Day By Day #25

Day by Day #25

MORNING/MIDDAY OFFICE

Silence and Stillness before God (2 minutes)

Scripture Reading: John 11:32–36, 40

When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.

Jesus wept.

Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” . . .

Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

Devotional

In this passage, we catch a powerful glimpse of Jesus deeply moved, troubled in spirit, and shedding real tears. Without holding anything back, he enters into Mary’s pain and looks straight into the devastation of Lazarus’s death. By watching Jesus at the gravesite, we learn a crucial lesson about loving people. Henri Nouwen describes it well:

No one can help anyone without becoming involved, without entering with his whole person into the painful situation, without taking the risk of becoming hurt, wounded or even destroyed in the process. . . . [R]eal martyrdom means a witness that starts with the willingness to cry with those who cry, laugh with those who laugh, and to make one’s own painful and joyful experiences available as sources of clarification and understanding.

Who can save a child from a burning house without taking the risk of being hurt by the flames? Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind? In short: “Who can take away suffering without entering it?”

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.^a

Nouwen’s question is a sobering one: “Who can take away suffering without entering it?” Yet, as Jesus taught, it is only when we lose our lives for others that we truly find them (Mark 8:35).

Question to Consider

Jesus acknowledged a promise when he said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” How might this promise encourage you to step over your fears and listen to the pain of others today?

Prayer

Lord, so often I pull back from really listening to the pains of other people, fearing their problems might swallow me up. You modeled an ability to enter into the “loneliness and despair” of others while still remaining separate and centered in the Father. Teach me to enter into the pain of others as willingly as you did, remembering both my limits and that you are God, not me. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)

MIDDAY/EVENING OFFICE

Silence and Stillness before God (2 minutes)

Scripture Reading: Luke 8:5–8

“A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. Some fell on rocky ground, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown.”

When he said this, he called out, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”

Devotional

The key to understanding Jesus’ parable of the Sower are his final words, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” Jesus wants us to know God is sowing his Word in the world and the most important posture we can have in life is that of attentive listening. Disciples who are good soil pay attention to him, yielding fruit a hundredfold. Believers represented by the other three soils—the well-trodden path, the rocky ground, the thorn-choked patch—do not. They are distracted and inattentive.

Leighton Ford, a renowned Christian leader and writer, sums up the indispensability of attentive listening to God this way:

Attentiveness is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp and one of the hardest disciplines to learn. For we are a very distractible people in a very distracting world.

God wants us to be an attentive people, as he is an attentive God. Many of the words of God in the Bible call his people to “look,” “see,” “listen,” “give heed.” . . .

The influential French writer Simone Weil believed that attention was at the very heart of prayer, and her French forbear Blaise Pascal also felt that inattention is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life. . . . Attentiveness, as I have come to see, is most critical for us to find the way to clarity of heart, and clarity is the path to seeing God, who is the source and end of all our longing.^b

Do you see now why distractibility and inattention are such great enemies of the spiritual life? When we fail to listen to God, to tune our hearts for his faintest whisper, we are risking nothing less than the substance of our spiritual life as well as our most important relationships.

Question to Consider

What is one practical step you can take today to lessen your distractibility and offer a deeper, more sustained focus to God and to the people around you?

Prayer

Lord, I recognize I am a distracted person. Help me to let go of my need to keep up with everything happening around me, and to trust you with the world. Please strengthen my ability to pay attention to you and to the people around me so I can love them as you love them. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)

^a Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: In Our Own Woundedness, We Can Become a Source of Life for Others (New York: Image Books, 1979), 72.

^b Leighton Ford, The Attentive Life: Discerning God’s Presence in All Things (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 23–24.