Yesterday during church they read from the Children’s Bible about Noah and the rainbow. There was a line that said that God was looking at the rainbow too. It stopped me in my thinking. It did because I had only thought of the rainbow from my side of the bow. God looks at the bow and remembers too. I loved this.
What is it about God that we put in a box that doesn’t get opened each time we read it. I recall a professor warning us not to say… this is a familiar text. Well not everyone…everyone…has heard the scripture another time. Perhaps even those who heard it have truly taken it into themselves. For me even if I have read a scripture, or heard a scripture many times and then the last time I hear it…something has changed. That change that lets me hear it.
When my mother died about 6 years after my father I was in the pulpit reading the scripture from the day. I had read it several times during the week. I got up and was reading John 14, the line that says I will not leave you orphaned. I stopped. Full stop. It had called out something in me that I had not acknowledged, I was somewhere deep down feeling suddenly like an orphan, my parents were dead. So I was almost 50, I was an orphan. I stopped.
The changing that happens because something in my life has shifted. An experience in my life has changed what I hear. My ears are opened in a new way.
John, my husband, co pastor, recognized what happened. He stood up behind me and put his hand on my back. I couldn’t speak. I sat down and he preached my written sermon. That’s what being a co-pastor was for us. When I couldn’t say the words, he knew and preached for me.
I knew these words so well. I knew the whole chapter having shared it at services everywhere. It was however new to me. It was not familiar. It was New. In that experience I knew just what my professor had said many years ago. This newness, this familiarity, was true for us as it was true for everyone else who has known the scriptures.
Our life experience translates what we read. Let our experience be new lenses by which we “see” the Gospel messages. The lens that opens the Gospel to our heart. Our present heart. Carpe Diem. Hear the Word of God, as it comes to us This Day.
The Spirit Will Tell You 