Daily Office Readings for Tuesday of Proper 11: Year 1
Morning, Psalm 45; Evening, Psalms 47 and 48;
1st Samuel 25:1 to 22; Acts 14:1 to 18; Mark 4:21 to 34:
“And when an attempt was made by both Gentiles and Jews, with their rulers, to maltreat them and to stone them, the apostles learned of it and fled to Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and to the surrounding country; and there they continued proclaiming the good news:” (Acts 14:5 to 7).
Normally I am not one to be scared off when the going gets rough. But maybe, this is God’s way of getting the Word of God to more, and different places. Sometimes we just have to move on. Perhaps it’s a way of “shaking the dust off your shoes as a testimony against them.”
There are several places in the Bible where God believing people have had to flee only to continue in the faith. Moses, David, Elijah, Paul and others have had to relocate in order to perpetuate the word.
In more near modern times, The Amish of Europe were all but exterminated. But they fled to America and even then had to settle in Pennsylvania in order to continue in their faith. Sometimes we have to choose to run away in order to live and teach another day,
So it’s not a matter of being scared off. It is more a matter of recognizing that the current people around you are not ready to receive the Good News. But God knows that there are people very near you who long for sustaining words. We just have to keep moving. We are not to give up, or give in. We are to move on.
Such moving on is not always a physical location. In our time of “E” relationships, moving on could just be a matter of deselecting one group and selecting another. In this blog I have reached people all over the globe who have selected me. My words do not always fall on ears of welcome. But again, I’m not scared off, I just knock the dust off and keep sharing. Somewhere, someone is moved by the words that God is speaking through me.
I receive God’s words as words of love and inclusion. I also know when God holds me in silence because the words that come to me are not God’s but mine. It is perhaps more important today in our “E” community to discern what is from God and what is not, before one hits the send, or publish button. I strive to be one of the communicating saints of God and I invite all the selfless saints to be filled with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and join me in spreading the Word to all who are longing for it. It is so much easier today to just move on if there is no love found in a few for what God is trying to do through you.
Let us live to love, rather than just live to live, listening to what the Spirit is saying to, and through the saints of God, while pondering anew what the Almighty can do. John
onewhoponders 