I have another blog, a private one, called Serendipitous Intersections, which features one post every day of the year. The gist of the blog is, it's a melding of three other 365-day "devotionals", one the famous work of Oswald Chambers and two others containing the work of George MacDonald. What I do is, I juxtapose the daily readings, usually in excerpt form but sometimes in whole, from the three sources and then add a heading of my own intended to unite them in a single concept or angle. Here in Armenia
(Based on my August 22nd post in Serendipitous Intersections: "Life on the margin, where there's no 'what's next' but for the next touch of the chisel"-- which is itself based on the August 22nd readings in "My Utmost for His Highest" [Chambers], "Diary of an Old Soul" [MacDonald], and reading #235 "365 Daily Readings from George MacDonald", [MacDonald, edited by C.S. Lewis].)
Read Matthew 3:11
“I
indeed baptize you with water… but… He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost
and fire.” [OC]
John the Baptist lived for “What’s Next” in
the vivid, pulsating, perpetually unfolding work of God. Every moment in
the poignantly brief account of his life is one of expectation. John goes out to the desert expecting to encounter the will of the living God there; he begins
to proclaim the arrival of the kingdom, expecting
a great movement of God’s power among the people; he baptizes them with the
baptism-of-repentance, expecting a
Greater One to come and pour out the Spirit of God; and in awe and wonder he
baptizes The Lamb of God Who Takes Away the Sins of the World, expecting Him to increase and himself,
John, to decrease.
Every expectation was an openness to the blow of the
Master Sculptor’s chisel [Mc]; every blow of the chisel was God’s work, not only for the saving of the world but
for the personal life-experience of one real man we call John the Baptist. Every
blow of God’s hammer and chisel
became an eternal aspect of John’s
unique story—the story that is understood from the inside by only two: John
and his God.
And so it is with every one of us. James in
his epistle says, “Let patience have its perfect work.” The least thing James means is that we
should know how to wait for anything
to happen; far more, the patience to
be perfected is the kind that shows as persistent openness in the midst of all the things that keep happening, openness to the pervasive divine will in which
patience is anchored. George MacDonald writes, “Statue under the chisel of the sculptor, stand ready to the blows of
his mallet. Clay on the wheel, let the fingers of the divine potter model you
at their will.” [Mc]
Everything God wants to do in your life, to do
through you, is for reasons and goals
that are bigger than you are; it is for others,
perhaps countless others you’ll never know in this life, and it is for His Own supreme glory. But the magnificent
paradox is, at the same time, everything God will do through you is for you, for your singular, inner, inviolably personal knowledge, contemplation and
glorying… in the sacrosanct, unrepeatable bond of one soul and its
Maker-Redeemer forever.
John
says “I indeed...;” yes, I myself am certainly doing this now… I baptize you with water, but… when He shall come…. [OC] What about us? We are
all doing something now, but when He shall come, when He shall move, when He shall strike the hammer to
chisel to soul, will we yield to the blow or will we clutch and cling to what “I am doing now,” forgetting the work has
always been His and that to make it ours is to make it nothing? You need perpetually—without
ever a let-up or break—to embrace
what He is doing and “What’s Next”, because He is making your life. He is making you part of something infinitely
greater than you are— for you!
For the whole creation around you! For Himself and His endless joy—the joy of
the living God!
“I indeed, but He….”
“Let patience have her perfect work….”
Live on the edge of "What's Next" in the perpetual unfolding of God's life and will in you and His world.
Live on the edge of "What's Next" in the perpetual unfolding of God's life and will in you and His world.
