Lenten Daily Reflection 2021-03-03
You can listen to the reading and reflection by clicking here.
Psalm 31.4-5, 12-14
Take me out of the net, that they have secretly set for me *
for you are my tower of strength.
Into your hands I commend my spirit *
for you have redeemed me, O Lord, O God of truth.
I am forgotten like a dead man, out of mind *
I am as useless as a broken pot.
For I have heard the whispering of the crowd; fear is all around; *
they put their heads together against me; they plot to take my life.
But as for me, I have trusted in you, O Lord *
I have said, you are my God.
As a self-reliant person, it is hard for me to reconcile a God that created me this way for a reason, yet also wants me to find my strength and trust in him. How am I supposed to know the point at which I find my limits and God’s power begins? Or does this look more like a Venn diagram? These are confusing questions for me to consider.
One of my greatest fears is of being useless or weak. Take my calendar, for example. Before Covid, I famously wouldn’t look at a week or month in context. Rather, I tend to make commitments based on whether I am technically free at a given moment, rather than decide if I was truly that indispensable to take another thing on. Rather than try and seek God as a source of strength and discernment, I filled my calendar as if I had something to prove, and that I was in control.
Now I look at my calendar and I see monotony, if not boredom many days. The vast but temporary restrictions imposed by COVID has been a bit of an experiment in understanding what my life could be like with fewer commitments and (certainly) a lot less control. The environment I can control is perhaps contained within the same four walls, doing the same five activities, with the same people, every day. And honestly, one of those people is a toddler, so really -- I can’t control what happens within these four walls, either.
And so, 2021, with all its potential, has at least, for the moment, brought a forced moment of putting God back in His place as my source of strength and trust. It’s always been true, but the past year has really driven it home, that no one or nothing else in His world can come close to being as steadfast as He is.