(Psalm 71: 1-2)

“Lord, I have come to you for protection;

Never let me be defeated!

Because you are righteous, help me and rescue me.

Listen to me and save me!”

“Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being ‘drawn toward.’ Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.


"Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of (the disenfranchised and), the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. ….

“For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called ‘love.’ Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity -- a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.”
Passion for Justice, the Rev., Dr. Carter Heyward, Episcopal Priest and Howard Chandler Robbins Professor of Theology, Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA.


In the thought of the Hebrew Bible, it is only because God’s intrinsic nature is righteousness (tsaw-dak)—to be just, to bring about justice and to save—that God actively chose us for mutually beneficial and reciprocal relationship. It is only because this loving relationship involves a commitment, a sometimes seemingly irrational one on the part of God, that we have dared across so many millennia to ask that our prayers for protection, victory, help, rescues and salvation be heard.


Let us come this week in prayer. Let our hearts of prayer speak boldly our deepest longings for protection, victory, help, rescue and salvation. Let us pray with the confidence of our faith across centuries of this commitment to the love and healing of broken lives in our broken world. Let us pray with hope, remembering that our faith is an ancient choice made for us by the One whose very essence is very essence is to save us, love us, heal, protect and defend us. Let us pray for the faith to choose to love and heal other broken lives in our broken world. Amen.

Ksimir Malevich, Russian, 1878 - 1835: The first painter to surrender to the freedom of abstract forms in search of purer emotional expression.

“Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.”
Alfred Adler, February 7, 1870 – May 28, 1937

May we bring our hearts in prayer this week seeking healing for what ails them. May we pray that God meets us there in the midst of our defiance and our fear restoring us, as we are able to allow, to the great truth of our ability to choose freely there to respond for the wholeness or our own lives and the lives of all who come to us seeking care. Amen.

Created to Choose

“…we are choice makers. We are created by God with this characteristic not shared by animals or angels. We have the dignity and integrity of affecting the way things are and the way things will be. Our choices are most important and they are consequential….

“What a tremendous thing to provide a source of gratitude within us, that when we seek to make the right decision, then we pray to God that he will make the decision right. That he will work together with us to make all things work together for good for his glory when we work according to his purpose. ” John Ashcroft former Attorney General of the United States. Mr. Ashcroft is a member of the Assemblies of God denomination and is the author of Lessons from a Father to His Son.


May we pray this week that in all that we choose, for our lives and for the lives of those we love and those we serve, we reflect the dignity and integrity which God intends for every human life. May all our choices give glory to God and work toward God’s purposes in the lives of all they effect. And may God fill our hearts with gratitude for this gift which can bring our hearts and minds closer to God’s. Amen