Sunday, May 29, 2022
See God There?
With God’s Hands Raised High,
Reflected In The Water,
God Blesses Us and Sends Us …
1 Kings 8:27
‘But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!
1 John 4:12
No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Words of Grace For Today
David built himself a fine palace. He wanted more. He wanted to build God a temple, God’s own house on earth. That would demonstrate to all that David served God … well, really it would demonstrate that God served David, so God says no.
Solomon moves ahead with David’s plan to build God a home, a temple on earth, even though Solomon is wise enough to know that God cannot be contained by … well, God cannot be contained by anything! Solomon builds the temple so the people have a place to go to pray to God and know that God hears them. Of course God hears us wherever we pray, but sometimes we people want more. We want to be convinced by mind games others play on us, that God is with us.
It’s hardly ever enough for us humans to know that God is with us and hears us and guides us … and suffers with us. We want more.
The verse from 1 John points to how we frail humans can fully know that God is with us. When God’s love is perfected in us as we love one another, then, though no one can ever see God, we can know that God lives in us.
True: God lives in us. True: when we love one another it is God in us that makes that possible. False: then we must work to love one another to convince ourselves that God lives in us. Nope, doesn’t work like that.
Start with God. Continue with God is for us. Then on to trusting that God lives with us and hears us and guides us … and suffers with us.
And we want more.
So we go off on all sorts of quests to achieve the unachievable in order to fully live life, leaving behind us in our dust the only thing that gives us life at all, and full life at that: that God lives in us.
There is no more. From that we can be more than we can imagine, bringing God’s love and grace to other people.
Still we want more.
So we pray: God save us … and give us more.
That’s what the Devil plays with, and it is that which brings so much suffering to us, other people, and to God who lives with us.
If we could only admit that we see God every day, in the most ordinary and the most extraordinary things and events. We would know that life on this planet earth is everything because God lives in us, walks with us, hears us, and guides us through every day.
Oh well, today like every day, we will do the best we can to reflect God’s love to all people and creation!
… the rest we trust God will somehow forgive, mend, and renew.