I hope at some point during this impossibly hot week in New England your soul was drenched with wonder. If not, I hope what you find below can put you on that path.
First, I liked James Quinn’s piano piece “Journey of Life.”
Second, I enjoyed George Herbert’s (1593–1633) poem “Grace”:
My stock lies dead, and no increase
Doth my dull husbandry improve:
O let thy grace without cease
Drop from above!
If still the sun should hide his face,
Thy house would but a dungeon prove,
Thy works night’s captives: O let grace
Drop from above!
The dew doth ev’ry morning fall;
And shall the dew out-strip thy Dove?
The dew, for which grass cannot call,
Drop from above.
Death is still working like a mole,
And digs my grave at each remove:
Let grace work too, and on my soul
Drop from above.
Sin is still hammering my heart
Unto a hardness, void of love:
Let suppling grace, to cross his art,
Drop from above.
O come! for thou dost know the way:
Or if to me thou wilt not move,
Remove me, where I need not say,
Drop from above.
Stephen Witmer summarizes the point of Herbert’s poem: “Until we feel helpless, we won’t plead for divine help.” And for me, the sacred impatience Herbert breathes forth in his final stanza captures what he’s after. In essence, he says to God, “If you’re not willing to drop grace on me, take me where I no longer need to ask you to do so.” Do you feel the same?
Third, I liked Columba Stewart’s comments on Psalm 119:71—a verse that’s played a significant role in my life. It reads as follows: “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statues.”
Commenting on this verse, Stewart observes that we, as in-the-process-of-being-sanctified sinners, go “from a false sense of self to painful self-recognition, which is the only place where listening to God can happen.” I take her to mean that thoroughgoing transformation is on the other side of “painful self-recognition.”
If you need help on the journey, ask those closest to you what it’s like to be around you. If you’re a parent, ask your children what it’s like to be mothered or fathered by you.
And then let them talk.
Don’t interrupt.
And when they’re finished talking, resist starting your follow-up sentence with the words, “But you also . . .”
Just. Listen. You’ll be blessed with valuable information.
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