Atonement
Stories
Object:
Contents
A Story to Live By: "Atonement"
Vision Stories: "A Deep Peace" by Jodie & Georgia Hunt
Good Stories: "Favor with God" by John Sumwalt
Scrap Pile: "Promises to Keep" by John Sumwalt
A Story to Live By
Atonement
Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
Hebrews 10:19-22
Caroline Myss gives a unique perspective on atonement in her new book Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential. Commenting on the Garden of Gethsemane story in Luke 22:39-44 where Jesus, in an agonized prayer, asks the Father to "remove this cup from me, but not my will but yours be done," she writes:
This passage is a jewel in the crown of our connection to divine power and soul clarity. Jesus openly stated in his prayers that he did not want to do what was being requested of him. In my terminology, he asked for a way out of that part of his Contract that he had to endure "by necessity." Jesus received help and comfort in the form of an angel, but nonetheless he was not released from completing his life's calling. He surrendered his will to the Divine, uttering a phrase that has since become the central Christian mantra: "Thy will be done." Without asking why, having lived a life of love and service, having now to suffer a gruesome death, Jesus accepted his lot. His prayer was a declaration of supreme trust in the wisdom of the Divine, consciously giving up authority to direct the dynamics of his life... Jesus modeled the archetypal ritual of surrendering all that we are to the Divine. He showed that we are here to serve divine wisdom, as opposed to divine wisdom serving us.
(Caroline Myss, Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002, pp. 91-92.)
Vision Stories
A Deep Peace
by Jodie & Georgia Hunt
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.
Hebrews 10:23
My father died suddenly at the age of 58, while he was on business in Canada. I felt badly that my siblings and I had not had a chance to say good-bye, and it troubled me very deeply that he died alone, without family and friends around him. We were all very close to him. One day I was vacuuming and I smelled pipe tobacco very strongly (my father was a pipe smoker), so strongly that it stopped me short. I had to stop and look around and see. I realized he came to tell me it was okay, and that I could let go. I felt a deep peace after that.
About a week later, I received the following note from my daughter Georgia, as a P.S. in a birthday card. I had not told her about my experience:
Dear Mom,
I know that you wish your father could still be here with you. I know you will always have his presence in your heart. I truly believe that he is here with us in spirit. Last night, I went downstairs to find a picture of a daffodil in the encyclopedia, and I felt a strong presence with me. I looked around to see if you or Dad had come downstairs, because I thought for sure someone was around. But I didn't see anyone. I got this strange, overpowering feeling in my heart -- and for a few minutes I felt so content and safe. The strange thing is, I smelled pipe tobacco. It's weird how much I had forgotten that wonderful smell. Well, anyway, I knew that Grandpa's spirit was in that room with me. I thought of you, and tears came to my eyes. I thought I should share this whole thing with you. You are as special to me as your father is to you.
Jodie Hunt is Church Administrator and a longtime member of Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Jodie and her husband, Jeff, have two grown children, Georgia and Aaron. Georgia attends Montana State University and enjoys skiing and hiking.
Good Stories
Favor with God
by John Sumwalt
"Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time." Then Eli answered, "Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him." And she said, "Let your servant find favor in your sight." Then the woman went to her quarters, ate and drank with her husband, and her countenance was sad no longer.
1 Samuel 1:16-18
Ruth David had always been her father's favorite. It may have been because she was disliked by everyone else, both inside and outside the family. Ruth was big-boned and heavy, ungainly in every way. She had a lumbering gait and a get-out-of-my-way attitude. To have called Ruth boisterous would have been an understatement. She was bossy and rough with children, even though she fancied herself a good babysitter and had once taught Sunday School at the Congregational Church. Ruth was infamous for her screaming tantrums, which occurred whenever she didn't get her own way. She once stopped play at a basketball game because her mother refused to buy her a second soda. The school psychologist said Ruth was slow: developmentally disabled was the official term. Everybody translated that as mentally retarded. It provided an explanation for some of Ruth's behavior, but it didn't help people like her any better.
Ruth dropped out of school in the tenth grade, the same year her mother and father divorced. She went to live with her father in the trailer court on the edge of town. Ruth's mother got the house and the four younger children. Ruth was glad to get away from that part of her family. She had never felt like she belonged with them.
Matt David was glad to take Ruth. He found her behavior difficult, but he was utterly devoted to her. She reminded him of his mother, who had also been known as a disagreeable person. Ruth had her grandmother's sparkling blue eyes and captivating smile, which, though rarely seen, could melt your heart when it appeared.
