Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Being given

Sunday, June 1, 2014

John 17:7-9
Jesus prays with his disciples, "They know that everything you gave me is from you, because the words you gave to me I have given to them, and they accepted them and truly understood that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me. I pray for them."

Eternity stands quietly by, while chronos time hurls Jesus relentlessly into the kairos moment of his death. Jesus stands, one foot in each of these parallel worlds, and invites us to stand with him. His life is nearly over. His life has always been. His life will always be. And ours ... too.

In both his classic Holy Longing and his new book Sacred Fire, Ron Rolheiser begins with a poem by Goethe. The poem evokes the relentlessness of time as it presses us into eternity:

Distance does not make you falter/now, arriving in magic, flying/and, finally, insane for the light/you are the butterfly and you are gone./And so long as you haven't experienced/this: to die and so to grow/you are only a troubled guest/on the dark earth.

Rolheiser goes on to remind us of life's seasons, in which we essentially move from beings, learning who we are ... to doers, defining who we are ... back to beings again, giving away who we have become and returning to our simple selves.

We move from dust to dust, as our earthy Bible reminds us humans of our humus-humble source. In the time between our birth and death (such sweet time), we are always being given to. Rain pours down from heaven upon the place beneath, and we stand under it looking up. Open-mouthed, drinking from the nectar of God.

At first this flood is the great wonder of the world, but I notice myself becoming accustomed to it. Taking it for granted, forgetting it is not due to me and my own grand efforts. The rain can still be sweet, but I need Jesus' reminder today about its given-ness. The disciples are surely not alone in the difficulty of standing with one foot in eternity and one foot solidly in time.

Jesus helps us all. He stands with us day in and day out, and it's as if he never left. Jesus does this with joy and "total empathy," as Rolheiser puts it. There is nothing about any one of us that Jesus does not love. Our Father's forgiveness is like the air we breathe, and Jesus shows us how to grow in that freedom-culture.

For this, on the forty-third day of Easter, I am so thankful.

When I choose to fight my tiny fights for mere survival, Lord, forgive me. I have lost your vision, and need to fall on my face in that blindness and wait for the mud of your healing to give me back my sight. Let me let you dominate me, and become strong in your strength, and no longer need names.*

* (Thanks to Rainer Maria Rilke - and Rolheiser's choice to share his poem - for many of these words.)

Devotions Archive

Being given

Sunday, June 1, 2014