Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Devotional sharing 260111

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. We read Psalm 139 in our staff prayer meeting this morning. The Psalmist reminded us the fact that God knows everything – even the dark side of our lives. We have nothing to hide before Him. God wants to have a transparent relationship with us. He wants us to tell Him and ourselves who we are. He wants us to develop a genuine relationship with Him, like the way He treats us. If God does not reveal who He is to us, there is no way we can know Him at all. Through prayer and meditation, we grow in His love and learn how to love others…

We can begin to love and be loved only as we bring all of ourselves to the other person, all of our disappointments, our joys, our angers and hopes. This is the nature of love and communication. It applies as much between God and a person as it does between person and person, and perhaps even more. For this reason we shall say quite a bit about prayer in fear and anguish, in anger and sorrow, since modern piety mostly seems to assume that we cannot find God through these experiences. Yet, any good parent expects to love and comfort children, to help them pick up the pieces when things seem to go wrong. God is certainly not less than a human parent.

Communication is a growing process. As one comes to trust more and more, one reveals more and more. Sometimes these will be things which looked so black that we buried them deep in the unconscious. We could not bear to keep remembering them. As trust and concern and love begin to grow, even these things can be brought out of the darkness. And until then few of us can ever become free of the nagging fear, hidden in the heart of nearly every person, that no one could really stand us if we actually let them see the totality of our being. I recall one young man with whom I worked for over two years before he was able to reveal the things he disliked most about himself. When he finally did, the change in him was miraculous.

It is not easy for us to realize that the One who is love does care for us. We have to bring the more secret parts of ourselves up slowly and let the reality of the One who is love be tested. This takes courage, patience, time. In fact one of the reasons why I believe in a life after death is the way communication with the Other develops. Even in the best of lives this reality is just beginning to grow at the end of that life. Even when we have known this experience of communication with the Other early in life, and realize all along that this Other is trying to communicate with us, our lives are just not long enough to bring all the parts of them and all of our actions into accord with the Other. There is no good reason to believe that the One who begins this process, and offers us all the care we are able to take, then will end the process just as we are beginning to experience it. On the contrary, every now and then an experience comes to one or another of us which strongly suggests that this process goes on after our physical death.

The promise of eternal life is not just to help us overcome the fear of death. It gives us new strength to deal with life today. If we practice this loving relationship with our eternal God, we will find assurance that He is active in our lives and in our relationship with others. There is not by coincidence that we encounter the people in our lives today. God puts us in their midst for a purpose – that is to mode our characters to become more godly or Christ like. Without entering into daily communion with God through prayer and meditation, we easily lost sight of our priority in life and true values of relationship with Him and others. Pause and enjoy His presence now. You can tell Him your naked feelings that you dare not share on Facebook. He understands.

In Christ,
Lawrence

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