Daily Lesson for January 28, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Psalm 119 verses 67 and 71:

67 Before I was afflicted I went astray,
but now I keep your word.
71 It is good for me that I was afflicted,
that I might learn your statutes.

Yesterday I got reacquainted with a friend from school who loves somewhere else in the country. A friend of a friend reintroduced us on Facebook. When we put it together that we knew each another, our mutual friend said that some time ago she had asked this long-lost friend if he knew me but he had said no. I told her that was because a he could not believe or even conceive that the guy he knew before had actually turned out to be a pastor. 

I am learning to give thanks for my story.  I am learning to give thanks for my journey -- not to revel or delight in it, but to see it for the way it has shaped me and to thank God for how God used it. As one contemporary song says, "God blessed the broken road . . ."

Maya Angelou, who passed away last year, has probably taught me more than anyone about just how important it is to be kind to one's own story. She wrote a book titled "Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now", and that book and all of the rest of her books bear witness to the healing power of the broken roads we have journeyed upon.  If we could all come to a place of no longer wishing for another journey, but rather accepting the one we have been on and embracing its blessedness there would be far less shame and guilt in our world and far more beauty.

So many of us live as Adam and Eve in the Garden, hiding ourselves because of guilt and shame. And it is a shame that so much of Western Christianity has taught us to be ashamed.  But the ultimate point of that Garden story was not to leave us hiding behind our stories of guilt and shame, but rather to tell how while in our stories of guilt and shame God comes to us -- with the grace that can turn brokenness into blessing. 


Perhaps Julian of Norwich put it best, "First the fall, then the redemption and both the grace of God."  

Our whole story -- nothing but the grace of God.