Praise the
Lord for this wonderful Wednesday. We will gather for our
mid-week fellowship, study, and sharing starting with a sumptuous homemade
dinner at 6:00 PM, followed by Choir practice ast 7:30 PM. One of my verses for
this new year is "Delight yourself in the
Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4) I desire to
love the Lord and walk with Him, serving, loving, worshiping, giving, and
receiving. It is my desire to glorify Him and enjoy His goodness, His grace,
and all the blessings which the money cannot buy.
"I want to be where You are,
Dwelling in Your
presence
Feasting at Your table,
And surrounded by Your
glory
In Your presence,
That’s where I always want to be
I
just want to be,
I just want to be with
You"
Henri Nouwen was a Roman Catholic priest and intellectual who
spent many years teaching at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. He was at the acme
of his career and the center of the intellectual world. He had written several
books and was known all over the globe. He was a priest in his fifties when he
asked himself the question: “Did becoming older bring me closer to Jesus?” He
said that after twenty-five years in the priesthood he found himself praying
poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people, and very much preoccupied
with “burning issues.” He further said, “Something inside was telling me that
my success was putting my own soul in danger. I began to ask myself whether my
lack of contemplative prayer, my loneliness, and my constantly changing
involvement in what seemed most urgent were signs that the Spirit was gradually
being suppressed.”
In his success he had fallen prey to three
temptations: to be relevant, popular, and powerful. He began to pray for God’s
direction in his life, and God led him to become the chaplain at Daybreak
Community called L’Arch. Daybreak is a home for mentally handicapped adults.
He wrote, “So I moved from Harvard to L’Arch, from the best and the brightest,
wanting to rule the world, to men and women who had few or no words and were
considered, at best, marginal to the needs of our society. It was a very hard
and painful move... After twenty years of being free to go where I wanted and to
discuss what I chose, the small hidden life with people whose broken minds and
bodies demand a strict daily routine in which words are the least requirement
does not immediately appear as the solution for spiritual burnout.”
But
it was at L’Arch where God began to deal with him spiritually and free him from
the temptation to always be on the cutting edge of culture. Through that
experience he found a new freedom to be the man Jesus wanted him to be. His
prayer life returned, and with it a renewed awareness of the presence of Jesus
in his life.
Some of us have lived long enough, and read enough of
history to realize that the burning issues of one age are the irrelevant topics
of the next. We can be a part of “The Church of What’s Happening Now,” or we
can be a part of the eternal Kingdom of God where the issues never change and
people’s needs are always seen as the need of the human heart. Jesus said, “Man
does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of
God.” Henri Nouwen wrote, “Too often I looked at being relevant, popular, and
powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry. The truth, however, is that
these are not vocations but temptations.” Jesus’ simple question to us is, “Do
you love me?”
In Christ,
Brown
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