All went well with Ruth and Matt until just after Ruth's 19th birthday. She started running around with older men and staying out all hours of the night. Matt arranged for birth control pills and reminded Ruth to take them, but sometimes she forgot or refused. The inevitable happened in mid-summer. Matt noticed that Ruth appeared to be heavier than usual. He took her to the clinic and the doctor confirmed that she was four months pregnant. What was worse, a blood test revealed that she had been infected with the HIV virus. Medications were started immediately, and when the baby was born he was declared to be free of HIV. The doctors called it a miracle. It was the first of many signs that this was a most extraordinary baby.
Ruth proved to be a surprisingly good mother. She was tender with her own child, spent all of her time with him, and gave him everything a child could need. Matt watched over them, doting on both his grandson and his daughter.
Jacob David, unlike his mother, was exceedingly bright. Matt noticed early on that he developed at a more rapid rate than any of his own children had. Jacob was talking in complete sentences at the age of two and reading before he was five. In kindergarten, he was assigned to the gifted and talented program, and in first grade he was so far ahead of the rest of the class that they had to arrange for a special tutor. The next year he was skipped ahead two grades, and when he was eight he started doing high school level work.
Socially, Jacob didn't fare as well. The older boys called him "son of retard" and the B word. There were taunts of "Your mother is a whore... and where is your Daddy?" Jacob often came home with bruises after fights with schoolyard bullies twice his size. "Hold your head up high," his grandfather told him. "You are a child of God. That is all anyone needs to know."
Ruth succumbed to AIDS on Jacob's ninth birthday. She had been trying to hold on until the party and had supervised the baking of his cake the day before. Matt was devastated. Jacob seemed to take it in stride. He had been preparing himself for years. Jacob had studied the HIV virus, understood what was coming, and explained it all to Ruth in terms she could understand. This was the beginning of what was to become Jacob's life work.
Thirty years later, Professor Jacob Benjamin David helped his 80-year-old grandfather onto a stage in the faraway city of Oslo, where both of them were presented to the King and Queen of Norway. Dr. David then stepped to the center of the stage to accept the Nobel Prize for medicine. He had discovered a vaccine for inoculation against the AIDS virus.
When it came his turn to speak, Dr. David held up the coveted prize and said, "This is for my mother, Ruth David. I wish she could be here this day to see what God has done."
**************
Author's Note: This story was written on the day that Dr. Jonas Salk died and is dedicated to his memory. Jonas Edward Salk was born in the Bronx, New York, on October 28, 1914, the son of a garment worker. In 1955, at the age of 40, Dr. Salk discovered a safe and effective polio vaccine. In 1952, 58,000 cases of polio were reported in the United States in an epidemic that claimed 3,000 lives that year. Dr. Salk's vaccine was a turning point in the battle against polio. He was at work on a vaccine to prevent AIDS at the time of his death, June 23, 1995.
Scrap Pile
Promises to Keep
by John Sumwalt
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Hebrews 10:23-25
The words of Robert Frost's immortal poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" have been running through my mind this week as I have contemplated these words from Hebrews:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
We are not to know what promises the poet had to keep, only of his intention to keep them. That in itself is a noble thing in an age when so many promises are made and not kept.
We are, all of us, who we are in large part as a result of promises kept and promises unkept.
Sometime in the spring of 1951, my parents, Leonard and Bernice Sumwalt, stood before the congregation of the Loyd Evangelical United Brethren Church and made a promise that has had a profound effect on my life. Our pastor at that time, Miss Sarah Mower, said to them:
"Do you therefore accept as your bounden duty and privilege to live before this child [that was me] a life that becomes the Gospel; to exercise all godly care that he be brought up in the Christian faith, that he be taught the Holy Scriptures, and that he learn to give reverent attendance upon the private and public worship of God?"
They said, "We do," and they did.
Many of you here today are who you are in part because you had parents or grandparents who made a promise like that.
I remind every couple who comes to my office in preparation for the baptism of their child that they will be making a promise before God, before the congregation and their child, to raise him or her in a family that lives the Gospel, that they will teach their child what it means to follow the teachings of Jesus and that they will bring him or her to worship every Sunday -- as an infant, as a toddler, as a preschooler -- until they are old enough to make this promise for themselves on the day of their confirmation. (Yes, infants can appreciate the atmosphere of worship: the music, the songs, the prayers, the movement of the Holy Spirit. Infants and small children have a keen sense of the holy.)
After 25 years of pastoring, I have learned to be very specific in these instructions.
I charge every couple at whose wedding I officiate to give back to their families, their communities, and their church some of the blessing God has given to them.
