9th August Trinity
Matthew
6; 19-34
“Do not save up your
treasures on the earth, where moths and rust eat away at them and thieves
tunnel in and steal. Save up your treasures in heaven, where no moth and no
rust consumes and thieves do not tunnel in and steal. Because where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also.
“The lamp of the body is the
eye. So if your eye is wholesome, your whole body is lighted; whereas if your
eye is bad, your whole body is in darkness. So if the light inside you is
dark…what great darkness!
“No one can serve two masters: either he will hate
one and love the other, or he will put
up with one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and greed’s
demon of riches [mammon].
“That is why I tell you, do
not trouble your heart about what you will eat and drink or with what you will
clothe your body. Is not life more important than food, and the body more
important than clothing? Look at the birds in the sky: they do not plant, do
not harvest, and do not fill barns, and your heavenly Father still feeds them.
Are you not of more value than they? Can any of you, by being vastly concerned,
add one moment to the span of your life?
And why do you worry about
clothing? Study how the lilies of the field grow: they do not work, and they do
not spin cloth. But I am telling you that not even Solomon in all his glory was
ever arrayed as one of these. If that is how God clothes the wild grass of the
field, here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, will He not do much
more for you, o small in faith?
“So do not worry, saying, ‘What will we drink? What
will we wear?’ It is the nations who ask for all these things, and indeed, your
heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. Ask first for God’s
kingdom and its harmonious order, and these other things will be delivered to
you as well.
So do not worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow
can worry about itself. Today’s trouble is enough for today.
9th August/September Trinity
Matthew 6: 19-34
The time from St. Johnstide in June to Michaelmas at the end
of September is a time of being outward bound. It is traditionally the time for
vacations, for travel, for time outdoors in nature and with family. It is also
often the time when people move, to take on a new job, to start school. But even if nothing changes outwardly,
inwardly this is the time for the soul to tread a path; a time to open the
soul, to see and hear freshly, and on new levels. It is a time for the healing
our inner ills.
We can entertain thoughts that are healthy, or those that
are unhealthy. One unhealthy form of thinking is called, by those in the soul-work
field, fortunetelling. This is our human tendency to extrapolate, to project
what is happening today onto the future. It may well be naïve to assume that
since everything is fine today, it will be fine tomorrow as well. But it is
downright destructive to our mental and spiritual health to assume that since
today is troubling, I have to worry and stress about tomorrow's troubles, and
the next day’s, and the next as well.
Such unhealthy thinking is based on an untrue
assumption—that I can already know what the future will bring. And it is
supported by another sneaking suspicion—that I won’t be able to handle what the
future brings without continuous rehearsals for supposed disasters.
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| Corrie Ten Boom |
Corrie Ten Boom[1],
whose family harbored Jews in Holland
during the War, tells the story her own father used, to illustrate the wisdom
of staying in the now, in the moment. When as a young girl she began to stress
about the future, her father asked her to recall their train trips together. 'When do I give you your ticket?' he asked. 'When the train pulls into the
station,' she replied. 'Indeed. I don’t give you your ticket when the train is
still miles away. I give it to you when you need it, when the train arrives.
When you worry, it is as though you grab your ticket long before the train is
due, and run miles up the track to try to catch it before it arrives. God will
give you your ticket for the future when the future arrives.'
We can be sure that we will meet the future with ripened
capacities, especially if we can concentrate our efforts at solving today’s
troubles, doing today what we can do today. For no pit is too deep that the
love of God is not deeper still.
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[1]
Corrie Ten Boom, Her Story, (The Hiding Place
