Why do you ask me about what is good?

Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is he that desireth life, and loveth many days, that he may see good? Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile. Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it. Psalm 34:11-14

Ah, such restful beauty in this.  Or beautiful rest.  Or both.  

And for me, silence is often the best path.  

Do good.  Seek peace.  Over and over, the choice I must make to see good.  Do it.  Seek it.  Pursue it.  

My brother Scott took a spin off of my stories this week, which speaks to the action verbs aspects of good in a world of evil.  

So when my parents read: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress,” it was perfectly obvious what they needed to do. They bought and gathered food and shoes and Spanish bibles and hauled this to a bevy of orphanages that clung to the squatter hillsides of Tijuana and Ensenada. Every other weekend, month after month, year after year, they packed their four kids into a Plymouth station wagon with as much cargo as could fit in the back and under our feet and on the roof of that car and drove across the border to deliver. My mother chased rats out of the pantries, my sisters gave haircuts to kids who had lots of lice, my father did plumbing and repaired roofs. My brother and I mostly just goofed off and played with kids.

I tell this story because it illustrates what I think Jesus meant when he told us to, “...continue in my word.” I don’t think that “continue in my word” means to keep reading our bibles, although there is certainly great potential in reading our bibles. I think that to “continue in my word” means to make the word that we hear from God extend into our lives–into our visible lives, the ones that we live out there on the streets and in our free time and in our station wagons and with our dollars. The effect for my parents was this: they learned that following Jesus set them free. They became free to take adventures into Mexico with their kids. They became free to give without calculation. They would tell you that they became free to live an abundant life from that day to this day–free indeed.

We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed. 

Let us think often that our only business in this life is to please God. Perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity. –Brother Lawrence