Friday, August 23, 2013

Sifting through empty pods

opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Matthew 7:7-8

Today, I am praying for those askers, for those knockers, and for those seekers.  Lifting them up to the LORD and asking How Long? And while they wait, Dear Father in Heaven Who Would Not Give His Child a Stone, please comfort their hearts and fill up their bellies.  Because our flesh is so very bound up in time, and I am one of these.  

And dear Poppa, for the others, those who are not asking, those who are not knocking, those who are not seeking, I lift them up to the LORD and ask How Long? Those of us careening through life, squandered our property in reckless living, I ask for mercy. And yes, so very often the most merciful gift is that of point of pain, the pause of feeding the pigs, longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.  

I will never forget little seventh-grade Ben Winslow’s joyful gallivanting when he wrapped his brain around the Lewis observation: God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Dear Father in Heaven Goes After the One That is Lost, I trust You to seek until You find, because it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. Because our flesh is so very bound up in time, and I am one of these. 

The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

The word translated as 'repentance' is the Greek word μετάνοια (metanoia), "after/behind one's mind,” which is a compound word of the preposition 'meta' (after, with), and the verb 'noeo' (to perceive, to think, the result of perceiving or observing). In this compound word the preposition combines the two meanings of time and change, which may be denoted by 'after' and 'different'; so that the whole compound means: to think differently after. Metanoia is therefore primarily an afterthought, different from the former thought; a change of mind accompanied by change of conduct, "change of mind and heart,” or, "change of consciousness.”


Dear LORD, Today may I ask, may I knock, may I seek. Your Spirit at work in me, lead me to repentance, Cause me to know the way wherein I should walk, for I lift up my soul until Thee.  

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