Today’s Scripture Reading:  Psalms 119:145-176, 128,129,130; Exodus 7:8-24; 2 Corinthians 2:14-3:6; Mark 10:1-16

Today’s Writer: Robert Finley

Sometimes I feel like the recipient of so much grace that I don’t know what to do. Nobody knows better, I guarantee it, how little I deserve the gifts that have been poured over me. Eyes to see this most fascinating and admirable world. Ears to hear its music, and songs to sing back. A wife whom I love, and sons, and friend and siblings and brothers and sisters besides. I know my Redeemer lives, and that he loves me. I know.

Yet. Sometimes I feel like I’m the plowman who put his hand to the plow and then turned back. The dog who returned to his vomit. The seed that fell on the rocky ground. The guy who had to hurry back to bury the dead. A rough vessel made for judgment?

And sometimes I don’t pay enough attention to what I’m doing to even have too many thoughts at all, and I bob along heedlessly, distractedly merry, like a fat animated cork in the current of a warm stream lazily gliding by all the pretty trees and grass and Netflix.

When I walk up to the edge of a place like Psalm 119, I feel like I’m staring over my toes into a huge gap between where I live and where I want to be, between who I am and…someone else.

Who is this who loves the law and the judgments of God so much that he would be consumed in meditation on them? Who really and absolutely abhors the lie? Whose heart is really so fierce and brave that he could name wickedness so definitively and so fearlessly declare, “That’s not me! I belong to you, God! I’m your man!”?

I know this person isn’t someone who just prayed this prayer once. He comes back to this place of crying out to God over and over, and he knows the way by heart. “I will your true words,” he seems to say, “until they have made me someone new forever.”

I also know that he won’t give up because he knows that God is going to complete the work of redemption that he has begun. The work of changing me, us, into a people who can stand with utter delight in his presence, singing his praises forever. And I know that’s where I want to be.

Image by Rick Harrison. (Used by permission via Creative Commons.)