Author: Bryan Richardson

You’re not weary of all that holiday music playing in every store you’ve set foot in for the past six weeks, are you?  Didn’t that begin sometime around Halloween?  It gets earlier every year.  For 2014, it will start right after Arbor Day.  Mark my words.  At any rate, one of those tired old songs asks this: Do you see what I see?  That’s not a bad question.  Especially if the Lord asks it of you.

Day 40 – What are you not seeing?

The Lord can teach us the discipline of paying attention—attention to the way suffering works for the good in our lives, attention to our need to ask forgiveness from someone, attention to how we can serve somebody.  We will not see if we do not look.  Here’s a prayer: What have I missed, Lord?

Re: Verse reading – Luke 14:25-35 (day three)

The word of God, the deeds of God, the love of God, the works of God – these are things on which the Bible admonishes us to meditate.  Meditation is a dimension of prayer.  How do we do it, though?  We already know.

Day 33 – Where is your mind?

We are quite familiar with a form–a negative form–of meditation.  It’s called worry.  Consider: Worry focuses our mind on every contour of the object of our anxiety.  We call to mind all conceivable scenarios of further loss, failure, and trauma.  Dread expands in our minds until it crowds out all other thoughts and feelings.  This is exactly how the mechanics of meditation work.  Therefore, to “be transformed by the renewing of [the] mind”, we take these mechanics and put them to work as we pray and contemplate God’s goodness: We focus our mind on every contour of whatever is good.  We call to mind all conceivable scenarios of all that is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, praiseworthy.  And God’s glory expands in our minds until it crowds out all other thoughts and feelings.  We can do this.

Re: Verse reading – Luke 10:25-37 (day three)

If you’ve worked with the same people long enough, you might be able to describe each person in one word.  We often find humor in distilling an entire life down to a single descriptor, but people are deeper and richer than that.  Sadness, hope, grief, fear, joy, accomplishment, vulnerability—God knows all these things about each soul.

Day 26 – What are you saying to God about your co-workers?

When we put people in categories of “whiner” or “optimist”, it’s easier to get on with our job.  But we lose souls in the process.  Perhaps a “golden rule for the office” would be good: Pray for your co-workers as you would have your co-workers pray for you.

Re: Verse reading – Luke 12:13-34 (day three)

Jeremiah claimed to God that God had deceived him.  Jonah declared to the Lord that he had every right to be angry with God.  At least one psalmist questioned God’s sense of justice.  No one told these people that prayer is supposed to be nice, neat, and clean.

Day 20 – How will you struggle with the Lord?

Complaining, or lamenting, to God was often the way the work of prayer got done in the Bible.  And when people voiced their grievances in times of stress, they often got much more than they expected, because their laments served as points of revelation of God’s character and work in the world.  Because they struggled with God, they came to know–as we can come to know–God’s ability to sustain the exhausted, show compassion to the lost, and reassure the downtrodden.

Re: Verse reading – Luke 10:25-37 (day three)

“For everyone who asks receives.”  Is it true?  Jesus revealed to us a universe that operates on the power of the request.  We often become anxious when we know someone will ask something from us, and we find it unpleasant to say no, precisely because a request carries such power.  This is how God designed things.

Day 13 – Will you ask God to act?

Although God is not under any obligation to do so, he has revealed that he, too, will respond to requests.  In fact, he will give us whatever we ask when we make our requests conform to his character—that is, when our requests come after thoughtful consideration of what is loving, good, and representative of God’s kingdom.  This is what it means to ask for things “in Jesus’s name.”

Re: Verse reading – Luke 7:1-17 (day three)

Prayer is the first step toward coming to know that this is not looking to devour you.  That’s the devil’s mission, the Bible says, not this good creation of God’s.  Jesus told us the pagans run after things they believe are in short supply, because they see the universe as a chaotic, hostile realm.  But Jesus knew better.  That which God called good, we need not fear.  When we pray, we come out of chaos and move toward this good God who hears and responds.

Day 6 – Will you ask this good God, who created this good universe, to reflect his goodness in you?

“Whatever is good,” think on it, Paul says.  Goodness is alien to our sinfulness, but as we hunger for goodness through prayer, we will learn it again.

Re: Verse reading–Luke 5:12-26.