Friday, January 21, 2022
In the Beginning God Created
At Our Beginnings God Created Us
Before Each Moment of Our Days
God Creates Faith In Us
A Gift
We Can Deny or Acknowledge
With Gratitude!
And Generosity Towards All Creation.
Isaiah 64:7
There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
John 15:16
You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.
Words of Grace For Today
All this reaching for …
… for viral posts,
… for glory,
… for fame,
… for wealth,
… for power,
… for … well for anything that will fill the emptiness in our being, an emptiness of being separated from God,
All of it is futile, and most of it fills us – not with what we want, but deceptive as it is instead we get filled right up with shtako, and it sucks the life right out of us as we reach ever more desperately.
Most futile of all are all the human efforts spent (wasted) reaching for God.
The games we create to try to convince ourselves that we have reached God: all the piety, all the restrictions on our lives, all the condemnations of others to make ourselves look good (in God’s eyes, as if!), all the hate for ourselves and others that builds and comes out as self-righteousness and bullying. All these games are so life-sucking that we are soon left as mere shells of the life that God created us to enjoy. And even then we reach and reach and reach for something, anything, to fill our overwhelming emptiness. All sorts of addictions follow: to alcohol (God’s gift so abused), to drugs (ingenuity of humans so perverted), to gambling (the gift of the necessities of life severely abused), sex (the gift of intimacy perverted by and into base self-indulgence and licentious promiscuity), work (the gift of labour perverted into an obsession that denies everything good in life), and on and on and on the addictions are numbered, not least of all the addiction to religiosity and piety (perverted from worshipping God, to worshipping one’s own efforts).
God’s gift to us of faith is exactly like the gift of life: only God can give it, we cannot reproduce it, nor even can we meet God part way to receive it. But oh, have we figured out ways to pervert, subvert, and deny it as God’s gift to us!
If God chooses to hide God’s presence from us then our prayers should well begin with Isaiah’s words, “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.” To which we should add: “SAVE US!”
So God is not.
As baptized saints we trust that Jesus came to demonstrate that we may often think God has abandoned us, Doch, God never does. God walks with us. God’s presence is not our choosing or in response to our doing or not doing, believing or not believing. God chooses us, to create us, to sustain us, to forgive us, to renew us, to make us saints able to be God’s Grace on earth.
As Jesus says, “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.”
This day, what fruit, what Grace, has Jesus led us to harvest from God’s great abundance, so that we have much to share with all around, especially the poor?