E&W 3-16-14

Sacred Story

Encouragements & Wisdom: March 16, 2014

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Encouragements and Wisdom: March 16, 2014 (PDF).

E & W reflections are additional helps for your Sacred Story prayer journey. Reflect on them at week’s beginning or outside of your 15-minute prayer periods.

The Affirmations

Everyone has been mortally wounded spiritually, psychologically, and physically by Original Sin and the loss of paradise.

We do well to reflect often on God’s gifts. God gifted us “originally” with immortality. We were created to share everlastingly in God’s love, the love of each other and the amazing cosmos. How we could have turned from God and rejected the gift is captured in the tragic phrase: the mystery of iniquity.

The spiritual choice to turn away from God’s pure love to the love of self is what we call the original sin. The gift of immortality was replaced by the “new normal:” fractured consciousness, broken hearts, violence, murder, depression, disease and death.

The perfect relationship between body, mind and spirit was made possible by our free choice to be fully united with God. When we turned away, all that made us immortal was fatally destabilized. The Affirmation states that we have all been mortally wounded—spiritually, psychologically and physically. We might reflect on the perfect relationship between these three integral dimensions of the human person as the locus of this mortal wound. For sin ultimately destroys relationships. Sin attacks the heart of God’s gift—perfect relationship and perfect love.

Only God, in Christ, can restore what was lost. And so, in Love, Christ enters into the history of the world’s brokenness to undo what was done. We must admit the full truth of what was lost if we are to ever fully turn to the source of our salvation.

Lord Jesus Christ, help me to know and honestly admit my brokenness and the loss of my original immortality so that I can turn to you with all my heart and awaken anew through your love and grace to
Creation, Presence, Memory, Mercy and Eternity.

Instruct me, O LORD, in the way of your statutes,
that I may exactly observe them.
Give me discernment, that I may observe your law
and keep it with all my heart.

(Psalm 119: 33-34)

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