riches

God and the Next Breath

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“Lord, I come to you with empty hands. If all I have today is You and the next breath, that will be enough.”

A friend taught me that prayer a long time ago, and I was reminded of it today seeing it in my Facebook memories. I think that prayer of gratitude and dependence is the perfect antidote to this culture of pervasive entitlement and greed.

Really, all I bring to God is a pair of empty hands. I bring nothing. Anything in me or from me that’s any good at all was first a gift from God to me. All that I have that wasn’t given to me by God is God Himself, and even that is a gift.

If all I have in the next 24 hours is God and nothing else but the next breath, that’s enough. If I have all the riches in the world and all the knowledge in the world and not God, I have nothing. I seem to recall a Bible verse about gaining the whole world and losing your soul in the process being futile.

Basically, every moment from here to eternity is a gift. I didn’t earn the next breath. I don’t deserve the next breath. God’s grace is what sustains me and keeps me going.

I think if I lived like I believed that, there’d be a lot less anxiety and a lot more adoration. There’d be a lot less worry and a lot more worship. There’d be a lot less talk about the weather and sports and politics and more of me sharing the goodness of God out of the overflow of a heart made full by gratitude.

Lord, I really do come to You with empty hands. If all I get from You today is You and the next breath, that’s enough. I’m good. In fact, I’m more than good. I’m blessed. Amen.

More Borrowed Wisdom

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“How can we embrace poverty as a way to God when everyone around us wants to become rich? Poverty has many forms. We have to ask ourselves: ‘What is my poverty?’ Is it lack of money, lack of emotional stability, lack of a loving partner, lack of security, lack of safety, lack of self-confidence? Each human being has a place of poverty. That’s the place where God wants to dwell! ‘How blessed are the poor,’ Jesus says (Matthew 5:3). This means that our blessing is hidden in our poverty.

We are so inclined to cover up our poverty and ignore it that we often miss the opportunity to discover God, who dwells in it. Let’s dare to see our poverty as the land where our treasure is hidden” (Henri Nouwen).

It’s hard to come up with something original at 10:35 pm on a Tuesday night (and even more so when you’ve been up since 5:40 am like I have).

So I borrow some wisdom from one of my two favorite writers, Henri Nouwen.

Dare to embrace your poverty as the means through which the blessings and riches of God flow. Dare to boast in your weakness as the pathway through which Christ’s strength comes.

Dare to be nothing so that Jesus can be everything. Dare to believe for the impossible from the Resurrected One.

 

A Beautiful Prayer

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“You are holy, Lord, the only God,
and Your deeds are wonderful.
You are strong.
You are great.
You are the Most High.
You are almighty.
You, holy Father, are
King of heaven and earth.
You are Three and One,
Lord God, all good.
You are Good, all Good, supreme Good,

Lord God, living and true.

You are love,
You are wisdom.
You are humility,
You are endurance.
You are rest,
You are peace.
You are joy and gladness.
You are justice and moderation.
You are all our riches,
And You suffice for us.
You are beauty.
You are gentleness.
You are our protector,
You are our guardian and defender.
You are courage.
You are our heaven and our hope.
You are our faith,
Our great consolation.
You are our eternal life,
Great and wonderful Lord,
God almighty,
Merciful Saviour.

Amen” (St Francis of Assisi).

Once again, I think this covers it. I found this through Daily Celtic Prayers and Inspirations on Facebook. See, there is some redeeming value to social media.

I’ve mentioned before that sometimes when you can’t find your own words to pray, it helps to borrow other words. Obviously, you start with the Psalms and other prayers from the Bible (including the Lord’s Prayer), but sometimes you can also pray the prayers of other men and women of God down through the centuries.

Here’s one more you can add to your list.

 

More About Blessed

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If you turn on TBN, you might hear some old preacher talking about how God wants to bless you. By that, he probably means that God wants to shower you with riches and mansions and luxury cars and yachts and so forth.

But when I read my Bible, I get a different version of what it means for God to bless someone. What Jesus calls blessed in the Beatitudes is far better than what any health-and-wealth preacher might call it.

Not that God doesn’t grant wealth as a blessing, but I think the idea of blessing is so much more than that. After all, doesn’t the Bible say not to store your treasures on earth where thieves break in and steal and rust corrodes? Will you be able to take any of your wealth with you? Of course not.

The older I get, the more I see that the best blessing God gives is God. More than any gift God gives, God giving Himself to anyone is the best gift of all. It truly is the gift that keeps on giving, because you will never in any lifetime get to the bottom of Who God is or how much He loves you.

