This is part of an ongoing series during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. To engage further in the #QuarantineSoulCare series, click here.
God is both good-hearted and strong-handed. We don’t have to be afraid. We really can trust.
Fear sabotages all that trust by contracting both the internal and the external. Fear is the language of scarcity; of cramped, compressed living. All our attempts to “seize the moment” play off our anxiety that we will lose the moment. Thus the native response of the human heart is to grasp after control, an illusion at the best of times. …
The rule of fear affects more than just us. Every time we allow the spiritual dissonance of an internal or external disobedience, we wound the world … wound every facet of relationship with self, with others, with God, and even with the natural world. …
Obedience is the counterintuitive path to freedom and wholeness. We cannot be our true selves without it, and freedom is what we all long for.
Trust is the only container with enough flexibility and integrity to carry a life of obedience. … We can trust this great God of ours with everything: Nothing needs to be held back. Nothing needs to be protected and hedged by our emotional programs for happiness, not even our own freedom. No, this great and beautiful God can be trusted with our greatest offering: the unfettered surrender of unequivocal obedience. …
Because we are in a constant process of conversion, our obedience is continually won and lost. This is no cause for shame or dismay; it is our path. It is the life of hungering and thirsting for righteousness. Falling and rising again. Learning and transforming. Forgiving and being forgiven.
Whoever did want him, who believed he was who he claimed and would do what he said, He made to be their true selves, their child-of-God selves.
–John 1:9-13, The Message
May today you hold nothing back from God, and experience the freedom and wholeness you long for. #quarantinesoulcare Click To Tweet
Today’s reading was taken from Gravitas by Jerome Daley.
