Just as our bodies have many parts and each part has a special function, so it is with Christ’s body. We are many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other. Rom 12:4-5 (NLT)
Island Man – Part 2
Go to PART 1
The following is a quote from “The Hungering Dark” by Frederick Buechner.
“In this sense every man is an island separated from every other man by fathoms of distrust and duplicity. Part of what it means to be is to be you and not me, between us the sea that we can never entirely cross even when we would. “My brethren are wholly estranged from me,” Job cries out. “I have become an alien in their eyes.”
The paradox is that part of what binds us closest together as human beings and makes it true that no man is an island is the knowledge that in another way every man is an island. Because to know this is to know that not only deep in you is there a self that longs above all to be known and accepted, but that there is also such a self in me, in everyone else the world over. So when we meet as strangers, when even friends look like strangers, it is good to remember that we need each other greatly you and I, more than much of the time we dare to imagine, more than most of the time we dare to admit.
Island calls to island across the silence, and once, in trust, the real words come, a bridge is built and love is done – not sentimental, emotional love, but love that is pontifex, bridge-builder. Love that speaks the holy and healing word which is: God be with you, stranger who are no stranger. I wish you well. The islands become an archipelago, a continent, become a kingdom whose name is the Kingdom of God.
Prayer:
Father and Lord,
Most near and most far, listen to our silence before thee as well as to our prayers, because often it is the silence that speaks better of our need. Speak thy joy into our silence. Breathe thy life into our less than life, not for our own sakes only but for the sake of those to whom, with thy life in us, we may ourselves bring life.
Much as we wish, not one of us can bring back yesterday or shape tomorrow. Only today is ours, and it will not be ours for long, and once it is gone it will never in all time be ours again. Thou only knowest what it holds in store for us, yet even we know something of what it will hold. The chance to speak the truth, to show mercy, to ease another's burden. The chance to resist evil, to remember all the good times and the good people of our past, to be brave, to be strong, to be glad. We know that today as every day our lives will be touched by thee and that one way or another thou wilt speak to us before we sleep, for the very moments themselves of our lives are thy words to us. Give us ears to hear thee speak.
Give us hearts to quicken as thou drawest near.
Amen.
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