I have learned that it is necessary to say clearly at the beginning of pre-wedding counseling that the church is not just a nice place to have a wedding, that those who choose to marry in the Christian community should be regular worshipers and regularly share in the ministry of a Christian community.
In every new member orientation class we prepare prospective members to make the promise that all of us in the United Methodist movement have made at one time. We ask them to respond to the question: "Will you be loyal to the United Methodist Church and uphold it by your prayers, your presence, your gifts, and your service?" Those who can say, "I will," become members of the church. The rest of us promise to help them keep this promise by agreeing to do all in our power to "increase their faith, confirm their hope, and perfect them in love." (The United Methodist Hymnal, p. 48)
In spite of the sacred promises made when we are baptized, and when we become members of the church, many of us break these vows routinely without much thought. One pastor in Milwaukee did a study of worship patterns in his congregation and found that few people are regular attenders in worship. Most people come one week and are absent two or attend two Sundays and then miss worship the next three Sundays. We have not done such a study in our congregation, but if we did I expect the results would be similar. We may think of ourselves as regular worship attenders, but the truth is that there are not many among us who are present in worship every Sunday. There are vacations, ballgames, out-of-town guests, family gatherings, hobby shows, weekends at the cottage, work that must be done, the Sunday mornings when we are just too tired to get up, and many other things that keep us from being faithful to our promise.
None of this is said to lay a guilt trip or to bring judgment. Please don't come to me and explain why you were absent last Sunday or why you can't be here next week. You don't have to convince me that you have a good excuse. I make the same kinds of "good" excuses. I am going to be very understanding. Talk to the one to whom you made the promise.
God knows when we have done our best to keep our promises, and God knows when we are kidding ourselves... when our broken promises have gotten us into deep trouble.
Consider this next time you stop by a woods on a snowy evening -- when you are tired and hurting, when you don't know how you can go on. The snow looks so lovely. Sometimes we would just like to lay down in it and go to sleep.
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep..." The "but" makes all the difference. The "but" saves us, saves our marriages, saves our jobs, saves our friendships, saves our lives again and again -- when we remember the "but." This is what the author of Hebrews was trying to help us remember:
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
(Hebrews 10:23-25)
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Excerpts from a sermon preached at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 2, 1997.
StoryShare, November 16, 2003, issue.
Copyright 2003 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
A Story to Live By: "Atonement"
Vision Stories: "A Deep Peace" by Jodie & Georgia Hunt
Good Stories: "Favor with God" by John Sumwalt
Scrap Pile: "Promises to Keep" by John Sumwalt
A Story to Live By
Atonement
Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
Hebrews 10:19-22
Caroline Myss gives a unique perspective on atonement in her new book Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential. Commenting on the Garden of Gethsemane story in Luke 22:39-44 where Jesus, in an agonized prayer, asks the Father to "remove this cup from me, but not my will but yours be done," she writes:
This passage is a jewel in the crown of our connection to divine power and soul clarity. Jesus openly stated in his prayers that he did not want to do what was being requested of him. In my terminology, he asked for a way out of that part of his Contract that he had to endure "by necessity." Jesus received help and comfort in the form of an angel, but nonetheless he was not released from completing his life's calling. He surrendered his will to the Divine, uttering a phrase that has since become the central Christian mantra: "Thy will be done." Without asking why, having lived a life of love and service, having now to suffer a gruesome death, Jesus accepted his lot. His prayer was a declaration of supreme trust in the wisdom of the Divine, consciously giving up authority to direct the dynamics of his life... Jesus modeled the archetypal ritual of surrendering all that we are to the Divine. He showed that we are here to serve divine wisdom, as opposed to divine wisdom serving us.
(Caroline Myss, Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002, pp. 91-92.)
Vision Stories
A Deep Peace
by Jodie & Georgia Hunt
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.
Hebrews 10:23
My father died suddenly at the age of 58, while he was on business in Canada. I felt badly that my siblings and I had not had a chance to say good-bye, and it troubled me very deeply that he died alone, without family and friends around him. We were all very close to him. One day I was vacuuming and I smelled pipe tobacco very strongly (my father was a pipe smoker), so strongly that it stopped me short. I had to stop and look around and see. I realized he came to tell me it was okay, and that I could let go. I felt a deep peace after that.
