Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

No, not one

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

From Matthew 18
Jesus said to his disciples, "What is your opinion?" If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the stray? It is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones be lost."

There's no point in sugar-coating. I've been so angry I've struck my son, broken dishes, screamed bloody murder. Hit walls and trees, hard. And what's more, my illicit fantasies don't really catch me off guard - I have been known to entertain them. And sometimes in my interactions with others that go wrong, my forgiveness can be elusive, and bitterness crouches at my door. I must admit. I must confess. I am the stray.

Still, this energy is not always twisted into ugly. Once I was so angry that I walked and delivered a 90-minute paper route, stomping around as hard as I could, in half that time. I felt great afterward. When I shut my mouth and bite my lips and do not speak, when I turn around and count to ten, I can calm down. God is gentle and God is good. He will receive my rage and wait with me, as it turns around. I know that beyond doubt, and I am more than grateful.

At the end of his novel Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry allows his title character a mystical moment with her not-long-dead husband Nathan. She stands at the gate. She knows how near he is. She stands and speaks (the book is written in her words): "The shiver of the altogether given passed over me from head to foot."

This "altogether given" settles on me today as the sky turns blue and the air turns cold. My breath slows, and I feel peaceful even in the soles of my feet. Of course I'm dust, and of course I'll return to dust, like us all, like the birds and the dogs and the apple seeds. The Lord is good to me.

Another favored author, William Faulkner, who often wrote in his own, continuous mystical moment, called on himself, his characters, and his reader to give up the sugarcoats. We are to take our place, beside the woman in the story, on our own mandala:

"Choose among which one she was, not might have been, nor even could have been, but was ... you have already wasted too much time ... All you had to do was look at it a while, there is the clear undistanced voice (speaking straight to you)... "Listen, stranger, this was myself, this was I."

In today's clear air, life does not require my labored polishing or maneuvering. I can just be ... me.

And Lord, in my "me-ness" you do not forsake me. When I forget to come in at night, caught in mischief or imagination or something far more dark, your searchlight shines, your voice calls, thank God I can even then come home.

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter,2004, chapter 24

William Faulkner, from the end of the "The Jail," prologue to the last act of Requiem for a Nun,from The Essential Faulkner, "The Undying Past," 1946, 1967, 2012

Devotions Archive

No, not one

Tuesday, December 10, 2019