Feeling Irksome About Life?

 For God so loved the world...

In addition to attending a worship service of your choice today, think about this:

  

The end for which we were created is to enjoy God's love.  For when we are bereaved of this, we live to no purpose; and having lost the end to which we were created, our life is cumbersome and irksome to us.   -- Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, London, 1908

Special Assignments

St. Francis statue on watch in my office window

I, Paul, have been sent on special assignment by Christ as part of God's master plan.  Together with my friend Timothy, I greet the Christians and stalwart followers of Christ who live in Colosse.  May everything good from God our Father be yours!  -- Colossians 1:1-2 (The Message)

The scene out my window today is wet.  Rain pouring, river rising and turning from green to brown as the mud and silt is churned up from the melting mountain snows.

I grabbed a Bible lying here and just started reading at where it fell open.  I read these verses and went no further.  "...Sent on special assignment as part of God's master plan."  I got stuck watching raindrops fall and asking myself two questions:

     1) What is God's master plan?

     2) Should I be hearing I have a special assignment?  Or, am I already on that assignment and does sitting here pondering deep thoughts while it rains do anything to accomplish that assignment? Or, was it ONLY Paul who got the special assignment?

Enduring IV

Hubblesite.org

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,  

what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?  -- Psalm 8:3-4

 Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) has supplied us with a sick man who refuses to ask God for healing.  The man has given three reasons for enduring his illness without divine intervention.  I've covered his first two reasons in parts II and III.  The man's third reason for not asking for help for himself has to do with him being too small to warrant God's help.  The man explains his insignificance like this:

...I am reluctant to ask the rich, loving and generous God for something as insignificant as this (his illness.)  ...Supposing I traveled to see the Pope one or two hundred miles away, and as I stepped before him, "Holy Father, I have made a difficult and costly journey of two hundred miles to see you and I beseech you...to give me a single bean."  Indeed, he and everyone there who heard me would justifiably say I was a fool.  (Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings, p. 92)