Wednesday, January 26, 2022                                   (today’s lectionary)
Memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, Bishops
O Lord, teach us to pray
 I am grateful to God, whom I worship with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers, night and day.
Too often that constancy is missing in my prayers for Margaret and our marriage. It shows. We can be very happy, and we can be very unhappy, one day (or hour) and then the next.
Nearly every day we listen to or read the lectionary and read this devotion. Not often enough, we sing a song. Then, since our pastor Matt challenged us to pray for each other, we have prayed after we read, except I often forget. Margaret reminds me. And our prayers turn our hearts toward Jesus, toward the Holy Spirit, away from our personal conflicts. This is a wonderful thing, after our 42 years of marriage.
I remind you to stir into flame the gift of God that you have. For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control.
It seems to me that self-control is much less accessible when I seek it by myself. Much better to seek it alongside Margaret, resting our mutual desire for self-control squarely on our Father’s shoulders, asking Him what in the world do we do now? Then we have a fighting chance. No, better to say then we have a peace-making chance.
Announce his salvation, day after day.
For a week each month we are apart, when Margaret stays in Austin while I drive back and forth to Illinois. We welcome this alone-time, and we dread it too. We miss each other. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Our parallel lives provide us more reasons to pray together, but not necessarily more opportunity.
Tell his glory among all the peoples, and speak of his wondrous deeds.
We can (and do) pray out loud together for people outside ourselves. I am thankful for the quiet confidence in God I feel inside when we do that. And I remember the Promise Keepers mantra: Pray out loud every day, in their presence, for every person in your family. I have been forgetful of this, and … it shows. Whether it feels that way or not, sometimes the soil of my soul is hard, rocky and full of thorns.
Satan comes at once and takes away the word sown in me, and when I hear the word in joy, I forget it the next day, because I have developed no roots. Though I hear the word, worldly anxiety and craving for all things choke the word in me. And it bears no fruit.
There is no respite from these temptations. No matter that I am 72, aging gracefully at times, more free than ever to present my conscience in confessional honesty before God. I need Margaret’s prayers and love, and she needs mine. Together we each bring ourselves more thoroughly to our Father.
The word sown in rich soil? This soil is made from the ones who hear the word and accept it, and who bear fruit thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.
(2 Timothy 1, Titus 1, Psalm 96, Mark 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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