Devotional Pts. for Week of Sept. 4

Sunday-Ps.139 is a  long deep prayer. Let’s spend some time with the last 2 verses. It opens to a fearless examination of the soul, the heart and mind of us. Jesuits would call this an invitation to examine the soul, a daily task for them and those who walk a spiritual path such as Ira Kent Groff.Try it for at least a week and keep track of what you found.

Monday-This means that we are each a unique creation that has nowhere else and never before has been created, and will never again in the future. No one else now, ever before or ever again, carries the same combination of gifts, talents, resources, opportunities, and challenges.

Tuesday-the Christian faith does not cut us off from the world but immerses us in it; the church is not a fortress set apart from the city. The church follows Jesus, who lived, worked, struggled and died in the midst of a city, in the polis.”

Wednesday-"We are all so busy constructing zones of safety that keep breaking down, that we hardly notice where all the suffering is coming from. We keep thinking that the problem is out there...: dark nights, dark thoughts,. If we could just defend ourselves better against those things, we think, then surely we would feel more solid and secure.  The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there. The suffering comes from our own reluctance to learn to walk in the dark."~From Learning to Walk in the Dark

Thursday-You are above us, O God,you are within.You are in all things,yet contained by no thing.Teach us to seek you in all that has life that we may see you as the Light of life.Teach us to search for you in our own depths that we may find you in every living soul. - Sounds of the Eternal: A Celtic Psalter

Friday- We want it to be meaningful that things be remembered. If we do not remember what has happened before, then we are powerless to give meaning to what is, day by day ... In fact, he continued, memory is not the heart of the endeavor. That is the human secret.   Forgetting is the precious balm that helps us to travel on, past the depredations of memory.    Jesse Ball

Saturday-You always arrive bringing light.Carried in chipped pitchers,And dented buckets,

Sloshing all that luminous liquid Out like soapy water Washing down the muddy floorboards

Of my weary or worried days. -Carrie Newcomer