Monday, September 10, 2012

Today’s text

Psalm 116:5-9

Yahweh is merciful and upright, our God is tenderness. Yahweh looks after the simple, when I was brought low he gave me strength. Yahweh looks after the simple, when I was brought low he gave me strength. He has rescued me from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from stumbling. I shall pass my life in the presence of Yahweh, in the land of the living.

Reflection

You are tenderness, and in tenderness we know you as the Heart as the Universe who hungers for our hearts and is content with nothing less than healing.

To know you, Holy One, is to know the breath in our lungs as it returns when the heaviness of sorrow and fear lift in the light of love’s embrace.

To know you is to see and feel your smile radiating in the grace of faces that know and love you … and us.

To know you is to feel strength of soul as hope for the fullness of life returns, for without it our hearts remain unfinished and longing.

To know you is to know the love that cannot and will not release our hearts even when we have no strength left to hold on. You hold onto us. Always will.

In that knowledge, we live our lives and all eternity in the land of your Presence, the land of the living.

For there is no life, no real living without knowing and feeling, without awareness of the love you are, the tenderness of your divine heart.

So very different are you than those who thunder from pulpits and television screens announcing your judgment upon our failed humanity.

I turn from them more and more as the years pass. Once they held fascination. They seemed to know you better than I.

But in these latter days I listen to what I know within, paying pay less attention to outside voices that tell me who you are, what you want, how I should live, what I should say and how I should lead.

I listen instead to the voice of tenderness that returns the breath to my lungs so that I may live and breathe, hope and know that all lies in Love’s unfailing hands. Always will.

And simply knowing, I dwell in the land of the living. Thank you.

Pr. David L. Miller