Last night I spent a long time flipping through an old journal and remembering where I’ve been. Reading the old memories and the old prayers helps me see how far I’ve come and how far I have yet to go. The journal I read last night contains some of the most important moments of the past five years of my life. It holds memories from the year I lived in Texas and the months preceding my wedding, my first year of marriage and the beginning of my work at Beeson. I scribbled countless prayers, scripture verses and endless musings in those pages. Sometimes I laughed. Other times I cried. But I always wrote to remember.
I’m ashamed to admit that I have a bad habit of losing my train of thought when I pray. I start my silent prayers with good intentions but before I know it, I’m chasing rabbits down overgrown paths, and I forget not only what I was praying for but also that I was even praying to begin with. Even worse, sometimes I forget the things that I pray about, and I have no way of knowing when God has answered my prayers. I began writing my prayers down the summer after I graduated from high school. I had kept a diary since the fifth grade, but that summer, something shifted in my relationship with God, and I began to write to him. My diaries grew up with me, and they became journals, a written record of my spiritual life.
Love has been in the air lately. And on TV, the radio, and billboards. Valentine’s Day came and went, but love has remained on my mind.
When Christians talk about love, we tend to gravitate toward 1 Corinthians 13. It is, after all, THE love chapter. But as I sat in church one morning, I started wondering what would happen if we quit trying to make the chapter fit our notions of romantic love and started applying it to our relationships inside the church. What if we actually loved one another the way that Jesus says we should? What if we allowed 1 Corinthians 13 to define the way we treat one another in the church? I bet things would be a lot different.
Lately, I’ve been reading through Jeremiah, and the more I read, the more I’m stricken by what it means to speak the word of God. When I began reading the book, I prayed that the Lord would grant me words to speak just as he promised Jeremiah, but the gravity of Jeremiah’s message is making me have second thoughts about that prayer.
God was faithful to his promise. He “put out his hand” and touched Jeremiah’s mouth, granting him not only words but also an audience. He never promised Jeremiah that the audience would like what he had to say.
Which is why a few short chapters later, Jeremiah wishes he had never been born. The promised words were not pleasant words for the people, and when Jeremiah tried to keep his mouth shut and save his own neck, the words burned within him and demanded release.
“If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” [Jeremiah 20:9]
