Come, Healing: Lent Daybook 16
Take a few deep breaths, settle your body, mind, and heart into a quiet space, and let’s begin with prayer.
Opening prayer: Heavenly Father, make me more like Jesus and more like the true self you’ve created as I savor your loving presence today. Please guide my thoughts and impressions by your Holy Spirit. Amen.
Look: Beloved, Tim Lowly - Source
I encourage you to spend time becoming familiar with Tim Lowly's work, which centers deeply and beautifully on his daughter Temma who suffered a cardiac arrest shortly after her birth that left her brain profoundly damaged. If there was ever a fatherly gaze of love, it's the way Tim invites us to see his daughter through his eyes and to see ourselves through hers. You might also enjoy this interview: Temma Is A Great And Utterly Innocent Mystery.
Listen: Come Healing (Leonard Cohen cover), Elayna Boynton - Lyrics | Spotify | YouTube
Read: Psalm 70-71, 74; Genesis 42:29-38; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; Mark 4:21-34
Excerpts:
"Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. Let those who love your salvation say evermore, “God is great!” But I am poor and needy; hasten to me, O God! You are my help and my deliverer; O Lord, do not delay!
*
Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel. For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth. Upon you I have leaned from my birth; it was you who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of you.
*
When they came to their father Jacob in the land of Canaan, they told him all that had happened to them, saying, “The man, the lord of the land, spoke harshly to us, and charged us with spying on the land. But we said to him, ‘We are honest men, we are not spies. We are twelve brothers, sons of our father; one is no more, and the youngest is now with our father in the land of Canaan.’ Then the man, the lord of the land, said to us, ‘By this I shall know that you are honest men: leave one of your brothers with me, take grain for the famine of your households, and go your way. Bring your youngest brother to me, and I shall know that you are not spies but honest men. Then I will release your brother to you, and you may trade in the land.’”
As they were emptying their sacks, there in each one’s sack was his bag of money. When they and their father saw their bundles of money, they were dismayed. And their father Jacob said to them, “I am the one you have bereaved of children: Joseph is no more, and Simeon is no more, and now you would take Benjamin. All this has happened to me!”…
But he said, “My son shall not go down with you, for his brother is dead, and he alone is left. If harm should come to him on the journey that you are to make, you would bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to Sheol.”
*
“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,” and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.
*
He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.
*
Yet God my King is from of old, working salvation in the earth…
Yours is the day, yours also the night; you established the luminaries and the sun. You have fixed all the bounds of the earth; you made summer and winter.
Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs, and an impious people reviles your name. Do not deliver the soul of your dove to the wild animals; do not forget the life of your poor forever.”
Pray & Do: Read out loud as a prayer Malcolm Guite’s sonnet in your meditation on Psalm 71. (Or click the title link to hear the author read it himself.)
You raise us with you in your resurrection
If we will only let you, so Lord come
Deliver me, and raise me from dejection
Then lift me to your stronghold. Let your name
Be my delight and my protection. Call
Me once again, and kindle love to flame.
For you have been my only hope in all
My days of life. You are the one who
Drew me from my mother’s womb, when all
Around me gave me up for dead. But you
Inspired the nurse who nursed me back to life,
Back in Ibadan all those years ago.
And now in age I open a new leaf
In my life’s manuscript and write for you
Another psalm to praise your light and life.
You might also enjoy:
David's Crown: Sounding the Psalms by Malcolm Guite
*Sunday Scripture readings are taken from Year C of the Book of Common Prayer 2019 (Anglican Church of North America). Daily Scripture readings are taken from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and include both Morning and Evening Psalms (Year 2).