We have delighted together in Advent celebrations for several years now, and we have just come to the close of a beautiful holiday season. Before that, we journeyed together through a modern, DIY monastery, an at-home celebration of intensified worship and devotion, and we looked into and gazed upon the inner workings of a royal life, an earthly template of the one given to us all, with its duties, disciplines, deprivations, and consecrations.
It seems the time may have come to suit up, to ready our armor and our weapons of warfare, to determine where someone we love is most oppressed, where captivity is holding captive a child of God … perhaps a child of our own … and go as David did to Ziklag and bring them home again, safe and sound.
It seems … perhaps … do you think? … what if? … now? … or, soon … maybe later
I’ve written and read many terrific, inspiring, faith-building devotionals over the years, but there comes a time … there comes a time when we need to put all that encouragement and comfort into a rucksack and set out on a grand adventure.
I’ve never read these words on a refrigerator magnet. We just need to decide whether this is video game jargon or instruction for life, and then decide what to do with them:
I pursued my enemies and overtook them,
and did not turn back till they were consumed.
I thrust them through, so that they were not able to rise;
they fell under my feet.
For you equipped me with strength for the battle;
you made those who rise against me sink under me. (Psalm 18:37-39)
What do you think? Do you know anyone whose life has been oppressed in the extreme, anyone you know to be demonized or just somehow strangely never able to rise above defeat or doom or disgrace or despair? Are you … am I … just going to leave them there where they lie for another year?
Would you help them if you could? Would you cross to the other side of the lane, minister to them before they die by the road? I say … let’s! Our first fast for 2018 starts FRIDAY, the 5th … 40 days before and until Lent … 40 days of compassion and tactical prayer, with worship covering all. Fasting food or entertainment, recreational shopping, television, complaining, vain imaginations … you choose! Mix ’em up!
Barely alive is not God’s standard. Mostly dead is not the same as all dead, and even all dead wasn’t a match for Miracle Messiah. Find someone … even now, even right now, find someone in your heart or even in your head … someone who could be doing better if you – or I – could Samaritan them back to life with our prayers.
“Wretched Man With an Approaching Depression.”
provided by Wellcome Images to Wikipedia.
Spooner, lithograph
Marketplace Monastics 