Tuesday, September 24, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Bold
I have chosen the way of truth, I have set my heart on your laws. I hold fast to your statutes, O my Lord, do not let me be put to shame. I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free.
Our prayer on Sunday was to be bold, look into the future rather than remain protective, holding too tight to our past.
Behold, he makes all things new.
Two days before, while we were driving home at 4 pm, another car sideswiped us when a car stopped suddenly in front of it. The driver apologized profusely. We exchanged insurance information. As these things go, it went well. Our car has black tire rubber marks on the passenger side and some paint scrapes, but not much else. Her car has one small dent, and that was all.
Still, all weekend I felt burdened by the need to pass this on to our insurance company. I took pictures and yesterday I called and sent them all the info that I have. I felt a load slip off my shoulders. I am trusting our insurance company to pick it up.
Here’s a poem by Steve Garnaas-Holmes, who has also carried burdens too long before he let them go:
Growing old tutors us in what Jesus taught.
To let go, to let go.
To surrender things, control,
the power to make things as you wish.
To rely, and be grateful.
To know the blessing hidden in being
poor in spirit, with diminished powers,
trusting a greater power, unseen;
to be meek, unlikely to outgun the strong,
and know what you have;
to know mourning, and the comfort that outlives grief;
to hunger for a world
yet to come into its righteousness—
hunger that is strength.
And the blessing that endures. It endures.
To let pain be a teacher and weakness a coach
and failure a school that never lets out.
To leave your works for your heart.
To forgive yourself and others as one.
“I grow old,” T.S. Eliot wrote at age 22, “I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Must you be old for Jesus’ teaching to hit home? Of course not. It’s more a matter of how much armor I’ve put on, and how thick it is. When it comes apart and the surrender comes, it’s always from the inside out, though great love and great suffering often get it started from the outside in.
In Frank Capra’s 1939 movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes), old Senator Paine, once an idealistic young man who inspired other idealistic young men, has become a well-dressed, bought man, doing dirty work of every kind (mostly lying) for his political boss. Paine’s protegé, Senator Jefferson Smith, carries on his ideals but then discovers his hero’s corruption.
At the end of a 24 hour filibuster in the Senate, Smith (Jimmy Stewart) stands in front of Paine’s desk (Claude Rains) exhausted, and he whispers, husky and hoarse:
I guess this is just another lost cause Mr. Paine. All you people don’t know about lost causes. Mr. Paine does.
He said once they were the only causes worth fighting for, and he fought for them once. For the only reason any man ever fights for them. Because of just one plain simple rule. Love thy neighbor. And in this world today of great hatred a man who knows that rule has a great trust.
You know that rule Mr. Paine, and I loved you for it just as my father did. You know that you fight harder for the lost causes than for any others. Yes, you’d even die for them.
In her conversation after the movie on TCM, Stacey Abrams from Georgia said, “And you can see in Paine’s face, watch the silent battle going on inside him.” Smith collapses on the floor, Paine rushes out of the Senate with a gun and tries to shoot himself. His fellow senators stop him, and he is carried back into the chamber, confessing, confessing, confessing.
Let me go! I’m not fit to be a senator! I’m not fit to live! Expel me, not him! Every word that boy said is the truth! I’m not fit for any place of honor or trust! Expel me, not that boy!
We certainly do live in a world which, as the poet said, is “a world yet to come into its righteousness.” Can we yearn and work somehow for that heavenly kingdom, with “hunger that is strength?”
Like a stream is the king’s heart in the hand of the Lord. Wherever it pleases him, he directs it. Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart. To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.
 (Proverbs 21, Psalm 119, Luke 11, Luke 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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