And they are asking this of someone who finds it endlessly mysterious.

I spent my lunch hour perched on a rock by the river, a book open in my lap.  But I alternated between the lazy scrolling of words on the page and the black butterflies drifting through the kudzu.  Leaf-shaped, silver-sided fish glinted along the fallen logs in the shallows below me.  Three turtles scrambled up on a half-submerged tree, and I spent a lot of time watching their backs dry in the sun.  A secretive rustling in the leaves at my feet eventually materialized into a long, blue-tailed lizard who clawed delicately over a neighboring rock.

I was struck by how still everything was - almost as if the river absorbed unnecessary sounds and swirled them off downstream.  Even the traffic up the hill from me was hushed.  It was a beautiful christening of the first day of autumn, a cool drink of the peace I crave, a tree-filtered sunshine afternoon.

**Headline taken from Ann Beattie's essay, "Melancholy and the Muse" in Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression, by Nell Casey (2003).

You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.

We are apt to forget that a man is not only committed to Jesus Christ for salvation; he is committed to Jesus Christ's view of God, of the world, of sin and of the devil, and this will mean that he must recognize the responsibility of being transformed by the renewing of his mind. (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, Sept. 9, via StudyLight.org)

Oswald says a lot of times Christians look on other Christians and criticize them for being slow or inactive when in reality the slow ones have taken every thought, every action captive and move only in the will of God.  If our impulsive desire is to serve God, that’s good, but it’s to be caught and questioned – since when has human nature instinctively turned to God?  No, that’s the beauty of Christianity – we use our strong human nature to bend itself to a pattern of seeking God first; by the spiritual, we overcome the natural.

The tendency to-day is to put the emphasis on service. Beware of the people who make usefulness their ground of appeal. If you make usefulness the test, then Jesus Christ was the greatest failure that ever lived. The lodestar of the saint is God Him self, not estimated usefulness. It is the work that God does through us that counts, not what we do for Him. All that Our Lord heeds in a man's life is the relationship of worth to His Father. Jesus is bringing many sons to glory.  (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, Aug. 30)

How often am I distracted by the call to action in Scripture and find that I’ve overlooked the relationship?  And again, I am more concerned with what Jesus did for me than for the standing of my relationship with Him – I see “bringing” and “glory” and miss “sons.”  In our minds, it is somehow easier to earn our way to heaven (and to God’s heart) by acts of service than it is to exist in relationship with Him.