Daily Meditations
Today I am sad. There is nothing wrong with being sad when things are tragic. We can be sad about a child getting cancer or a best friend in trouble. It’s what we do with the sadness that matters. First we turn to God. Sharing our sadness with God brings his love and peace. Taking the strength that God gives we can help where we can and share his love.
Meals are important in the ministry of Jesus. The communion we receive in church is based on a meal and brings us to join in that meal. Meals bring people together. Joining in a meal allows us to share in a very unique way. If you want to know someone better plan to have a meal with them. It will bring friendship and understanding.
What a sad life it must be….believing in nothing. Our link to the divine brings us closer to the world we live in. It helps us see the beauty in everything around us. How can you live without this?
Today in church we heard the beatitudes from the gospel of Luke. They sound different than the ones in Matthew. I was particularly struck by verse 22. We have all suffered by being excluded, ignored, insulted. Exclusion hurts. It makes us feel “less than.” We have to remember that exclusion is something that humans do. God will never exclude us for any reason. God always includes.
20 Looking at his disciples, he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
21 Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
22 Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man.
23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.
So many times we long for answers. Why is there such evil in the world? Why do people kill others? Why do children have to die of cancer? There are so many questions and few answers. Faith is trusting that God loves us and wants the best for us even thought there are no answers.
There are times when we are in so much pain, whether physical, mental or both, that we cannot even begin to pray. In spite of that God can hear our cry. He knows our pain and he is with us. Remember, “nothing can separate us from the love of God.”
Today being all about love the most important description of it comes from 1 Corinthians 13. Nothing says it better.
13 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; 5 it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; 10 but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. 13 So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Hopefully we each have someone who loves us. Those who love forgive our mistakes and look beyond to the person beneath. God has promised that we are each loved this way by him. His love sees all that we are…warts and everything. We are each loved.
Too often we think about love as an emotion. When we love there are times when we do feel an emotion surrounding it but that is not all there is. Love is what we choose. Love is what we do. The emotion may not be forefront but the choice and the doing always are.
Hear God in Other Voices 