Daily Lesson for January 22, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Isaiah 45 verses 9b and 10:

Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’
or ‘Your work has no handles’?
10 Woe to him who says to a father, ‘What are you begetting?’
or to a woman, ‘With what are you in labor?’”

Do me and yourself a favor. Relax for a minute or two. Set your phone down. Close your eyes -- not yet!  After this paragraph, close your eyes and just try to relax. Let your fingers go lose breath deeply, and just think on the word, "Be".  Okay, see you in a couple of minutes!

In my office I have a poem by e.e. cummings titled, "Just Be".  It is reminder to me that by God's creativity I am who I am and it is good, and beautiful, and blessed, and that I should give a gift to myself and see it all as such.

That requires acceptance and love of myself. It means loving and accepting my race, my hair color and texture, my skin tone, my size, my shape, my sex, my sexual orientation, my gifts, my graces and my disgraces.  It means accepting and  loving who I am and being okay with who I'm not.  It means playing my part in the great symphony of life with joy and delight and not quibbling with God over why I gotta be a woodwind rather than brass.  Accepting and loving myself and my part means playing the smoothest woodwind music I can possibly play while at the same time delighting in the music of others.

Dr. King used to preach a now famous sermon commonly known as the "Street Sweeper Speech".  In it he said, ‘‘If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say,   ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

Whether we're created to be a street sweeper or a the next Michaelangelo really doesn't matter. What matters is that whatever we were created and gifted to be, we be it.  And we don't try to be or wish we were anybody else.  

God delights in who we are; we should too.