Devotional Messages

DEVOTIONAL MESSAGE

Pastor’s Note: This spring, five years after the first weeks of the Covid pandemic, I find myself curious about how we were making sense of all that. I wondered if there were lessons that trial taught us that could be helpful with the anxieties of today. In that spirit, I offer you this devotional message from March 27, 2020.

Psalm 4:4-8 – When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent.  Offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord.  There are many who say, “O that we might see some good!  Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord!”  You have put gladness in my heart more than when their grain and wine abound.  I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety. (NRSV)

How are your nights going?  Are you sleeping in peace, or pondering everything that disturbs you on your bed?  In these days when shortness of breath is a potentially deadly symptom, it can be hard to take the deep breaths that remind us of the closeness of God’s Spirit to our own.  We are longing to see some good, to feel the light of God’s face shining upon us and our world.

In this time when we’re all having to adapt and be flexible, we’re discovering just how stubborn we really are.  We’re bumping into our limitations, sometimes unknowingly and sometimes head-on with gusto.  We’re learning what we feel like we can’t possibly live without and then learning how to live without it.

What does it mean to seek gladness that isn’t rooted in abundance?  What does it look like to respond to deprivation (of whatever nature) with trust rather than anger or fear?  Most of us never signed up to be saints, yet here we are being called to levels of spiritual maturity we never aspired to.  There is no crash course in spiritual endurance, so we’re going to bumble and rage our way through it as long as it takes, feeling flashes of God’s peace one day and exploding at a loved one for no clear reason the next.

Through it all, God will be with us, the God of abundant grace, who knows exactly who we are, and what our weaknesses are, and how our strengths will emerge in this new situation.  God will be with us when we lie down, whether we sleep in peace or turn restlessly all night.  God will be with us through our breath, whether short or deep.  God will be with us in our tears and our laughter, in our baking binges and our making-do meals of what’s left in the pantry.