1 Chronicles 22:19 …devote
your heart and soul to seeking the Lord your God.
There are days—sometimes too many to count—when I have not made time to spend with you, God, and I feel your
sorrow. There are other times when I short change us both by trying to spend
time with you when I am on the run. I am even guilty of sending up arrow
prayers at the spur of the moment before we have met and had fellowship.
I have studied your word
and know that you desire to have a relationship with me. I know that by my
putting off time alone with you, I cheat both of us. Instead of giving you the “First
Fruits” of my day, I fear that sometimes, I give you the leftovers, and I feel
sorrow. In my sorrow, I feel yours, which is not like the sadness that falls
upon us mortals, and then is lifted in the next few moments or hours when our
mind is engaged in something else, another drama or perhaps another joy.
Knowing Scripture, as I do, I believe your sorrow continues as I, your beloved
child, keep myself away from you.
Knowing you desire to have a daily—moment by moment—relationship with me, I still find myself put other demands first. Thus I watch as my
need to give into the ‘the tyranny of the urgent’ causes me to drift farther
and farther away until I cannot see you in my life. The things of this word
become my focus, and I become a person doing instead of a human being. I lose
sight of you; the creator God the one who called me into existence and the one
for whom I was created. During these times, I feel as if I am a helium balloon
floating on the winds of chance. Yet even in these situations, I hear you
calling to me. For a brief moment, I am reminded of your overarching love, care
and concern for me. Awareness dawns and I realize that I must return
to you while my heart and soul still respond to your call. Returning to you, you
once more teach me how to reorder my priorities and therefore bless me as
I make our relationship the first priority in my life. You shelter me under your
wings, and I rejoice, for only in you do I experience true and abiding love,
faith and commitment because these attributes of yours will continue even
though heaven and earth are no more!
Looking back from the
shelter of your wings to that distant and troubled world, I realize anew that
if your Scriptures had not reach me when I was far away from you, I may have
become as one who has heard, received, and believed the gospel, but whose roots
were not firm. Seeing the world and all it has to offer from the comfort and security of
your nurturing care, I know that even in your sorrow your mercy was extended to
me. I rejoice in the realization that you have again drawn me back to you! Yet
in this joy I am aware that no mother, father, sister, brother or child, no one
can understand the grief that I cause you. And I, only I know the grief I caused both of us when I allowed the world and all it deceptions to pull my focus to those
things that will not last and in so doing see that my feet were planted on slippery
sand rather than on the firm salvation that knowing you affords.
Please God, I pray, help
me stay close to you today, this very minute that I may replace the ‘tyranny of
the urgent’ with a commitment to make my relationship with you the "Alpha
and Omega" of my existence. Remind me to begin and end each and every day
with you and allow my mind to be drawn to you again and again throughout the
day for; succor council, wisdom and encouragement. In this world there is
no one like you; who graciously offers these resources to me from a wellspring
of blessings and guidance that you have. Ah, to begin and end of each and every
day with you...what joy!
Because of your great
love for me, because of my great need for you, I ask you to draw me close to
you by the renewing mind so that I may be transformed though spending time with
you and in your Scriptures. Amen
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