MEDITATION:
Written by Dallas Willard (1935-2013), an American philosopher known for his writings on Christian spiritual formation. This is an excerpt from his book “The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus.”
When people vilify God for failing to make a wholly good world inhabited by wholly good people, I fear that they are not always concerned with moral goodness. Many times they only mean that God should have made a world in which they would always get what they want and one that would be inhabited by people of the sort they like. I suspect that all of the complaints we hear about the way the world runs are only so many variations on a theme spelled out so exquisitely in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
“Ah Love! Could you and I with Him conspire, to grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, would not we shatter it to bits—and, then re-mould it nearer to the heart’s desire!”
We humans never get what we want, and oh, we want it so badly! We want it badly enough to conclude without hesitation that God should have designed this world with our specific needs in mind.
PRAYER:
From an ancient collection of prayers from the 6th century.
O Lord Jesus Christ, good Shepherd of the sheep, who came to seek the lost, and to gather them to your fold, have compassion upon those who have wandered from you; feed those who hunger, cause the weary to lie down in your pastures, bind up those who are broken in heart, and strengthen those who are weak, that we, relying on your care and being comforted by your love, may abide in your guidance to our lives’ end; for your name’s sake. AMEN.
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