About a week later, I received the following note from my daughter Georgia, as a P.S. in a birthday card. I had not told her about my experience:
Dear Mom,
I know that you wish your father could still be here with you. I know you will always have his presence in your heart. I truly believe that he is here with us in spirit. Last night, I went downstairs to find a picture of a daffodil in the encyclopedia, and I felt a strong presence with me. I looked around to see if you or Dad had come downstairs, because I thought for sure someone was around. But I didn't see anyone. I got this strange, overpowering feeling in my heart -- and for a few minutes I felt so content and safe. The strange thing is, I smelled pipe tobacco. It's weird how much I had forgotten that wonderful smell. Well, anyway, I knew that Grandpa's spirit was in that room with me. I thought of you, and tears came to my eyes. I thought I should share this whole thing with you. You are as special to me as your father is to you.
Jodie Hunt is Church Administrator and a longtime member of Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Jodie and her husband, Jeff, have two grown children, Georgia and Aaron. Georgia attends Montana State University and enjoys skiing and hiking.
Good Stories
Favor with God
by John Sumwalt
"Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time." Then Eli answered, "Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him." And she said, "Let your servant find favor in your sight." Then the woman went to her quarters, ate and drank with her husband, and her countenance was sad no longer.
1 Samuel 1:16-18
Ruth David had always been her father's favorite. It may have been because she was disliked by everyone else, both inside and outside the family. Ruth was big-boned and heavy, ungainly in every way. She had a lumbering gait and a get-out-of-my-way attitude. To have called Ruth boisterous would have been an understatement. She was bossy and rough with children, even though she fancied herself a good babysitter and had once taught Sunday School at the Congregational Church. Ruth was infamous for her screaming tantrums, which occurred whenever she didn't get her own way. She once stopped play at a basketball game because her mother refused to buy her a second soda. The school psychologist said Ruth was slow: developmentally disabled was the official term. Everybody translated that as mentally retarded. It provided an explanation for some of Ruth's behavior, but it didn't help people like her any better.
Ruth dropped out of school in the tenth grade, the same year her mother and father divorced. She went to live with her father in the trailer court on the edge of town. Ruth's mother got the house and the four younger children. Ruth was glad to get away from that part of her family. She had never felt like she belonged with them.
Matt David was glad to take Ruth. He found her behavior difficult, but he was utterly devoted to her. She reminded him of his mother, who had also been known as a disagreeable person. Ruth had her grandmother's sparkling blue eyes and captivating smile, which, though rarely seen, could melt your heart when it appeared.
All went well with Ruth and Matt until just after Ruth's 19th birthday. She started running around with older men and staying out all hours of the night. Matt arranged for birth control pills and reminded Ruth to take them, but sometimes she forgot or refused. The inevitable happened in mid-summer. Matt noticed that Ruth appeared to be heavier than usual. He took her to the clinic and the doctor confirmed that she was four months pregnant. What was worse, a blood test revealed that she had been infected with the HIV virus. Medications were started immediately, and when the baby was born he was declared to be free of HIV. The doctors called it a miracle. It was the first of many signs that this was a most extraordinary baby.
Ruth proved to be a surprisingly good mother. She was tender with her own child, spent all of her time with him, and gave him everything a child could need. Matt watched over them, doting on both his grandson and his daughter.
Jacob David, unlike his mother, was exceedingly bright. Matt noticed early on that he developed at a more rapid rate than any of his own children had. Jacob was talking in complete sentences at the age of two and reading before he was five. In kindergarten, he was assigned to the gifted and talented program, and in first grade he was so far ahead of the rest of the class that they had to arrange for a special tutor. The next year he was skipped ahead two grades, and when he was eight he started doing high school level work.
Socially, Jacob didn't fare as well. The older boys called him "son of retard" and the B word. There were taunts of "Your mother is a whore... and where is your Daddy?" Jacob often came home with bruises after fights with schoolyard bullies twice his size. "Hold your head up high," his grandfather told him. "You are a child of God. That is all anyone needs to know."
Ruth succumbed to AIDS on Jacob's ninth birthday. She had been trying to hold on until the party and had supervised the baking of his cake the day before. Matt was devastated. Jacob seemed to take it in stride. He had been preparing himself for years. Jacob had studied the HIV virus, understood what was coming, and explained it all to Ruth in terms she could understand. This was the beginning of what was to become Jacob's life work.
Thirty years later, Professor Jacob Benjamin David helped his 80-year-old grandfather onto a stage in the faraway city of Oslo, where both of them were presented to the King and Queen of Norway. Dr. David then stepped to the center of the stage to accept the Nobel Prize for medicine. He had discovered a vaccine for inoculation against the AIDS virus.
When it came his turn to speak, Dr. David held up the coveted prize and said, "This is for my mother, Ruth David. I wish she could be here this day to see what God has done."
