Category: love

Our lifelong fight

Young man wearing hat that says Love Your Neighbor.

Our lifelong fight as a Christian is to get off the natural level and on the supernatural. Our lives must be a pure act of love, repeated many times over.

Day, Dorothy. The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus (Plough Spiritual Guides: Backpack Classics) (p. 58). Plough Publishing House. Kindle Edition.

Before we dismiss,
yes, dismiss,
Dorothy Day altogether,
along with Mother Teresa,
and Francis of Assisi,
and the Father
and the Son
and the Holy Spirit
for being unrealistic,
idealistic,
hearts-on-sleeves-heads-in-clouds,
big talkers
of inconvenient truths that,
if we don’t immediately,
knee-jerkedly,
dismiss,
we might feel just a tidge
of something we don’t like
about ourselves,
something like guilt, maybe,
for how cold
and self-serving
and small
we really are;

before we do that,
could we allow that tidge
of living feeling
bring to life
within our cold, small selves,
something, maybe, like
awareness
and acceptance
of who we are
and what our lives are like
apart from the love,
the kind of love,
these talkers talk about?

Tags acceptance, Dorothy Day, guilt, inconvenient truth, loving others, The Reckless Way of Love

love Poetry

What he said…

Jesus didn’t say: Figure me out;
He said – Follow me.

He didn’t say: Get your doctrine right;
He said – Judge not.

He didn’t say: Puzzle out the End Times;
He said – Stay awake.

He didn’t say: Perfect yourselves;
He said – Love me with all your heart.

He didn’t say: Develop your vision for ministry;
He said – Love your neighbor.

He said:
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
the meek,
those who mourn,
who seek peace,
who hunger and thirst for the world to be right with God,
who are judged and ridiculed for doing so.

He said those things – that’s what He said.

Tags following Jesus, love your neighbor, loving God, ministry, peacemakers, poor in spirit

Bible reading love Poetry Scripture

I had lost something

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi (AmazonClassics Edition) (p. 74). Kindle Edition.

My hunger for knowledge about God,
my obsession with doing what was right,
what would leave me blameless
before any accuser,
even God himself
(myself another Job),
all but devoured my chance,
my only chance,
to experience ‘the grace,
the beauty, the poetry’
of the Majestic River
of Life.

I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.
Revelation 2:3-4

Harper Bibles. NRSV Bible with the Apocrypha (Kindle Locations 88055-88057). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Grace and peace to you…
dw

Photo by Stephen Walker on Unsplash

Tags Life on the Mississippi, loss, loving God, Mark Twain, Mississippi River, revelation, river of life

love Poetry prayer

We have the greatest weapons

Post author By dw
Post date October 3, 2019
No Comments on We have the greatest weapons

We have the greatest weapons in the world, greater than any hydrogen or atom bomb, and they are the weapons of poverty and prayer, fasting and alms, the reckless spending of ourselves in God’s service and for his poor. Without poverty we will not have learned love, and love, at the end, is the measure by which we shall be judged.

Day, Dorothy. The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus (Plough Spiritual Guides: Backpack Classics) (p. 63). Plough Publishing House. Kindle Edition.

More powerful than power itself is the choice to set it aside.

Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. 53 Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? 54 But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way?”

Harper Bibles. NRSV Bible with the Apocrypha (Kindle Locations 76005-76007). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Photo by Christoph Schmid on Unsplash

Tags Dorothy Day, fasting, Jesus, loving others, nuclear weapons, poor, poverty, power, prayer, The Reckless Way of Love

hope love Poetry

Locking ourselves in prison

Post author By dw
Post date July 21, 2019
1 Comment on Locking ourselves in prison

It would be a sin to place any limit upon our hope in God. We must love Him without measure. All sin is rooted in the failure of love. All sin is a withdrawal of love from God, in order to love something else. Sin sets boundaries to our hope, and locks our love in prison.

— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, Sentences on Hope

Sin:
exchanging our greatest love
for something less,
hoping for less than what we have assurance of,
settling for even less than we hope for,
accepting a story of non-provision,
covetousness rewriting hope’s history
into a bleak tragedy
of love beyond our reach
just outside the bars
of the unlocked cell
we are dying in