I realize it has been quite some time since I have posted anything. I am not gone for good, just have lost my voice for a bit. There have been so many times I have wanted to just stop everything else and get back on this blog and share again. Perhaps soon. In the meantime, here is an early peak at what I wrote for the Faith Finder section of the Northwest Blade in Eureka, SD to be published next week. Hope to see you soon.
The poet, T. S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which contains one of my favorite lines of poetry, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Apparently the speaker of the poem was considering what was important in his life, which in that case was attending social functions.
I think of that line often as I make coffee while preparing breakfast, and I realize that I would probably need to write that I have measured out my life with scoops of potting soil. It seems each year as I trim up my potted plants, I pot a few new ones with the hope of sharing them with others or keeping a new one in place of the old, but the fact is each year there are more and more pots of plants placed here and there around our yard. I have finally realized that with each new pot there is one more spot for the mosquitoes to reproduce and one more place for decaying plant residue to accumulate, and one more spot for me to clean.
Perhaps a better consideration would be to pause and ask with what I have measured out my spiritual life. With what have I measured out my life lived with or my life lived for Christ? Could that life be measured in study? Could it be measured by prayers? Could it be measured in deeds done for others?
As Christians we know that in order to accept God’s love and grace we must believe in Christ. Jesus in Mark 14:6 answers his disciple Thomas, who questions where he is going, with “I am the way the truth and the life, No one comes to the Father except through me.” Yet as we read on through the Epistles of the New Testament, we learn there is more to being a Christian that simply believing. James in his epistle instructs us how to live as true Christians. In chapter one verse 22, James writes, “But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” Then he ends the chapter with, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”
If you find the time to consider by what means you measure out your life, I hope you will find something in the way of following Christ and sharing the good news of what it means to follow him, doing it both in what you say, and in what you do for those around you.
lucindalines 