Through prayer our daily work becomes wrapped up in the heart of God’s compassionate love. Just as Jesus was broken and given on the cross to feed our desperate souls, through work we are broken and given in order to feed and serve others....
Keep ReadingO God, help me to see your glory and your splendor in the seemingly isolated and random pieces of this day. Open my blinded eyes to see you, unstop my deaf ears to hear you, and allow my lame spirit to leap like a deer within me and shout for joy. Amen....
Keep ReadingThe rabbis guide their people with stories; ministers usually guide with ideas and theories. We need to become storytellers again, and so to multiply our ministry by calling around us the great witnesses who in different ways offer guidance to doubting hearts....
Keep ReadingThe cave is dark and cold, filled with death and decay. After all, it has been four days since the dead man was placed inside. There’s no more hope; that’s it! Death has had the final word. If only Jesus would’ve shown up sooner, but now what could he possibly do? ...
Keep ReadingO Lord our God, help us to be faithful to gather what you have provided for our hearts and souls this day - that we may feed on you and live. In the name of Jesus, the bread of life. Amen....
Keep ReadingI love the plough that opens up the earth, lays bare the soil where seed can fall. It matters little that the widening wound of earth still hesitates, uncertain of the nutrients it has to offer falling seed. The seed is sown, the wound of earth closed up again. The broken soil becomes a womb, a sheltering tomb of life protecting what must die to live. We wait then for sign...
Keep ReadingThe call came at about 9:30 p.m. on a typical Thursday evening in early December. I had just returned home from somewhere or other and was talking with my wife in the living room about the events of the day when our son called on his cell phone to ask if he could go to the church coffee shop with some friends. As she spoke to him there was an abrupt halt in the conversatio...
Keep Reading“Tears hollow out places in the heart,” wrote Gibran, “where joy can grow.” To be emptied is to create a place that can be filled. “They that sow in tears…” says the psalmist, and which of us has no tears to sow? ...
Keep ReadingI would love to have been a fly on the wall, an eyewitness to this extravagant outpouring of sorrow and love. I would love to have seen her face as she both wept upon and kissed the feet of the Savior. Surely these were no normal tears. These tears were an odd combination of the remorse and regret associated with the gravity of sin, coupled with the immense gratitude and a...
Keep ReadingO God. We give ourselves over to your care, trusting only in your infinite mercy and love. We will continue to give thanks to you, O Lord, for all that we have and all that we are. We will rest assured in the knowledge that when we cry to you in sadness or in joy you will hear our cry and make reply. Amen....
Keep ReadingDigory kept his mouth very tight shut. He had been growing more and more uncomfortable. He hoped that whatever happened, he wouldn’t blub or do anything ridiculous. “Son of Adam,” said the Aslan. “Are you ready to undo the wrong that you have done to my sweet country of Narnia on the very day of its birth?”...
Keep ReadingThe closest communion with God, I have begun to discover, comes through the shedding of my tears. If grapes and grain are not crushed, there can be no wine and bread. If my life is not crushed, there will not be the closest and most intimate communion with God. ...
Keep ReadingJoyful persons do not necessarily make jokes, laugh, or even smile. They are not people with an optimistic outlook on life who always revitalize the seriousness of a moment or event. No, joyful persons see with open eyes the hard reality of human existence and at the same time are not imprisoned by it. They have no illusion about the evil powers that roam around, “lookin...
Keep ReadingCelebration gives us the strength to live in all the other Disciplines. The other Disciplines faithfully pursued bring us deliverance from those things that have made our lives miserable for years, which in turn evokes increased celebration. Thus is formed and unbroken circle of life and power. ...
Keep ReadingOnly the one who has experienced it can know what the love of Jesus Christ is. Once you have experienced it, nothing else in the world will seem more beautiful or desirable. ...
Keep ReadingJoy dwells with God; it descends from Him and seizes the spirit, soul, and body, and where this joy has grasped a man it grows greater, carries him away, opens closed doors…The joy of God has been through the poverty of the crib and the distress of the cross; therefore it is insuperable, irrefutable. ...
Keep ReadingOne aspect of choosing life is choosing joy. Joy is life-giving, but sadness brings death. A sad heart is a heart in which something is dying. A joyful heart is a heart in which something new is being born....
Keep ReadingThe difference between shallow happiness and deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can’t stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of ch...
Keep ReadingJoy is essential to spiritual life. Whatever we may think or say about God, when we are not joyful, our thoughts and words cannot bear fruit. Jesus reveals to us God’s love so that His joy may become ours and that our joy might become complete. Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing - sickness, failure, emotional distress, op...
Keep ReadingThe Voice on the earth was now louder and more triumphant; but the voices in the sky, after singing loudly with it for a time, began to get fainter. And now something else was happening....
Keep ReadingIf enough of us were to ungarble our words [the word spoken uniquely into each one of us by God], perhaps God’s story might be more clearly heard and understood. Perhaps the song that God sings into the wind that whispers all around us in the trees would be on more lips and taught to more children. My friend Russell Montfort once remarked that he suspects that “we die ...
Keep ReadingWhen he awoke, the song was there. Its melody beckoned and begged him to sing it. It hung upon the wind and settled in the meadows where he walked. He knew its lovely words and could have sung it all, but feared to sing a song whose harmony was far too perfect for human ear to understand. And still at midnight it stirred him to awareness, and with its haunting melody it dr...
Keep ReadingI have been greatly instructed by the story of Ulysses, when he was sailing past the islands of the Sirens. These Sirens had the power of charming by their songs all who listened to them, and of inducing them to leap into the sea. To avert this danger, Ulysses filled the ears of his crew with wax, that they might not hear the fatal music, and bound himself to the mast with...
Keep ReadingOne day a friend of mine was walking through a shopping mall with his two-year-old son. The child was in a particularly cantankerous mood, fussing and fuming. The frustrated father tried everything to quiet his son, but nothing seemed to help. The child simply would not obey. Then, under some special inspiration, the father scooped up his son and, holding him close to his ...
Keep ReadingIn the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There w...
Keep ReadingWhen you feel invited to remain in silence at Our Lord’s feet like Magdalen just looking at Him with your heart without saying anything, don’t cast about for any thoughts or reasonings, but just remain in loving adoration. Follow the whisperings of the Holy Ghost. If He invites you to beg, beg; if to be silent, remain silent; if to show your misery to God, just do so. ...
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