4 But God, with the unfathomable richness of love and mercy focused on us, 5 united us with the Anointed One and infused our lifeless souls with life—even though we were buried under mountains of brokenness and separation and alienation. 8-9 For it’s by God’s grace that you have been saved. You receive it through faith. It was not our plan or our effort. It is God’s gift, pure and simple. You didn’t earn it, not one of us did, so don’t go around bragging that you must have done something amazing. 10 For we are the product of God’s hand, heaven’s poetry etched on lives. (The Voice Translation).
You are a poem of God’s presence in the world, Paul says to the church in Ephesus. You are holy hymn in the hymnal of Heaven. And while this all sounds great, there are some days we feel the brokenness of life in ways that words don’t reach, can’t describe, or define. Where is the poem in the face of heartbreak and soul ache? Where is the magical musical moment when we are worn out or weary?
Go back and re-read this passage slowly, letting each word sink and settle into your soul.
We begin with God and God’s indescribable, uncontainable, uncontrollable love and mercy. There is a part of that previous sentence that is BOTH good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a grace and love from God that abounds if I am willing to open my life to, a truth that is bigger and bolder and braver than any fifteen minutes of fame ~ a story that is bigger and bolder and braver than the stories I tell myself. The bad news? That means that I have to let go of thinking I have it all figured out, that I can just Google the answer, and that the world will be better when “those” people (who are 100 percent human, just like me) are gone and I am in charge. There are two competing gospels here: is God’s good news is grace upon heaping helping of grace full of meaning and beauty the story you are living OR is it that the world is broken and battered beyond repair, so why bother? Each gospel has a plan it sells us. If the world is God-filled and soaked, we participate with God in the holy work of tending the garden of grace. If the world is broken, might as well get what we can while the getting is good.
Pay attention today to the words you hear, the thoughts you think, the feelings you feel ~ be curious and ask why? Why did that person say that thing? Why did you react or respond that way? The more we open our sacred imaginations to explore the Eternal Internal, the more we find a poem, prayer, and hymn of praise that is waiting in each of us to spring forth.
Prayer with me the first verse of Take My Life,
Take my life and let it be
consecrated, Lord, to thee.
Take my moments and my days;
let them flow in endless praise,
let them flow in endless praise.
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