Daily Grace
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
The One Thing You Cannot See
Because at some point, if you stay in this long enough, you will not simply be the one who was wounded.
"Search me, O God, and know my heart." (Psalm 139:23)
There is a truth most of us would rather not write down. If you stay in the work of love long enough, you will not only be the one who was wounded. You will be the one who did the wounding. You will say the thing that lands wrong and lands hard. You will be tired and short with somebody who came to you at the worst possible moment for you and the most important moment for them. You will misjudge. You will defend yourself when you should have listened. You will protect your reputation at someone's expense and tell yourself it was for the good of the church.
And you will do it while genuinely believing you are one of the good ones. That is the part that should frighten us most. Not that we might fail, but that we might fail and never know. The wounds we inflict are almost always invisible to us, because we are standing inside our own good intentions, and intentions make a poor mirror.
Which is why the only prayer that actually makes a person safer is the one that hands the search over. Search me. Know my heart. Tell me what is in there. You will not find it on your own, because you are the one thing you cannot see. Do not pray only to be delivered from the people who wound you. Pray to be shown the places where you are the one doing it, and then thank God when he shows you, because a wound you can finally see is a wound you can finally stop inflicting.