This youngster was, after all, a devout fellow. He was someone who would not have been able to simply forget what Jesus had said to him. He would have wondered . . . doubted . . . questioned. Over time eternal life might have grown more attractive and his riches less so. One way or another God would have claimed him eventually.
For me, taking up the cross is not one huge, single, life-altering event. It is thousands of little choices that I make or fail to make every single day.
Each of us belongs so completely to God that all we have to do to find God is turn our attention there. Every moment is replete with the Beloved. God, God’s self will teach us how best to be in communion with God, how God wants us to pray. For each of us it’s a little different, I think. It’s a relationship thing.
God holds our hearts in times of incubating beginnings like the earth holds seed in its dark embrace. Who knows when and how understanding quickens? We don’t see it until the stalks push up into the day.
God has given me this double vision, stirring my heart, so that my sorrow and my mindfulness of the needs of others go hand in hand with my wonder and my sense of awe.
Make practicing the presence of God a Lenten discipline of renewal. It is a way through which we can come to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom God sent. And this is eternal life.
I want to say to all of you who read the Episcopal Café, and especially to you young visionaries out there, that the Episcopal Church is yours to do with what you want.
Seeking our own will is like being content in a tiny room in a large mansion because we don’t recognize that what we thought was a wall is really a corridor.
It surely does hurt us to kick against the goads of God’s plan for us. And Jesus’ words tell me that Paul was harnessed to the Way of Jesus Christ long before his vision.
This tending and feeding is the job of every member of the church. Jesus invites all of us, ordained and lay alike, to love and to care for his people.