Daily Lesson for August 18, 2017

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Psalm 107 verses 10 through 16:

10 Some sat in darkness and deep gloom, 

bound fast in misery and iron;

11 Because they rebelled against the words of God 

and despised the counsel of the Most High.

12 So he humbled their spirits with hard labor; 

they stumbled, and there was none to help.

13 Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, 

and he delivered them from their distress.

14 He led them out of darkness and deep gloom 

and broke their bonds asunder.

15 Let them give thanks to the Lord for his mercy 

and the wonders he does for his children.

16 For he shatters the doors of bronze 

and breaks in two the iron bars.

This coming Sunday's sermon is titled "Gratitude" and I will be giving thanks for so many things Second B has been for me and for my family for four generations. I am so thankful for so many things I neither earned nor deserve.  It's all grace. 

And beyond even the many graces Second B, there is the abounding grace God. Today's Lesson describes who I was a quarter of a lifetime ago. I sat in darkness and deep gloom, bound fast in the iron misery of my own rebellious ways. I despised the counsels of God and fled what I thought was the stifling presence of His saints. I wanted to live life my way. I wanted to be free; but really I ended up enslaved.  

As Richard Rohr says, for years I skated around the edges of my sin -- and then I fell in. It was a fall to grace. 

The grace did come easy. It was painful and humbling and if I hadn't been so sure that there was no other way in the world to be saved then through surrender then I would never have given in. So there I was, a prodigal returned, not to robe and ring and fatted calf, but to a single bedroom in the home of my new-octogenarian roommate. This wasn't the glory I imagined, but it was the way of salvation. By the flint-hard grace of God was I saved from my own self.

I am thinking today, I could have missed this all. I could have missed this life with God and the blessing which have come since. My family could have missed it. My children could have missed it. I was so close to missing it.

And when I think on how close I was to missing it all, a line from an old hymn comes to mind: "Count your blessings, name them one by one."