It Was a Sunday

AM Psalm 119:49-72 • PM Psalm 49, [53]
Isa. 49:1-12 • Gal. 2:11-21 • Mark 6:13-29

It is Sunday and I am making coffee. I seem to be ok. I hear an inner voice saying: that’s right, Rebecca, you are doing fine. It is my husband, John’s voice, who was always encouraging. But sometimes I hope this is God’s voice. I would like to hear His words to me. This is a hard time and this morning more troubling than most. My cat is ill and at the vet’s. But I ache for people with worse troubles, people I see crossing the streets, who are far less comfortable.

At my grocer’s, I saw, sitting on a curb, a man who said to me, “I really need a ride to Springdale, rather than money. Since it was a Sunday, buses were stopped. “Oh, I can’t do that,” I said. “Well then let me carry your groceries to your car,” the man said and he did. I hailed several people to ask if they could take this man to Springdale, but no one could. Still, we generated so much activity I think, eventually, someone did.

I would like to hear God’s voice inside me and, when I don’t, I only have to think of the kindness of other people to remember it. Here God, speaking through Isaiah, is telling his people what God said long ago to the Israelites when they were captives in Israel: from Isaiah 49.

“the Lord says, who formed me from the womb
to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him,
and that Israel might be gathered to him,
for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord,
and my God has become my strength –

he says, “It is too light a thing that you
should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the preserved of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations…”
And I will make all my mountains a way…that they mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.

We understand because we have been in our own kind of Babylon.

Written by Rebecca Newth

...trying to dwell in those passages.