Reflection
The greatest challenge is not first of all to do much, but to do first things first. In the long journey of life we need to be sustained in our doing and service.
Isaiah 57:18–19
January 7
God’s Healing Presence
To know God and to live in God’s presence is not only to live in truth and light, but also to live in wholeness and well-being. This is what we grow into through God’s enabling, our participation in the community of faith and the practice of the spiritual disciplines.
When we live only in and for ourselves we do damage to the very fabric of our being. We were never meant to be the center of life. God is at the center and we are invited to live life to the full with all our powers and energies to the glory of God.
But since we have placed ourselves at the center and are selfish and wayward, we need to be healed and restored. In fact, first and foremost, we need to be turned around. This is the call to conversion.
This restorative work is the genius of God. God knows not only how to create well, but how to re-create well when things have gone wrong. God can make all things new.
St. Augustine speaks about this. He writes: “[God] has prepared for us the medicines of faith and applied them to the maladies of the whole world.”7
Through God’s presence, his word, and his creative Spirit, God
renews all things. In Christ there is healing, not only for all people, but also for every dimension of life, and the whole creation.
Healing can come to my inner being, but also to my relationships, to my family, even to the place I work, and in a small way to the nation as a whole. One day, the whole world will know this healing and restoration.
Reflection
Where does the healing presence of God need to come into my life and in our world?
Exodus 20:18–21
January 8
Trials and Testing
Growth in the Christian life does not happen only in fair weather. The testing of our faith more readily occurs in times of uncertainty and difficulty.
Throughout the long history of the Christian church there have been those who have given their lives for their faith. They faced the great test: faithfulness at the threat of death. They found grace in martyrdom.
Most of us on the journey of faith face other tests and trials. These may be coping with life’s difficulties, broken relationships, financial or health issues. But it may also include various forms of relinquishment, including voluntary downward mobility.
Whatever may come our way on life’s journey, St. Cyprian is
convinced that “God wills us to be sifted and proved, as He has always proved His people, and yet in His trials help has never at any time been wanting.”8
Invited to live this strange dialectic of the wounding-healing hand of God, we are called to trust God’s strange way with us. Blessing and testing. Support and challenge. Growth and pruning. Presence and absence.
While we would like only to know God’s hand of blessing, we also need to know God’s hand of correction and guidance. While we would like the smooth path, we need to know the God who faithfully accompanies us on the rocky road.
Thought
In wounding us, God’s purpose is to bring us to greater wholeness and to deepen our understanding that God’s ways with us are different than our expectations.
Romans 5:8
January 9
New Life for All
The greatness of the work of Christ in his life, suffering, and death is that it had all of humanity in view. Christ’s was no sectarian love, but a boundless redemptive love for the world, so that all things may come to fullness and wholeness.
While we are so limited in our affections, so parochial in our attitudes, and so tribal in our commitments, the towering-yet-humble figure of Christ points us in a very different direction.
His was the way for all. No one, whether great or small, was excluded from the generous love of Christ who made a way for the healing of all of humanity. St. Anselm understood this. He prayed: “Jesus Christ, my dear and gracious Lord, you have shown a love greater than that of any man and which no one can equal, for you in no way deserved to die, yet you laid down your dear life for those who served you and sinned against you.”9
The grace of Christ is both for the religiously faithful and the unfaithful. It is for the irreligious and the pious. It is extended to betrayer and friend; to priest and prostitute; to rabbi and rebel. Both the oppressed and the oppressor need the healing grace of Christ. There is no one who does not need this grace. There is no one who is not welcome.
The wideness of Christ’s love is expressed in the wideness of his mercy. And there is room for all.
Prayer
So dear Lord, may all turn to you and pray, whether saint or sinner,
profligate or virtuous, seeker or skeptic. Amen.
Isaiah 48:17–18
January 10
Grateful Faithfulness
The grace and blessing of God are given freely. They don’t come with strings attached. But they do call us to community, worship, faithfulness, responsibility, and service.
God is not first and foremost there for us, as if we are the center of things. We are there for God. And God is no Father Christmas.
God is a covenant-making God, calling us into his grace and goodness and into a relationship where our greatest desire becomes the vision to glorify God and to do his will. St. Clement is clear about this. He writes, “Take care, my friends, that his [God’s] many blessings do not turn out to be our condemnation, which will be the case if we fail to live worthily of him . . . and to do what is good and pleasing . . .”10
Grace issues in gratefulness and obedience and this forms the ethical shape of our lives. This is living life in God, in the Spirit. And this will always be a cruciform life.
Graced by the love of God in Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit, we will seek to conform our ways to God’s ways and will. This both honors God and replicates the way of God in our world. Thus godliness shapes all we are and do.
Our activism, therefore, should spring from grace. And it is to be marked by joy and gratefulness.
Thought
A God pleaser will do more for the well-being of humanity than a people pleaser.
1 Corinthians 7:29–31
January 11
Pilgrims
Christians are pilgrims in that they are on a journey of faith leading to on-going growth in Christ. But there are also other journeys that they are called to make in the service to others.
Traditionally, the pilgrim status of the Christian has been cast in terms similar to that articulated by Thomas à Kempis. He writes, “Live as
a pilgrim and a stranger on earth, unconcerned about the world’s cares, and keep your heart free and raised to God, for this earth of ours is no lasting city.”11 Here pilgrimage has to do with our journey towards heaven.
There are also other pilgrim journeys we are called to make. One is the literal one where Christians go on a faith and prayer pilgrimage to a spiritual site. Another is when Christians take time out of their regular routines in order to deepen their prayer life. Thus, a retreat is a form of pilgrimage.
Furthermore,