Monday April 6, 2020
Now into our third full week of a state ordered lockdown, we find ourselves feeling restless. Restlessness is different from loneliness because it’s not just our friends and community that we miss. It’s even more than missing the regular pattern of our lives.
We’re being forced to think about new ways not of being with others but by being with ourselves. Do we just constantly read? And I don’t mean the internet. I’m thinking about the books tat are sitting on a shelf – or the floor – that I didn’t have the time to open until now.
Or should we use this time to consider what we do have: our relationship with God and how much of Scripture speaks to us in this time. Reading the Psalms, just one a day, helps me to focus on how people in another time faced adversity and fear with the faith that God is with us even in the worst of times.
Prayer for the Day
Tempting are the ways of self-deception and self-indulgence,
But, you, O God, summon us to turn aside this day.
Searching our hearts we come to find the life you offer.
Freeing us from our presumptions and preoccupations,
We pray for strength and courage to continue the work of love.
In the name of him who is your gift of love,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
Humility leads me to do anything I can do in any situation without having to do everything in every situation.
Joan Chittister, OSB
American religious writer
Christ moves among the pots and pans.
St. Teresa of Avila
Spanish nun (1515–1582)
When I call out, answer me, my righteous God.
In the straits, you set me free.
Have mercy upon me, and hear my prayer.
Psalm 4:1
(Translation by Robert Alter)