our lives’ foundation,
your fidelity has been the roof over our world.
You once said, “I joined forces with my chosen leader,
I pledged my word to my servant, David, saying,
‘Everyone descending from you is guaranteed life;
I’ll make your rule as solid and lasting as rock.’”
From:
ALL SOULS MEMORIAL EPISCOPAL CHURCH, WASHINGTON, DC
“The only time God is interested in our resolutions is when we fail. If we could do it all ourselves, then we’d simply be involved in an exercise in self-improvement. God gets interested when we realize that we need him and ask for help.”
Some people simply don’t bother with resolutions. They’ve given up. Perhaps they’ve become discouraged after having failed in the past. Making a plan or a promise (they feel) simply sets them up for failure, and then they end up feeling worse in the end. But if we were to make resolutions with a good dose of humility thrown in, we might begin to understand that failure can be a part of the process. Failure can lead to growth and the movement forward, especially if it causes us to fall upon God’s help again and again. If we ask for help, it’s amazing what God can send our way: energy, hope, faith, new resources in friends, in teachers or advisors, and in community.
. . . . invites us to rest in OUR smallness and to let God be God. The day invites us to a place of simple faith where we can perhaps allow that “God is,” and leave it at that. Behind God is mystery, is love, and still silence. T.S. Eliot reflects of this aspect of God and draws on images from John when he writes
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word. [Ash Wednesday]
Even when unspoken. Even when unheard. Even when unobserved or unrecognized or un-believed, God is.
And in that simple statement there is freedom for us. If God is, then I don’t always have to be. I don’t have to be in charge. I don’t have to be right. I don’t have to understand. I don’t have to as good as I’d like to be, or as perfect, or as generous. I’m still whirling—still growing (falling and getting up again, all through prayer), but our God is big enough to handle me (and you) even when we’re at our smallest.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. Thanks be to God for
being vast.
And in that simple statement there is freedom for us. If God is, then I don’t always have to be. I don’t have to be in charge. I don’t have to be right. I don’t have to understand. I don’t have to as good as I’d like to be, or as perfect, or as generous. I’m still whirling—still growing (falling and getting up again, all through prayer), but our God is big enough to handle me (and you) even when we’re at our smallest.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. Thanks be to God for
being vast.
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