My thoughts are all over the place. My Lectio 365 devotion took me to Proverbs chapter three and as I read and re-read the chapter, I started to cry. Crying always surprises me. I simply don’t do it.
“Let love and faithfulness never leave you,” the father says to his son.
I love this! What a thing to tell your child. Of course I have never sat down with my kids, looked them in the eye and told them to bind love and faithfulness around their necks. It has never occurred to me.
In addition to my parental failings, I admit love and faithfulness have not been my theme words for Summer 2020. Despise and despair would be more fitting.
I just didn’t do it. I didn’t pray for our leaders, I didn’t pray for our president. I didn’t pray for God to heal and guide and lead. I just didn’t do it. I went instead with rolling my eyes, talking back to the radio when a soundbite from the President came on and then calling him names.
I don’t like him. I don’t trust him. I don’t pray for him and the words love and faithfulness never pop into my head when I’m thinking of Donald Trump.
“In all your ways submit to him and he will make your paths straight.”
I forgot all about this one. The beginning of this verse is, “trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”
Sit with that for just a minute.
Breathe it in deep. Sit still, read it one more time.
I think there might be freedom in submission. Freedom from myself and from all the stupidity I come up with when I go my own way in judging people, deciphering policies, deciding on personal endeavors and in creating the pretense I dress up in as I move about the world. This typically leads me away from freedom and into cynicism. I forget all about love and faithfulness and fall into the arms of distrust, fear, and let’s not forget loss of hope. They are so dang cuddly at first but soon they start to choke and bind and make breathing difficult.
That is not freedom.
Trust.
Submit.
Straight Path.
Love and Faithfulness.
There it is. There’s freedom.
So why my tears this morning? Was I lamenting my choice of a summer theme and where it took me? Was it shame for the things I felt and said about Trump? Was it reading words of freedom while I was all bound up and realizing I have the power to untangle myself? Was it the knowing that I after all these years of trying to follow Christ I turned my back and followed Kris yet again?
Maybe.
Thank you Lord. Thank you for meeting me here. Thank you for love and faithfulness. In all the different ways and places today will take me, right now I submit to you. I admit to my need for love, for faithfulness. Bind them around my neck. Tattoo them on my soul.
God, please forgive me.
Holy Spirit breath your goodness and mercy into me.
Come Lord Jesus.
Kristine 