There is a message in this bottle on the beach where I walked today.
It reads: No present thing nor future thing can separate you
from the love of your God for you. Rom 8:38
Convinced today more than ever.
Proverbs 31:25 Strength and Dignity are her clothing and she smiles at the future.
Whatever present thing or future thing has captured your thoughts, know this: Neither the present nor the future can separate you from God's Love. Smile from deep within. Through those tears. God is here. Paving a way. Emptying space in your heart that you've filled with, what? Lose that life for Christ's sake.
Words. I have thought deeply about how all these words I write do not mean much to the people I know. Seriously. And so, today, when I grieve what little I leave behind. I read this piece from Frederick Buechner and it means the world to me:
"I shall go to my grave feeling that Christian thought is a dead language---one that feeds many living ones to be sure, one that still sets these vibrating with echoes and undertones, but which I would no more use overtly than I would speak Latin." T.h.a.t. is a quote from a non-Christian! Frederick Buechner replies: "I suppose he is right, more right than wrong anyway. If the language that clothes Christianity is not dead, it is at least, for many, dying. What is really surprising is that it has lasted so long."
That is where my thoughts pick up. My own words fall on empty ears, sunken eyes, brassy mouths. No one wants them, really. And I wonder . . .
And I love this, what Buechner writes: "But I keep on using them. I keep plugging away at the same old words. I keep on speaking the language of the Christian faith because, although the words themselves may well be mostly dead, the longer I use them, the more convinced I become that the realities that the words point to are very real and un-dead for me, and because I do not happen to know any other language that for me points to these realities so well... Threadbare and exhausted as the Christian language often is, it remains the richest one even so.
And I hope that we offer threadbare morsels---great, worn-out Christian words that describe the experiences in which we move to live out a holy life and love in a broken world. Smiling at the future because ours is written by a Sovereign God. #notritewords #convinced
PRAYER FROM PSALMS
Psalm 119:28
My soul is weary this day.
Strengthen me according to your word.
Use these threadbare words we toss around to make us holy and leave a legacy.
OVERVIEW: Proverbs 29-31
Today's reading gave me a hard nudge over something God has been impressing on my heart the last week. As I age, I distance myself from difficult family members instead of pouring out His eternal Word and asking Him to pour out His love on them through me. I minister to difficult strangers with no problem, time to look at my family as the mission field.
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