I’m going to be away until Wednesday visiting my daughter in Cardiff but I want to do a series next around the Lord’s Prayer. Yes I know I’ve done it before but this time I’m going to slowly work through line by line, like I did with Psalm 23, but using a version translated from the original Aramaic.
But I want to leave that space between now and later in the week with this quote from Richard Rohr
From Sunday 21st July Prayer is a symbiotic relationship with life and with God, a synergy which creates a result larger than the exchange itself. We ask not to change God, but to change ourselves. —Richard Rohr
As one of the ladies at our house group last night said “the Holy Spirit is the symbiont living within us.”
I think with this thought in mind the whole “Lord teaches us how to pray” and Jesus responding with Matthew 6:9-13 makes sense.
Photographed by myself Jan 2022. A lonesome tree on the top of the hill
How often do we feel like that when we are going through something awful? Something tough? Like we are exposed and alone?
He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. 4 Even though I walk through the darkest valley
Psalm 23:3b-4a
Do you know we only split the Bible into chapters and verses because some bishop decided it? The divisions started to happen in the 9th Century but really came into their own in the 13th Century. David, when he wrote this Psalm would have just written it as a poem with the lines as they are but to be read as whole.
For some reason this jumped out at me – of us being guided along the right paths for God but that sometimes they would lead us through a dark valley – through the valley of the shadow of death, as it says in the NKJV. For those who have gone through dark times, whether the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a redundancy, a lost opportunity, etc, it can feel like walking in the shadow of death. I believe any time of grief is a time of death – death of a dream as much as loss of a person.
Someone I care about deeply is going through a dark time but, standing back a bit, I can see that if they don’t go through this dark valley they will never be freed from certain things. This dark time for them will cleanse them.
I can’t find it but in one of this last week’s Henri Nouwen meditations he talks of how grief can be a place of growth. In Richard Rohr’s blog someone talks of how in our culture we try to ignore grief and dark times and run away from them. That we just want to get over it. But here if we run these verses together and don’t allow for the verse break it says that God, our Shepherd, will guide us this way. So does this mean that it is good for us?
Perhaps this is why we we are lead in those calm quiet places first – so we are refreshed but also have developed our relationship with God. Dark times are hard if we don’t know we are loved unconditionally and don’t know that God “has our back” so to speak. We need to get to that place where we can trust that we are being led – that we will be led through not left there. But that in the going through we will …
I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Psalm 23:4b
Maybe then we can support and lead others through their valley of the shadow of death at God’s pace rather than rush them through because we don’t like them being sad and depressed.
God lets people grieve so should we – and that includes ourselves.
Aspirational Adventures 