HANDS (3rd in Series)

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Are you still sleeping?”  Jesus asked the Disciples in Gethsemane.  And what is behind the question?  Is there something here more than a physical awakening? 

Is there an implication that, like Nero, we sometimes fiddle while modern America burns?  Is it at Gethsemane we realize how easy it is to be spiritual sleepyheads?  Transient in our moral natures?  Lazy and lackadaisical?

The terrible slaughter of ageless dreams; so often has it taken place during the history of mankind.  Not so much because of bad men who accomplished too much evil, but because of good men who accomplished too little good.

A new creature in Christ - it always comes back to that.  For as the old saying goes, “I am but one, but I am one.  I cannot do everything, but I can do something.  What I can do, therefore, by the grace of God, I will do.”  (anonymous)

Have you ever said to someone, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it”?  But that’s not what the gospel says. 

The gospel does not speak of slug-a-beds.  The gospel speaks of open doors and new beginnings.  Of sunrises, not sunsets.  Of journeys that begin in a little Nazareth town and finish at the gates of heaven.

Too often we merely sing the words of this old hymn, but don’t really hear them:

I would be true,

for there are those who trust me;

I would be pure,

for there are those who care.

I would be strong,

for there is much to suffer;

I would be brave,

for there is much to dare.

I would be friend of all,

the foe, the friendless;

I would be giving, and forget the gift;

I would be humble, for I know my weakness;

I would look up, and laugh, and love, and live.

In other words, to achieve what Ann Morrow Lindberg wrote about in her book, Gift From The Sea:

To be, “At peace with (yourself with) a purity of intention… an inner harmony… a state of spiritual grace from which (you can) function and give as (you were) meant to in the eyes of God.”

“And now, Lord, what do I wait for and expect? My hope and expectation are in You.” Psalm 39: 7

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A quote below from tomorrow’s ONE A DAY blog entitled HANDS (4th in Series)

 

“Carl Sandberg once described a very unusual man.  He wrote, “Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, (but) in the mixed shame and blame of the immense wrongs of two crashing civilizations, often with nothing to say, he said nothing, slept not at all, and on occasions he was seen to weep in a way that made weeping appropriate, decent, majestic.”  

His name, of course, was Abraham Lincoln.  And one day, like all men, his hands…”

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