Day 5, Monday, February 23, 2015
Mark 2:21-28 (NRSV)
These verses about repairing patches and putting new wine into old wineskins can be a little tricky if we don't see them metaphorically.
The Lenten question this causes us to ask is how does my faith in Jesus Christ impact my daily living?
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| Where does your current path lead? |
For those raised in the church, the difficulty is that our faith in Christ is not a new patch. It is not something new being sown into an old life. We don't reject the old life or old behaviors for a new one because we have been living with this faith for a long time - maybe all our lives.
So for those that have grown in the faith, we must step outside ourselves and take a hard look.
What behaviors match up with loving God and loving neighbor?
Which ones may need to be discarded?
I love this prayer by Thomas Merton. It seems like a good conclusion to these thoughts today:
My Lord GOD, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.
Prayer from Thomas Merton's Thoughts in Solitude
Photo by By Dcrjsr (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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