Category: Scriptures

My daughter has now graduated High School and will be going to college in the fall. Over the summer, she will be working with AmeriCorp and the United Way to connect children who are food-insecure to Free Summer Meals at hundreds of sites all over the county. This morning, she exclaimed with delight “It’s real food! Like fresh vegetables, produce, pita pockets with real cheese. Its healthy food! Delicious food!” She is so proud to be part of a first-class effort. Although in many typical ways a cynical, know-it-all teenager, her love for children and compassion for people in need comes through. I am so happy that she found this path.

Shortly after I started this particular blog in 2010, I wrote the following Devotion for a well-known charity newsletter:

“And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” — Phil 1:9-11

It seems a paradox to be both abounding with love and highly discerning.  Knowledge and discernment can make it easier for us to identify all that is flawed and not excellent about the world.  So Paul challenges us to sharply hone our senses, both our moral and physical senses, and not simply to condemn what is wanting, but to do the more difficult work of approving what is excellent.

Maybe its not accurate to say that Paul challenges us.  He prays that we do not become cynical and distrustful of loving, believing it to be naive. And for certain, it would be naive not to know that we live in a world where humanity is fallen, broken, and sinful. But it also takes more knowledge and discernment to understand that the Good News that Jesus Christ is the light that shines in the darkness and that we should seek him in the world, in others, and in ourselves. Paul’s prayer in Philippians 1 is for all of Christ’s disciples: those who teach, those who care, those who share and spread Jesus’ love. Paul’s prayer is also for those who are in need of abounding love: the children and family who need our help, but who also need to know that God’s love is within them, that it is excellent, and that through Jesus Christ it will grow more and more until the love is abounding.

Prayer:

Dear God,

Your excellence and the fruits of righteousness are the greatest knowledge. I love them, want to share them, and want to help others to discover them. Grant me the strength to do your work, the wisdom to do it well, the Joy to do it with love, and the faith to know that your Will shall be done. Amen.

For years, I would do some sort of variant on this prayer before we broke bread as a family. At some point, however, I stopped encouraging the kids to say grace at dinner. I became cynical, exhausted, and despairing. My children are skeptical — like true scientists. They are also full of hope and joy — like true Christians.

Here is the experience of Grace: Listening to my daughter discern with a scientific eye and scholarly mind that there are structural inequities and injustices which create a prosperous community that nevertheless has thousands of hungry children, and in the next breath express abounding love for the bringing good food to children who need it. It does not matter that I got discouraged and wandered away from a church home and stopped praying. It does not matter that I am tired. Somehow, the message got through to my kids and today my daughter is in the world doing good works. God’s Will be done. Amen.

“Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; See also: Raphael Lataster, “Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn’t add up.” Washington Post (Dec. 14, 2016)

My daughter interviewed me the other night for a school project about world cultures. She wanted me to talk about the rituals of birth, initiation, marriage, and death. Turns out, I had a lot to say about it. She needed to take the recording and transcribe what I had to say. She seemed nonplussed to have had to transcribe so much stuff.

Thinking about the interview, I got emotional. I brought feeling and emotional investment to what was really just a school project; imbuing the work product with a level of personal detail that maybe will be embarrassing to her.

And yet, I doubt that it will. At this point, these stories are all familiar to her. They are the family lore, like my Mom & Dad’s stories about “the War” were family lore to me. She digested my testimony with nary a reaction; the placid objectivity of an anthropologist in the field.

Family stories passed from parent to child like this, nevertheless, become the property of the recipient. These stories are plastic and malleable, owing less to the truth or my memory and more to the social, psychological, and parental needs of my children as they navigate life and  one day raise children of their own.