CASCADES DAY 60 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. - I John 1:7-12 “We love because God first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are deceiving themselves; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” - I John 1:9-21 I nearly passed it by, but by Gods grace, my eye caught sight of it at the last moment. So I circled Pilgrim back to spend some time at the confluence of a mountain stream and my river. Tucked away behind some river oaks, up a ways in a momentary creek, lived a lovely cascade, a thin veil of a waterfall as a stream fell quite elegantly into the flow of the passing river. So beautiful!, I kept thinking, these last few moments of the journey of this mountain stream! Yet, when did the stream end and the river begin? And did the cascade belong to the stream or to the river? Or maybe, it was a life unto itself... or yet again ... maybe this little waterfall made one ... the stream and the river. When one lives contemplatively for awhile - for good or bad - one begins to think of such things! I wonder if we ought to think of the Christian life of Love in terms of a cascade. John speaks of Love in a most intricate way. We love ... because God first loved us. Somehow either Love is a skill taught to us by God ... or in a different perspective, maybe Love is a commodity given to us by God. As I prayed midst the mist of that cascade, and listened prayerfully within its gentle music, I began to consider it yet another way... maybe John is saying that we learn of Gods Love by our experiencing it and sharing it ... our lives of Love becoming the cascade of heavenly grace into earthly realms ... and it is the cascading of Love that makes it Christian Love. Where does the Divine Love end and the Christian Love begin? Or are they one? Of course, when I speak of our experience of Gods Love, I am not referring to the constant reality of Gods Love. Gods loving us is not dependent - whatsoever - on our experiencing that love. It is simply in Gods character to be Loving. But even though in fact, God loves us ... that does not necessarily mean that we are self-aware of the experiencing Gods Love. Or to try to gain finer precision ... that we are opening both the inflow and the outflow of our lives to the human sensation of being loved by God. The founder of my particular Christian tradition, John Wesley, used the oft-quoted description of this experience of Divine Love... I knew I was loved by God when my heart was strangely warmed. And when we truly experience the Love of God, it teaches us a quality of Love that finds it vigor in its flowing through our lives in our willingness to actually go about the activity of loving of others. According to John, if we still hate someone (hate is the failure to love or the withdrawal of love) this reality provides clear evidence that our lives are not cascading with the Love that flows from heavenly realms into earthly places. But if we allow Divine Love to cascade through our own moments of living ... then the experience of Divine Love teaches us - and then, to some degree, the world about us - the means and processes of Love itself. My Loved Ones, more and more I have become to believe in the wondrous power of Divine Love, Humanly Expressed to patiently change the life of another soul and to subtly change the life of the world. Out of a million, misty droplets of a mountain stream giving itself in a final cascade of grace, a great river, a mighty, eternal river is formed. And such is the way of the cascading Love of God. Once it begins to flow ... it flows and flows and flows ... becoming something beautiful in its giving of itself ... becoming both something of God and something of the Human ... this cascading of Christian Love. Pax. Brother Anthony of the Cross (jim mcwhinnie) -- For the enhanced version of today devotional, click thesmokeofadistantfire.net/ Visit my poetry site, Willow Words, by clicking willowwordspoetry.wordpress . Also visit my new Psalter site for a reading of the Psalms thepsalmsbybrotheranthony.wordpress To learn the lessons of wisdom from Brother Timothy, Spiritual Adviser to Brother Anthony of the Cross, click ... https://facebook/media/set/?set=a.10203015704810846.1073741829.1151537005&type=1&l=3d06df5be6 Check out my latest venture ...Puppy Therapy/each picture has a caption and then to the right, the life lesson for the day... simply click on the first and then click the arrows ... https://facebook/media/set/?set=a.10202453064185182.1073741826.1151537005&type=1&l=77446bde05
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 18:19:48 +0000
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