I am going to share this reading from my devotional life. Although it is unusual for me, I am going to keep my own comments to a minimum and let the passage speak to you in its own way as it did for me. It is amazing to me how my Lectio Divina and devotional passages always dovetail nicely even when approached from different venues. I found this passage spoke to me deeply, it was a reminder that no matter where we are in life, or what we are doing, God is waiting patiently at our side for us to notice He is there with us.

The following is from Simon Tugwell’s book: “Prayer”:

Another picture that our Lord loves to use is that of the shepherd who goes out to look for the sheep that is lost (Matthew 18:12 and so on). So long as we imagine that it is we who have to look for God, then we must often lose heart. But it is the other way about: he is looking for us. And so we an afford to recognise that very often we are not looking for God; [italics mine] far from it, we are in full flight from him, in high rebellion against him. And he knows that and has taken it into account. He has followed us into our own darkness; there where we thought to finally escape him, we run straight into his arms.

So, we do not have to erect a false piety for ourselves, to give us hope of salvation. Our hope is in his determination to save us. And he will not give in!

This should free us from that crippling anxiety which prevents any real growth, giving us room to dd whatever we can do, to accept the small but genuine responsibilities that we do have. Our part is not to shoulder the whole burden of our salvation, the initiative and the programme are not in our hands: our part is to consent, to learn how to love him in return whose love came to us so freely while we were quite uninterested in him.

Also, we can let ourselves off that desperate question, “Am I in the right place?” “Have I done the right thing?” Of course, we must sometimes acknowledge sins and mistakes, and we must try to learn from them; but we should not foster the kind of worry that leads to despair.

God’s providence means that wherever we have got to, whatever we have done, that is precisely where the road to heaven begins. However, many cues we have missed, however many wrong turnings we have taken, however unnecessarily we may have complicated our journey, the road still beckons, and the Lord still “waits to be gracious” to us (Isaiah 30:18).

If we let these things really speak to us, then we can surely accept our Lord’s invitation, indeed his command, to cast all our cares upon him (I Peter 5:7) and let him care for them. We can give space in our hearts for Christ to dwell there, and it is faith that gives him space (Eph. 3:17). We can let him dethrone us from being God in our own hearts and establish there his own rule. We can then let him give us to ourselves, just as at the beginning he gave Adam to Adam. Then we can receive from him all that is ours, all our facultis, all our freedom, our capacity to take initiatives, to make our own decisions, so that our own true independence no longer challenges God’s sovereignty but it is precisely a most wonderful expression of it, as we receive our freedom day by day, minute by minute, from the creative love of God.

From “prayer” by simon tugwell

I noticed long ago that we, as humans, tend to second guess ourselves or talk ourselves out of what is good and/or necessary. I once told my congregation that I am convinced that if we could redeem all the time, we spent worrying about things that never happened or fretting about things that did happen but, in the end, were not as bad as we feared, that our lives would be twice as long and twice as healthy!

We often make wrong turns in life. One of the most wonderful bible verses I ever read that freed me from the chains of missed opportunities and lost trails was Joel 2: 25 “I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent against you.” Another version reads that “I will restore the years that the locust has eaten” or that we have wasted. God doesn’t let anything go to waste…especially us!