The work of Your fingers...

 

“When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him?" [Psalm 8:3-4]

One-Way Love

“Sometimes hesed is translated “steadfast love.” It combines commitment with sacrifice. Hesed is one-way love. Love without an exit strategy. When you love with hesed love, you bind yourself to the object of your love, no matter what the response is. So if the object of your love snaps at you, you still love that person. If you’ve had an argument with your spouse in which you were slighted or not heard, you refuse to retaliate through silence or withholding your affection. Your response to the other person is entirely independent of how that person has treated you. Hesed is a stubborn love. Love like this eliminates moodiness, the touchiness that is increasingly common in people today."

- Paul Miller, A Loving Life: In a World of Broken Relationships

A Strange Way to Save the World...

We are one month post Christmas and still fresh in my mind is the mystery of the incarnation. Indeed our God loves to bring rescue in counterintuitive ways.

How Interruptible are you?

It seems to me that a good litmus test for how we are growing in Christ likeness can be gauged by our “interruptibility” (if that were a word). Are we able to be interrupted and be ok with it? Can our schedules and agendas flex and yield to the agendas of others? Can we set aside our own priorities to hear or attend to the priorities of others? Can we allow the priorities of others to win out?

There are boundaries to being interrupted, of course. There are times when we simply cannot move the line – when we must push through to see something important to completion. And, for certain, there are seasons of business in life where there is not much space for others to burrow in.

Yet, on the whole, it has been my experience that the people who have most reflected and most deeply tasted of the grace of God were people that (to a healthy degree) were ok with being interrupted. And, more than that, they met those interruptions not with gritted teeth or furrowed brow, but with gracefulness and kindness. They made space in their lives for others and saw helping them as a priority. And, maybe…just maybe they were people that saw these seeming annoying interruptions as Divine opportunities placed in their pathway by God Himself.