Page 55 - Lenten Devotional 2023
P. 55
Week 6: April 3-7
1 John 4:16
So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in
love abide in God, and God abides in them.
Reflection
Imagine a pebble being dropped in a calm and quiet lake. The waves and ripples
continue in a circle around where the pebble landed and radiate in all directions,
bouncing off the nearby rocks and landing by the shore, reverberating and starting a
new ripple in the reverse direction. The process seems to never end and even the
calmest water has some motion present. Now imagine the smallest effort of loving
behavior toward our own body or toward another person: like the ripples it finds a way
to expand and continue to affect many others. As humans, we tend to withhold our best
self for those that are most like us; it is often easier to interact with people that already
understand us and that we know well. More difficult is to release our expectations of
who ‘deserves’ the best support and love, and let the ripples touch people, creatures,
and nature in ways we never imagined. That is an example of how to abide (or live) in
love. The core of welcoming is to receive the love that the Divine has already (and
constantly) given to us, and to pass it along. We don’t need to control or limit where
that love flows; we just pass it along, just as we also savor this Loving Presence for our
own self.
Welcome Stories
We were two parents in new jobs and two teenagers in new schools, in a townhouse
new to us in the Washington, DC, suburbs, having left a home and work and friends and
neighbors and schools in a medium-sized Midwestern town that we had (mostly)
cherished for the previous eight years. We went to worship at Saint Luke Lutheran
Church, up the street from the downtown area of Silver Spring, Maryland. There we
found instant welcome. I was given a room to live in when our townhouse was not quite
yet ours. Rosemary was welcomed into an adult Sunday school program. Our daughters
were embraced by the youth of the church. I was taken with enthusiasm into the choir.
