Daily Lesson for April 9, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Ezekiel 37 verse 14:

"And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land."

And John chapter 15 verse 14a:

"You are my friends."

Last night at church we had a panel discussion on the spirituality of recovery.  One of our panel guests was Tom McGovern, a former professor in the department of psychiatry at Texas Tech and one of the spiritual giants in our community.  During the discussion we began to talk about the power of community in the recovery process. Tom quoted his friend, the late Ernest Kurtz, who was the preeminent historian of Alcoholic Anonymous. Ernie described the AA community as creating a feel among its members of "being at-home".

We all need a community of people we can feel at-home with, though many do not know what it means to feel at-home because they never felt at-home when at home. Sometimes we have to leave home to discover again what being at-home is supposed to feel like. Here is a picture: To have the sense of being at-home is to be in the company of a group of people who know, tolerate, and love us unconditionally.  It is a place of total acceptance.  It is the place where you can hug, cry, laugh, and tell your story as honestly as you can.

Jesus said, "You are my friends."  What I am describing really is a place of friendship. To have friendship is to be at-home; and to be at-home is to already be in heaven -- even in the most earthy of earthy places like a smoky AA meeting or a place called the Red Zone Cafe, where I'm off to have breakfast and study Scripture with a group of good, good friends.