In Good Company

There is nothing quite like having good traveling companions. I know this from my many experiences backpacking, trekking, and traveling. And I also know this from the many small groups, studies, and classes that I have been a part of. It's good to be on the road together, not just for support, but for the fact that we're much more likely to get somewhere that we wouldn't have gotten to on our own.

I'm feeling this way, already, about Bonhoeffer. For example, check out this essay, forwarded to me by my dad, where Brett McCracken reflects on Ash Wednesday and the Lenten journey, while also quoting Bonhoeffer, and, to my great delight, throwing in some quotes from an essay on Bonhoeffer written by Marilynne Robinson (author of Gilead, the '05 Pulitzer for Fiction). It's a great, quick read, and really helps to put in perspective all the "giving stuff up" talk that circulates around the Lenten season. Robinson writes of Jesus' own potent mix of power-in-self-denial that "He (Christ) is present even where he is forgotten and efficacious even where he is despised."

How in the world is grace so confoundedly incessant?

That's where Day 2 takes us in the 40-Day Journey, guiding us towards a readiness and an openness, not to our own self-constructed regimens, but to "God's Word for us."

We start with a question:

Are you satisfied in your present experience of prayer and meditation? What kind of time do you give to these activities?

"There are three things for which the Christian needs a regular time alone during the day: meditation on the Scripture, prayer, and intercession...

In our meditation we read the text given to us on the strength of the promise that it has something quite personal to say to us for this day and for our standing as Christians -- it is not only God's Word for the community of faith, but also God's Word for me personally... We are reading the Word of God as God's Word for us. Therefore, we do not ask what this text has to say to other people... but what it has to say to us personally."

- from his book Life Together

Consider these words from the Psalms:

How sweet are your words to my taste,

sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Through your precepts I get understanding;

therefore I hate every false way.

Your word is a lamp to my feet

and a light to my path.

Psalm 119:103-105

Prayer for today:

Lord, draw me to your living Word and let it be for me food for the journey.