To be blessed is to know God and to know Jesus, who is God with a human face. All of us take that privilege for granted all the time, but have you ever stopped to think that the Creator and King of Everything has sought you out for a relationship? That should boggle our minds.

At the end of the day, I’m blessed. I know that God will supply all my needs through Jesus because ultimately my greatest need is Jesus. And He will take care of all my other needs, too.

You can have everything your heart desires and not have God and you will be miserable. You can have nothing but God and you will find that He is enough.

That’s another reminder to myself.

 

 

 

An Aborted Night in Franklin

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rain

First of all, my tour of duty as dog-sitter has ended. At least part one has. Part two is next week.

It was a lot of fun and I met some interesting neighbors and their even more interesting pets, including one Golden Retriever who likes to carry her favorite tennis ball in her mouth when she goes on a walk and two very tiny Yorkies. And the people were nice, too. Everybody seemed to love Millie, the dog I was taking care of and they all wanted to pet her and talk to her.

My cat Lucy was so overjoyed to see me that she climbed in my lap and fell asleep. Apparently, that’s how she does excitement. But at least she purrs whenever she sees me. Unless her food and/or water bowls are empty. Then not so much.

Of course, to celebrate another week survived I went to Franklin. Unfortunately, the weather got a bit snippy so I didn’t stay as long as normal. There were the torrential rains and the thunder that sounded like cannons. There was me in my increasingly wet sandals. That was not a good combination.

The good news is that I did not melt and I did eventually dry off. I got my McCreary’s fix and even got to visit my favorite  church building. There was even a lull in the rain, so I was able to walk around a bit.

The older I get, the more I think that the riches that really count are the experiences you get from living, from going out and trying new things and taking risks and sometimes from simple things like walking in the rain. Those are what you look back on with fondness more than any degrees or business accomplishments.

There. That’s my big moral of the day. Nothing too philosophical or theological. Just some stuff I’ve been learning lately.

 

 

 

 

My Bracket’s Got a Hole In It

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Busted-Bracket

I recently checked my NCAA basketball tournament brackets– you know, the ones that were supposed to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams and completely irresistible to women?Yeah, that one– and was more than pleasantly surprised at one of them.

As it turns out, my Fox Sports bracket was doing better than 99.6% of all the brackets out there. If I believed in jinxes, which I do not, I would have thought that I jinxed myself. That was as good as it got for my bracket.

After that, my brackets went in a direction decidedly warm and southward in a handbasket. Three of my Final Four teams lost, including the team I had pegged to win it all. The team a LOT of people had marked to win it all– Michigan State. They lost. So did my runner-up, Michigan.

So, I won’t be rollin’ in a Rolls Royce or Maserati anytime soon. But I had fun filling out my brackets. And at least I got this far before my brackets busted. Unlike most of my efforts in the past.

For those of you who don’t follow sports, it means that the world didn’t end. I didn’t have any money to bet on these games, so I didn’t lose any. Not that I would EVER have bet money on sports, says the good Baptist boy.

Nothing will happen to me other than maybe me being knocked down a rung or two on the ol’ ladder of my sports pride.

I’ll be back next year, filling out as many brackets as humanly possible and basing all my picks on gut instinct and my sportly intuition. Which loosely translated looks a lot like eeny-meeny-miney-moe. . . .

I have no illusions about having a perfect bracket. I just hope my championship pick doesn’t lose in the first round.

 

On a Night Like This 2

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image
Guess where I am? No really . . . take a wild guess.

Downtown Franklin, you said? How ever did you guess that? It’s not like I go there at least once a week, right?

Oh wait. I do.

I had the new Court Yard Hounds album as the soundtrack to my trek from the Brenthood all the way to my favorite place on earth. And it’s not Disney World.

I had my favorite meal, corned beef and cabbage, at my favorite place to eat, McCreary’s Irish Pub. Just about everybody knows my name there, and I love it.

I detoured from my usual next step. Instead of shlepping over to Frothy Monkey, I hoofed it over to Sweet CeCe’s, where they did not, as usual, have my very favorite flavor– Southern Sweet Velvet a.k.a. Red Velvet. I nearly cried.

Not really. I just got Hershey’s Chocolate instead and managed to not fall over dead from extreme disappointment. Life goes on.

I got in my Quality Frothy Monkey Time, don’t you worry. I sipped on fruit tea and got caught up on my annual Bible reading plan.

This year, I’m reading through the New American Bible, a Catholic translation complete with all the deuterocanonical books. Or apocryphal, if you please. I read through most of Job, quite a bit of The Book of Wisdom, and a few chapters from Luke.

My lesson from Job? It’s better to keep quiet and make your friends wonder if you’re an idiot than to open up your mouth and prove it.

