Would Jesus honor me with such a task?

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Matthew 5:7

I am reading yet another book on the Beatitudes. And this one is radically different than the theoretically radical Christian Counterculture by John Stott. Mostly because in truth, his book is all theory, and none of it lived out in the streets. While Heidi Baker’s book, Compelled by Love, is completely lived out in the streets…of Mozambique. And in the trash bins and cardboard shacks and plastic tarp kitchens and the overpopulated hospitals. And it is the sort of book that I long to read aloud to everyone I meet, in spite of its simplistic syntax and repetitive word choice.

But most of all let me read it aloud to my heart. To speak truth into my world, as I await Him. And may this prayer seep deeply into my innermost being, as I drive there and back again, to His majestic Canyon, which never ceases to speak of the eternal to my soul.

Dear Jesus, help us to spread your fragrance everywhere we go.
Flood our souls with your spirit and life.
Penetrate and possess our whole being so utterly,
that our lives may only be a radiance of yours.
Shine through us, and be so in us,
that every person we should come in contact with
may feel your presence in our soul.
Let them look up and see no longer us, but only Jesus.
Stay with us, and then we shall begin to shine as you shine;
so to shine as to be a light to others;
the light, Jesus, will be all from you.
None of it will be ours.
It will be you shining on others through us.
Let us thus praise you in the way you love best,
by shining on those around us.
Let us preach you without preaching:
not by words, but by our example,
by the catching force,
the sympathetic influence of what we do,
the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear for you.
Amen.

                                                                       -John Newman/Mother Teresa