While we are weak

Devotion for Being Apart -

June 14

We will share a devotion Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays through Fridays.

- Kara

 

Romans 5:1-8

Very often, we let fear tell us who we are instead of faith.  But, while we were weak, Paul says, while we were helpless to earn a thing, unable on our own to choose anything but our own demise, Christ died for us.  

 While we were enemies, God reconciled us to each other. God didn’t say Get it a little more together first, and get back to me. God didn't say, You're on your own with this one.  

God said, Now, you, just as you are, in the farthest from me and each other that you can be, and the most against me and each other that you can get, I choose you. I love you. I claim and forgive and welcome you.

Christ took on our division from God, and our violence against each other, into God’s own self.  In his own human body, it was put to death, and with Christ we were raised to life, so that our relationship to God is Christ’s relationship to God – we are inside the love of the Father to the Son and that cannot be broken.

 

Let's be clear: suffering is not good. Suffering is terrible. It is suffering.  But that doesn’t stop God for a second. Nothing can stop God’s love and redemption.  Not worry or fear or apathy or depression, not systemic evil or our own cruelty or ignorance, not even the most terrible thing we can dream up, or do, or experience, has the power to stop God’s love.

 

What Paul is saying here is not prescriptive, it’s descriptive; he’s not telling us what to think or feel or believe about suffering, he’s showing us something true. Nothing can stop the mighty love of God.  It’s love so powerful that that it can make hope out of suffering.  It’s love that shapes us for life that belongs to God and each other, by forming in us endurance and character, and bringing us to hope, which David Steindl-Rast calls, “passion for the possible.” Hope is “the future of God that doesn’t come later.”  He says, “hope happens when the bottom drops out of pessimism.  We have nowhere to fall but into the ultimate reality of God's motherly caring.”

 

Sometimes we are going to feel peace. Sometimes we will feel strong and sure and steady. We will trust and know that God is at work, and we will confidently join in. Thank God for those times.

Other times - maybe more often right now - we will feel weak. We will slip into believing lies, trusting fear, letting worry or despair tell us what is real, and either knowingly or unknowingly participating in destruction. But it is not our faithfulness that saves us, it’s God’s.  It’s not our great attitude, or good work, or consistent trust, or tireless efforts that change the world, it's God’s love, God’s grace, God’s redemption.  May we fall into the motherly care of God, to receive that grace for ourselves and offer it to each other. 

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CONNECTING RITUAL:

 

Perhaps tonight before bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we can pray in this way, and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

Lord, I am weak. 
I am incapable of trusting, unable to live in freedom, 
and I keep on choosing bondage instead of life.  
But I see the power of your love. 
I see what forgiveness can do, and what hope opens up; 
I have experienced your grace 
and I want to be part of it with my whole being. 
I want faith to tell me what is real instead of fear. 

So God, I lift up to you now those places of fear, where I long to see your presence and activity in my life and in the world....

And I lift up those places of hope, where I have seen your love and tasted your joy....

Help me trust in your faithfulness. 
Help me believe that you always bring life out of death,
 and trust that you will bring life from the places of death 
within and around me right now. 
I want my life to participate – to grieve, and forgive ,and set free, and heal, and welcome, and repent, and witness your redemption every single day; Lord, use me.
Connect my being again to your own,
and to all others,
that I may know you love us, 
and that my living may flow from that truth. 

Amen.