Devotional Messages

DEVOTIONAL MESSAGE

Luke 10:27 - "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

Taking the time to prepare a meal for someone is a labor of love. We shop for ingredients, chop, sauté, and stir, follow recipes, set the table, and clean up after. In caring for another’s nourishment and enjoyment, we employ our hearts, souls, strength, and mind, pouring out our love not only through cooking, but through driving, cleaning, preparing, and even taking out the trash after dinner. Disciples minister and professor Kay Bessler Northcutt asks us to see these actions as prayer (from Setting the Table). Here, prayer is not time set-aside for a “mental letter” to God, but an “offering up” of “the burden of our love” in actions that require “the full force of our attention” and the discipline to take all the steps to do something well. Love of God & creation is in each step, even the seemingly tedious and mundane.

While we are called to make space for quiet contemplation, I believe we’re also called to pray through our acts of love, giving ourselves fully and mindfully to our actions and paying attention to all the ways we and others express love of God. After all, the communion table is set for us each week by those who take the time to gather the bread, juice, and serving ware, offering love through seemingly ordinary actions which become a kind of prayer and transform the ordinary into a holy experience of nourishing, extraordinary, all-encompassing love.