Sunday-These days we use hearts for emoticons to sign text messages. I ♥ soccer! In a dream God offered the youthful King Solomon anything he wanted: "Give your servant a hearing heart"--Lev Shomea in Hebrew--"a discerning mind" (I Kings 3:9). What if for Valentine's Day you asked for a "listening heart?"--for practical work and political leadership as well as for family relationships and friendships?
Monday-"My continuing passion would be...to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight." (Eudora Welty)
Tuesday- If it does nothing else, reverence produces humility.As Augustine writes at the opening of his Confessions:"Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and thy wisdom infinite. And thee would a human praise, a human, but a particle of thy creation, a human, that bears about him his mortality, the witness of his sin, the witness that thou resists the proud, yet would this human praise thee, he, but a particle of thy creation."
Wednesday-Don Saliers preaching on the Transfiguration, then celebrating communion: blessing on blessing. "He (Jesus) told so many parables he became one; he ate so many meals with the poor and the outcast, that he became a meal for us."
Thursday-God is … the Seer and the Seeing and the Seen. God seeks Himself in us, and the aridity and sorrow of our heart is the sorrow of God who is not known in us, who cannot yet find Himself in us because we do not dare to believe or to trust the incredible truth that He could live in us, and live there out of choice, out of preference.… We exist solely for this, to be the place He has chosen for His presence, His manifestation in the world, His epiphany. But we make all this dark and inglorious because we fail to believe it, we refuse to believe it." - Thomas Merton
Friday-“God is present in the details of the everyday but is also visible when we pull back and take a wider gaze upon our lives and pay attention to the patterns and ways things have been woven together." Christine Valters Painter
Saturday-In Christian faith, the accent shifts back and forth between what God does and what people have to do. When the accent falls too heavily on people’s obligations, it can contribute to a sense of overwhelming difficulty—a sense of futility, desperation, and despair. But when the accent falls too heavily on what God does, it can contribute to a sense of passivity, of indifference; to a lethargy that refuses responsibility. . .The Bible itself keeps moving the accent, shifting first this way and then that. God’s action and my responsibility are held together in a delicate balance. The New Testament is like a fugue, with two musical lines moving towards each other: meeting, interweaving, each distinct line contributing to the richness of the whole.Ron Byars
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