Lent 2022, Day 22

 


Today’s BiOY Verse of the Day:

Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Psalm 37:4 

I think a lot of us misinterpret this verse; we choose to read it as a contract: I will be “good,” and God will give me everything I want. If things don’t work out, it’s either my fault (I sink into self-loathing) or God’s (I take up faith-loathing). The danger and insidiousness of “Prosperity Gospel” or “Word of Faith” teaching springs from this sort of mindset, to the detriment of millions and the enrichment of a very few. It’s an easy, even lazy, way to view God and faith. It’s the sort of shortcut thinking I referred to in yesterday’s musings. 

So how do I read this verse, this concept? I think that God promises to reward our friendship with the desires he wants us to have: compassion, mercy, and love spring to mind. I also think he wants us to be active, to strive for Earth as it is in Heaven, even though we know it won’t come in our lifetime. I don’t believe the desires promised to be fulfilled include private planes paid for by congregants, but they do include obedience, looking outward, and working to make the world better.

Libby, of course, will have none of this. She has named it and now she wants to claim it. She requests a villain’s lair, with access granted only to a select few whose sole call is to serve Libby. She also requests complete freedom to behave however she likes.

She is currently having this theology tested. Our intrepid trainer has her out for a walk, sans me. I can hear the complaining from here.

#lent2022 #rescuedogsofinstagram #bibleinoneyear #repentandbelieve

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert Mom

The stage lit up in a way I found overwhelming.  The crowd cheered and I listened to the music and was moved but didn’t know why.  Kids sang along, angrily, ecstatically, and I stood in their midst, tears streaming down my middle-aged face.  I found myself once again in the sacred role of witness and testifier. Four years prior, the first concert not-of-my-choosing that I chose to attend with my daughter was some metal band. I don’t remember who but I remember the night vividly.  It was a classic-to-the-point-of-cliché mother-daughter battle:  she was 14 and NEEDED to see this band, would simply die if she did not.  Her Catholic-school friends were supremely uninterested in seeing this band, so her reasonable, modest proposal was that she, at 14, attend a gritty concert in a gritty part of San Francisco, solo.  I was not 14, and I would simply die if she went alone (I might actually have used the words “over my dead body”).  Impasse. We were in the midst of therapy that is a luxuri
Read more

Lent 2022, Spy Wednesday

Image
Having grown up in a non-litur gical tradition, the various movements of Holy Week are pretty new to me. It makes me sad that I’ve missed out on such depth and rich history. And cool names! Spy Wednesday ... wow. Of course, the “spy” of “Spy Wednesday” is no laughing matter: none other than that great villain of Scripture, Judas Iscariot. The one who betrayed his friend with a kiss. That guy. My friend  @d.a.v.i.d.n.y.c  once taught a class on Judas Iscariot. It was fascinating to learn that the Gospels that were written closer to the actual historical events reported the story of Jesus’ betrayal very matter-of-factly. Only in the later Gospels does Judas start to become the caricature we know and hate. In Mark (written c. AD 66-70) the story of the betrayal is presented in a “just the facts, ma’am” manner. In Matthew (written c. AD 85-90) we get the facts of the story, along with the heart-wrenching moment when Jesus calls Judas his friend, even as he’s being betrayed. In Luke (and it
Read more

Lent 2022, Day 29

Image
  From Nicky Gumbel’s commentary on today’s reading from Luke 8: “I have never met a strong person with an easy past. Faith is tested.” Although I imagine this is not universally true, I think it is mostly true of most people. Stress, hardship, testing, tend to strengthen us. It’s in nature and it’s in human nature. When my kids were small, I used to say that I wished for strength and toughness for them through developed muscles, not from scarring—or as my friend Linda Douglas put it, “we’d prefer that they learn some lessons from the textbook and not the field trip.”   But sometimes the field trips of life are where we learn our most important lessons, where we grow the most. To protect ourselves and our children completely from those field trips, were it even possible, would be for them to miss out on much of what it is to be human. Sadness, loss, pain, illness, unfair treatment … all of these things happen in this broken world, and while we don’t wish for them, don’t welcome t
Read more