Recently, I was reminded of the power of gratitude. For a while now, I’ve been making it a practice to write every morning in my gratitude journal – one full page – before I sit in prayer or meditation. This week, I invite you to do the same. Write one full page each morning. This will be our morning practice. If you wish, please post one thing for which you are grateful.
I offer a reflection I wrote on Psalm 128 for The University Hill Congregations’s Lenten Devotional for April 1, 2014:
…the psalmist blesses all those who fear God with abundant life: with work and food, with prosperity and happiness, with kinship and belonging, and clearly with descendants. The psalmist offers the blessing of long life – of the chance not only to see children born; but grandchildren also. The people I know who are grandparents I am sure delight in this blessing!
What do we make of the phrase “Fear the Lord?” I tend to think of fearing the Lord as faithfulness and connect it to the well-known part of the Shema prayer: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might– and then Jesus’ addition – and love your neighbour as yourself. Strive for this; give your care and attention to this, give your life to this – and you will be lavishly blessed. You will be blessed not by your own efforts, but by your devotion, conviction and heart-centered response to God.
We are at a time in the life of the Church where blessing is crucial. This has probably always been the case, yet it seems especially important to be attentive to blessing at times of change and uncertainty. The declarative speech of blessing is powerful: it can assure and encourage us, it can name something in us we have yet to claim or know and it can enliven, heal and transform.
Prayer: Holy One, help us to love you with everything we are and everything we have. Help us to love ourselves well and to generously love our neighbour, our brother or sister, the stranger. Make us gracious and grateful recipients of blessing and help us to be a blessing of encouragement to one another. Amen.