The Perfect Weather continues. It really feels like a sneak preview of fall, soon to arrive after another stint of hot stinky humid weather. And more rain. I’m eagerly anticipating the changing colors of leaves, crisp morning air, bon-fires, hayrides, corn mazes, good conversations with friends old and new, and– best of all– for Jesus to once again dazzle me with His love for me.

I may check out my favorite house to make sure the current tenants are taking good care of it for me. I may suddenly burst into a Dave Barnes song. You just never know with me.

I think the reason that I’m not filthy rich is that I’m already quite attractive, extremely witty, and brilliant. I would be most unfair for me to add immense wealth to that. So I stay broke as a kind of public service to all of you out there who would otherwise either die of mortal envy or perish from lusting after my hot bod.

God is whispering sweet nothings to me in the night air. I can feel His love and pleasure over me like a sort of comfy old blanket that keeps my heart warm. May you feel the same.

My you know fully the love your Abba has for you this and every night to come.

Translating My Prayers

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prayer2

I had a friend from Romania who attended Kairos with her new husband of four months. Since he’s not quite as adept at English as she is, she interpreted most of the Kairos service for him. It was a beautiful thing to see.

Then a light bulb went off in my head. That’s what the Holy Spirit does for me when I pray. I don’t mean that God needs an interpreter to understand my Southern dialect of English, but sometimes my prayers don’t even have words. Sometimes all I have are sighs and groans that are too deep for words, raw emotions that I can’t figure out, much less give voice to.

That’s where the Holy Spirit takes over. Even when I’m praying what I think God wants to hear, the Holy Spirit is inside me praying what’s really in my heart and on my mind. Even if that is anger toward God or frustration with how I think he’s guiding me.

Sometimes in prayer, thoughts come unbidden to my mind that I’m afraid to pray. Or at least I’m tempted to spiritualize so that they sound more Christian. Through the Holy Spirit, God sees beyond my Christian-ese and my thees and thous to the real words I can’t (or won’t) pray.

As I’ve said before, I’m so glad God didn’t give me 90% of what I asked for. He may not have caused that certain girl to fall in love with me, but he gave me something much better. He gave me Himself and an overwhelming sense of a more perfect Love that no human could ever give me.

He may not  have given me riches, but He’s helped me to see how richly blessed I am and how much I have to be truly thankful for.

Sometimes, I go to The Book of Common Prayer when I don’t have words of my own. I’ve used The Liturgy of the Hours recently as well. Some of Henri Nouwen’s prayers have felt like they were my own prayers said better than I could ever say them. Sometimes, all I have is “Lord, help” and “Thank you, Lord.” Even my silence before God is a form of prayer for that is often when I can finally hear Him speaking to me.

So if all you fail to get anything else out of all I’ve written, get this. God wants to hear from you. He doesn’t want pretty words or perfect theology or even coherent sentences. He wants you, all of you. Every bit of joy and pain, hurt and triumph, sorrow and happiness. He wants everything that’s on your heart and on your mind.

This comes from one ragamuffin trying to tell all the other ragamuffins out there where to find the best Bread out there. That’s all.

He giveth more grace (featuring a surprise guest blogger!)

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Ok, not really. It’s still me, but I am including a bit of poetry (not mine) in this blog, because it so profoundly affected me when I heard it tonight at Kairos Roots. Here it is. May it affect you like it did me and make you more thankful and grateful to our great God! Here is her story and then her poem will follow (I copied and pasted her story. Shh! Don’t tell anyone!)

“Annie Flint was born in the Johnston home where she lost her mother, then shortly after lost her father too and was raised by the Flint family. After she graduated from college, she contracted arthritis in one of its most crippling forms and lay in bed for not one or two years, but for decades of her life. And if that wasn’t bad enough she lost control of her internal organs and to her utter embarrassment had to live on diapers for many years of her life. And if that wasn’t humiliating enough she began to become blind and cancer began to take its toll…according to one eyewitness, who wrote a book(called Making of the Beautiful), the last time he saw her, she had seven pillows cushioning her body from keeping the sores from inflicting indescribable agony.

In the midst of all that, she wrote this beautiful poem:

‘He giveth more grace when the burdens grow greater,
He sendeth more strength when the labors increase;
To added affliction He addeth His mercy;
To multiplied trials, His multiplied peace.

When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources,
Our Father’s full giving is only begun.

Fear not that thy need shall exceed His provision,
Our God ever yearns His resources to share;
Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing;
The Father both thee and thy load will upbear.

His love has no limit; His grace has no measure.
His pow’r has no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus,
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again!'”

Annie Johnson Flint