**************
Author's Note: This story was written on the day that Dr. Jonas Salk died and is dedicated to his memory. Jonas Edward Salk was born in the Bronx, New York, on October 28, 1914, the son of a garment worker. In 1955, at the age of 40, Dr. Salk discovered a safe and effective polio vaccine. In 1952, 58,000 cases of polio were reported in the United States in an epidemic that claimed 3,000 lives that year. Dr. Salk's vaccine was a turning point in the battle against polio. He was at work on a vaccine to prevent AIDS at the time of his death, June 23, 1995.
Scrap Pile
Promises to Keep
by John Sumwalt
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Hebrews 10:23-25
The words of Robert Frost's immortal poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" have been running through my mind this week as I have contemplated these words from Hebrews:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
We are not to know what promises the poet had to keep, only of his intention to keep them. That in itself is a noble thing in an age when so many promises are made and not kept.
We are, all of us, who we are in large part as a result of promises kept and promises unkept.
Sometime in the spring of 1951, my parents, Leonard and Bernice Sumwalt, stood before the congregation of the Loyd Evangelical United Brethren Church and made a promise that has had a profound effect on my life. Our pastor at that time, Miss Sarah Mower, said to them:
"Do you therefore accept as your bounden duty and privilege to live before this child [that was me] a life that becomes the Gospel; to exercise all godly care that he be brought up in the Christian faith, that he be taught the Holy Scriptures, and that he learn to give reverent attendance upon the private and public worship of God?"
They said, "We do," and they did.
Many of you here today are who you are in part because you had parents or grandparents who made a promise like that.
I remind every couple who comes to my office in preparation for the baptism of their child that they will be making a promise before God, before the congregation and their child, to raise him or her in a family that lives the Gospel, that they will teach their child what it means to follow the teachings of Jesus and that they will bring him or her to worship every Sunday -- as an infant, as a toddler, as a preschooler -- until they are old enough to make this promise for themselves on the day of their confirmation. (Yes, infants can appreciate the atmosphere of worship: the music, the songs, the prayers, the movement of the Holy Spirit. Infants and small children have a keen sense of the holy.)
After 25 years of pastoring, I have learned to be very specific in these instructions.
I charge every couple at whose wedding I officiate to give back to their families, their communities, and their church some of the blessing God has given to them.
I have learned that it is necessary to say clearly at the beginning of pre-wedding counseling that the church is not just a nice place to have a wedding, that those who choose to marry in the Christian community should be regular worshipers and regularly share in the ministry of a Christian community.
In every new member orientation class we prepare prospective members to make the promise that all of us in the United Methodist movement have made at one time. We ask them to respond to the question: "Will you be loyal to the United Methodist Church and uphold it by your prayers, your presence, your gifts, and your service?" Those who can say, "I will," become members of the church. The rest of us promise to help them keep this promise by agreeing to do all in our power to "increase their faith, confirm their hope, and perfect them in love." (The United Methodist Hymnal, p. 48)
In spite of the sacred promises made when we are baptized, and when we become members of the church, many of us break these vows routinely without much thought. One pastor in Milwaukee did a study of worship patterns in his congregation and found that few people are regular attenders in worship. Most people come one week and are absent two or attend two Sundays and then miss worship the next three Sundays. We have not done such a study in our congregation, but if we did I expect the results would be similar. We may think of ourselves as regular worship attenders, but the truth is that there are not many among us who are present in worship every Sunday. There are vacations, ballgames, out-of-town guests, family gatherings, hobby shows, weekends at the cottage, work that must be done, the Sunday mornings when we are just too tired to get up, and many other things that keep us from being faithful to our promise.
None of this is said to lay a guilt trip or to bring judgment. Please don't come to me and explain why you were absent last Sunday or why you can't be here next week. You don't have to convince me that you have a good excuse. I make the same kinds of "good" excuses. I am going to be very understanding. Talk to the one to whom you made the promise.
God knows when we have done our best to keep our promises, and God knows when we are kidding ourselves... when our broken promises have gotten us into deep trouble.
Consider this next time you stop by a woods on a snowy evening -- when you are tired and hurting, when you don't know how you can go on. The snow looks so lovely. Sometimes we would just like to lay down in it and go to sleep.
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep..." The "but" makes all the difference. The "but" saves us, saves our marriages, saves our jobs, saves our friendships, saves our lives again and again -- when we remember the "but." This is what the author of Hebrews was trying to help us remember:
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
(Hebrews 10:23-25)
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Excerpts from a sermon preached at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 2, 1997.
StoryShare, November 16, 2003, issue.
Copyright 2003 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
