Listening and Learning

 

Prayer of the day for June 20 from A Prayer for Every Day

"Almighty God, make me strong through Your peace. Deliver me from all unrest and worry. Let all my energy be directed to doing Your will; the I will, without stopping, bring forth good fruit. Amen."

Oswald Chambers (d. 1917), Scottish Baptist preacher writes, "Jesus doesn't take us aside and explain things to us all the time; He explains things to us as we are able to understand them. It is slow work -- so slow that it takes God all of time and eternity to make a man or woman conform to His purpose. We can only be used by God after we allow Him to show us the deep, hidden areas of our own character. It is astounding how ignorant we are about ourselves! We don't even recognize the envy, laziness or pride within us when we see it. But Jesus will reveal to us everything we have held within ourselves before His grace began to work. How many of us have learned to look inwardly with courage?"

Following that from Chambers Charles de Foucauld (d.1916), French Catholic priest and hermit states; "the soul will bring forth fruit exactly in the measure in which the inner life is developed in it.If there is no inner life, however great may be the zeal, the high intention, the hard work, no fruit will come forth; it is like a spring that would give out sanctity to others but cannot, having none to give; one can only give that which one has. It is in solitude, in that lonely life alone with God, in profound recollection of soul, in forgetfulness of all created things, that God gives Himself to the soul that thus gives itself whole and entire to Him."

From the Reformed Journal people:

But instead, let’s focus on quiddity. Quiddity means nature, essence, peculiarity. Anglican theologian Richard Bauckham, in his book Living with Other Creatures, commends the contemplation of other creatures simply so that we might worship God better:  

“It is not just the moments of breathtaking beauty that help us to worship God, but the endlessly remarkable quiddity of other creatures, their being themselves in all the strangeness, intricacy and difference that God has given to each.”

God has designed a world in which each creature offers its own peculiarity and oddness. Monarch caterpillars craft a jade-green chrysalis filigreed with gold. Monarchs and milkweed work together so that monarchs can live to pollinate another day. We lose the milkweed, we lose the monarch, we lose ecosystem services, we lose the resilience of ecosystem diversity, we lose one tiny fluttery facet of God’s abundance. We lose we lose we lose.

From Fredrick Buechner

The Final Secret

THE FINAL SECRET, I think, is this: that the words "You shall love the Lord your God" become in the end less a command than a promise. And the promise is that, yes, on the weary feet of faith and the fragile wings of hope, we will come to love him at last as from the first he has loved us—loved us even in the wilderness, especially in the wilderness, because he has been in the wilderness with us. He has been in the wilderness for us. He has been acquainted with our grief. And, loving him, we will come at last to love each other too so that, in the end, the name taped on every door will be the name of the one we love.    "And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart, and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you rise."    And rise we shall, out of the wilderness, every last one of us, even as out of the wilderness Christ rose before us. That is the promise, and the greatest of all promises.