Prayer

O God, we thank you for all those in whose words and in whose writings your truth has come to us. For the historians, the psalmists and the prophets, who wrote the Old Testament; for all those who in every generation have taught and explained and expounded and preached the word of Scripture: we thank you, O God.

Grant, O God, that no false teaching may ever have any power to deceive us or to seduce us from the truth. Grant, O God, that we may never listen any teaching which would encourage us to think sin less serious, vice more attractive, or virtue less important; grant, O God, that we may never listen to any teaching which would dethrone Jesus Christ from the topmost place; grant, O God, that we may never listen to any teaching which for its own purposes perverts the truth.

God, our Father, establish us immovably in the truth. Give us minds which can see at once the difference between the true and the false; make us able to test everything, and to hold fast to that which is good; give us such a love of truth, that no false thing may ever be able to lure us from it. So grant that all our lives we may know, and love, and live the truth, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.[i]

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[i] William Barclay, Prayers for the Christian Year (New York: Harper, 1965); quoted in Vernon Grounds, “The Truth About Truth,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Volume 38, No. 2 (June 1995), 228-229.

Bitter

Of all futilities,
those known as such,
                               and also impossible to avoid,


are the bitterest of all.

Happy, unhappy

Virtuous happiness issues its arduous demands. Happiness on the cheap is repellent and repugnant. Heron can do that, as can orgies (or any sort). Full bodied happiness is steeped in sorry, grief, and lament. It refuses to despair, which is giving up on the God of hope and life. Yet happiness oblivious to pain (human an animal) is cruel, self-centered, and enervating. Happiness worth its stinging salt, slogs through groans, moans, tears, quakes, fear panic, and unbidden but inevitable sufferings.  Happiness looks behind (to the Cross of Christ); it looks ahead (to the return of Christ); it looks within (to Christ with, if...he resident in the soul by regenerating grace); it looks above to Christ on his resplendent Throne; it looks below to the everlasting arms. It listens for the laugh of love, but not without hearing the searing wail of woes untold and uncounted. Love is, love is as strong as death--and stronger still. That thick red blood triumphs over its wounds--but that blood (of Christ, creature, and creation. Thus, I am a against happiness, for happiness, under God.

Spouse A (not chronically ill): I am writing a despair poem.
Spouse B (chronically ill): I do not have time for that.

Who is more pathetic?

This woeful world can rub you raw, raw.

Press on to acknowledge God; pray on to bring God's blessings down--with Christ Jesus as your justification and hope.

Love is the work of a lifetime of receiving grace and giving it.