“Although we have been made to believe that if we let go we will end up with nothing, life reveals just the opposite: that letting go is the real path to freedom.”
Sogyal Rinpoche
“But the spiritual truth that leads to freedom is the truth that we belong not to the world but to God, whose beloved children we are. By living lives in which we keep returning to that truth in word and deed, we will gradually grow into our true freedom.”
Henri Nouwen
Henri Nouwen
”Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.”
Charles Spurgeon
“In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have, cannot be my disciples.”
Luke 14:33
My Prayer today is for freedom. Real freedom is to be released from our chains. The chains that often only God can truly see, and which we often don’t ask for release from, except for those times we might feel their chaff. And then we read verses, like ‘anyone who wants to be my disciple must love me far more than he does his own father, mother, wife, children… ‘; ‘must sit down and count his blessing and renounce them all for me’. We are to, ‘sell’ all we have to have ‘treasure’ in heaven’ and then we are asked to ‘follow him’. I noted that many of these verses started with a giving up of something (like our ‘life’), denying of something, leaving something, releasing something and then, following him. As though these things otherwise would weigh us down, or redirect our affections or our energy, or would replace God on the throne in our lives. I think if you and I were honest, we can say that they do. And if we were truly honest, we would say that we are sometimes adhered more to things of this world than to God. We can’t have both, and as I continued to read flicking from page to page, God showed me the picture of a marriage, ‘So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” If our relationship with God, is a covenant relationship the same as marriage, we are either adhered to each other, or we are divided. When his desire is for us to be one, then there is no room for another. There is no in-between. We cannot follow him, and stay put. We cannot hold on to things and build treasure in heaven. We are not to let any ‘thing’ or any ‘one’ come between us. My prayer for us today is the daily giving up that he calls us to. So that just as we turn to our husband or wife when we wake, we might turn again to God each day as though he were the only one.
These are drawn from daily prayers and reflections I write for my Chaplaincy colleagues.
Living Tree Poetry 