Prayers and Thoughts

for Reflection

Lenton Devotional

2007

March 8

May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.

1 Thessalonians 3:12

“Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know,” says the Lord.

Jeremiah 33:3

By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

John 13:35

A Christian man was walking to church one night when he encountered four boys loitering on the street corner.  He invited them to go to the service with him.  They did, and each of the boys also agreed to return to church with him the next Sunday.  They became the nucleus of a Sunday school class the man began to teach.

Years later, a group of the man’s friends decided to try to contact the four boys to see what had happened in their lives and to invite them to write a special birthday letter to their teacher to be read at a surprise party.  Their letters revealed that one of them had become a missionary to China, one was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank, one was the private secretary to President Herbert Hoover, and the fourth was President Hoover himself!

If you were to hold a handful of pine nuts in your hand today, you could not begin to predict which of the seeds might actually sprout and produce a giant tree.  It is amazing that such a large tree might grow from such a small seed.  The only way to tell which nuts have trees inside them is to plant them!  When you plant acts of kindness and generosity to others you never know what might tree may grow from that small seed.

Author Unknown

Into all our lives, in many simple, familiar, homely ways, God infuses this element of joy from the surprises of life, which unexpectedly brighten our days, and fill our eyes with light.  He drops this added sweetness into his children’s cup, and makes it to run over.  The success we are not counting on, the blessing we were not trying after, the strain of music in the midst of drudgery, the beautiful morning picture or sunset glory thrown in as we pass to our from our daily business, the unsought word of encouragement or expression of sympathy, the sentence that meant for us more than a writer or speaker thought – these and a hundred others that everyone’s experience can supply are instances of what I mean.

Samuel Longfellow

The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me.  I have met people so empty of joy that when I clasped their frosty fingertips it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm.  Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart.  It may be only the clinging touch of a child’s hand, but there is as much potential sunshine in it for me as there is in a loving glance for others.

Helen Keller

Before I awaken this morning you are with me, Lord. As I open my eyes, I thank you for the gift of this new day.  May I take this certainty of your presence with me into all this day can hold – help me not to waste it.  I bundle my fears of what this day may bring and place them in your hands. Let me see the people you send to me, not as interruptions in my schedule, but as creations in your image to touch and to love. Be with me now as I arise. Open my heart to love, to trust, to hope, to share, to give, and to the call of the needs of others. Give me an awareness that is constantly opening all of my senses to search for the hidden joys, the tiny discoveries of your gift of life. Come unto me now and shepherd me through this day. Amen.