God doesn’t give us ministries we cannot perform. God calls us to ministry and gives us the gifts we need to do what needs doing. We are sometimes amazed at what we are able to do in the service of the God who empowers us with the Holy Spirit.

I have noticed, though, that people can talk themselves out of their ministries. They can focus their inadequacies and be overwhelmed despair at what they see. And so they never make a start.

I am very aware of my inadequacies. I could run up quite a list of them if I wanted to do that. But I don’t. I focus on God’s sufficiency for my needs and the needs of those I am called to serve. God didn’t put me where I am so that I could wallow in my own shortcomings and do nothing. I was put here so that I might glorify God in my words and deeds. That’s why we’re all here, and we will have the gifts we need to do what God wills for us.

I derive a great deal of peace from thinking these thoughts. If I thought that the world depended on me and people like me for its salvation, I’d be a nervous wreck, for I know that I possess neither the wisdom nor the strength on my own to save the world. We have another savior, who has chosen to use us in the great and graceful plan of the world’s salvation.

God doesn’t give us ministries we cannot perform. God calls us to ministry and gives us the gifts we need to do what needs doing. We are sometimes amazed at what we are able to do in the service of the God who empowers us with the Holy Spirit.

I have noticed, though, that people can talk themselves out of their ministries. They can focus their inadequacies and be overwhelmed despair at what they see. And so they never make a start.

I am very aware of my inadequacies. I could run up quite a list of them if I wanted to do that. But I don’t. I focus on God’s sufficiency for my needs and the needs of those I am called to serve. God didn’t put me where I am so that I could wallow in my own shortcomings and do nothing. I was put here so that I might glorify God in my words and deeds. That’s why we’re all here, and we will have the gifts we need to do what God wills for us.

Open our eyes to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works…

A world in which nature was unrelated to human behavior was a foreign concept to the ancient writers. So vulnerable to the forces of life and death arising from nature were they that they readily saw God’s hand in famines, in floods. They were people who understood the economy of the natural order, who knew that it was wasteful to kill a calf for food instead of letting it grow to a productive maturity, who mandated the gleaning, of the fields by the poor, who understood that the land needed a rest every few years.

O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity…

All of us have had periods in our lives when it has seemed to us that this ascertain was not true. “What’s going on here?” we angrily ask ourselves or someone close to us. “Why am I being singled out for suffering and pain? What kind of a God permits this?”

You don’t have to ask this question for very long at all before you realize that it doesn’t take you anywhere. It demands a sensible answer to human suffering, and human suffering is not sensible. A compassionate God doesn’t make human suffering into a good thing; it’s still bad. Our choice is not between suffering and not suffering; it’s between meaning and not meaning. When we lose everything, we still do not lose God; it is this in which God’s compassion is shown to us.

It takes some time for most of us to encompass this truth. I know that sounds anything but comforting to those who suffer and have not encompassed it. “I don’t want Compassion Presence,” they wail. “I just want to stop hurting!” Everyone hurts at one time or another; some seem to get more than their share of sorrow. God’s own Son was no exception to this human reality.

When the psalmist wrote this, he was thinking of a liturgical setting: harps, drums, timbrels, singers, everyone in his or her own way offering the best there was to the glory of God. The best every—artist knows what that is. The feeling of having stretched as far as you can stretch. The happy exhaustion of having given it your all. The arts sprang from religion, a theological and pastoral gift, not and extra little frill for those who happen to enjoy that sort of thing, but central to the human response to God.

Theological? Yes. When the human being stretches as far as possible, tests the limits training and skill, she is fulfilling God’s command: Be fruitful and multiply. Did you think that was just about having babies? The world is filled and nurtured in all kinds of ways besides the obvious one of procreation. The writer. The singer. The actor. The painter. Than dancer. God gives us gifts and we husband them carefully.

Always be mindful of the kindness and not the faults of others.

…grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord’s resurrection, may be raised from the death of sin by your life-giving Spirit…

from the collect for Easter Sunday

As we start our journey through the Trisagion join me in taking some quite time alone. Alone, to open our hearts that we might hear God speaking to us as His children and messengers to carry the gift and promise that the cross symbolizes to a hurting world.

May we as His Children reflect the joy that new life in Christ brings.

I give you a new commandment: that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, so you too should love one another.

John 13:34

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Isaiah 53:6

Pity arises when we are sorry for someone. Compassion is when we understand and help wisely.

Wash me through and through from my wickedness, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.

Psalm 51:2-3

Pour your grace into our hearts, O Lord, that we who have known the incarnation of your Son Jesus Christ, announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary, may by His cross and passion be brought to the glory of His resurrection.

-Collect for the feast day of The Annunciation

-Book of Common Prayer