Thursday, September 12, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
 Loving God
When one supposes he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if one loves God, one is known by him.
Eating cottage cheese with tomatoes, resting awhile before the next thing, listening to the quiet sound of a refrigerator, freezer, and suddenly an air conditioner, I listen for ways to push through my thinking into the quiet place of God’s presence, available at all times so they say, but to my fragile mind seems more like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower.
You search me, Lord, and you know me.
It’s me who flits. I am the butterfly.
Read, write, listen, pray. All day. I’ve been doing those things, forming words and sharing them, hearing words and reflecting them, reading again the best parts of what I read yesterday.
We read in silence; we read looking for God. But we read in a particular way. A man drops a rare diamond in the leaves of the forest floor. Carefully, he kneels down. One by one he lifts each leaf. Slowly he searches, knowing his lost treasure is in the leaves. And this is how it is that we must read, listen to another and wait in silence. Our attentive expectancy in faith brings us to the brink of the insight of our true self in God. It is this preparation that allows us to realize that all of creation is a symbol of He who is. (James Finley, Palace of Nowhere, p 95)
Here in Austin the temps rise in the afternoon, although not like the mercury in Phoenix. Still, I’ll wait till evening to take a walk, a short one with long-leg-steps around the apartment rectangle, and the crickets will be singing, the birds settling down to sleep, and a car, now and then a car, passing by.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me,” it will not. Even the darkness is not dark to you, for you created my inmost being. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made! You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Last night I sat for awhile beside the pool, which was empty except for me. The sun was setting. A car pulled up and two people opened the car doors, screaming at each other. Neither was giving way. Their two angers crushed into each other, until suddenly they stopped. One got out and the other drove away. I thought of my own anger, crushing someone sometimes.
Search me O God and know my heart. Test me and know now my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me.
I remember Finley’s words about a rare diamond “in the leaves of the forest floor.”
Slowly he searches, knowing his lost treasure is in the leaves.
There is always more than enough. There is never any hurry. The jewel, the diamond, the lost pearl is there. Just turn over the leaves, David, one by one by one.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O Lord, were I to count them they would outnumber the grains of sand. Lead me, O LORD, in the way everlasting.
(1 Corinthians 8, Psalm 139, 1 John 4, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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