Thursday of the First Week of Ordinary Time

January 14, 2021

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 95. It’s a very popular psalm and we have prayed with it several times.

Today, Paul quotes it in his letter to the Hebrews, following up with this warning:

Take care, brothers and sisters,
that none of you may have an evil and unfaithful heart,
so as to forsake the living God.

Hebrews 3:12

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Our psalm suggests that God was pretty fed up with the hard-heartedness of the folks following Moses through the desert.

Forty years I was wearied of that generation;
    I said: “This people’s heart goes astray,
    they do not know my ways.”
Therefore I swore in my anger:
    “They shall never enter my rest.”

Psalm 95: 10-11

Praying with these thoughts, we might ask ourselves where our own hard-heartedness lies. Though some of my readers may be perfect 😉, I’m not – and there may be a few of you like me. I have been, and still am sometimes, a chilly heart, an indifferent heart, an arrogant heart, even a vengeful heart.

We are even, at times, resistant to God as God is revealed in our life challenges.

Our psalm invites us, as both Paul and the psalmist invited their people, to humbly trust God’s ability to soften our hearts – even through what we may perceive as a desert.

We are asked to yield to God and let God’s mysterious grace blossom in us.

Come, let us bow down in worship;
    let us kneel before the LORD who made us.
For this is our God,
    and we are the people God shepherds and guides.

Psalm 95: 6-7

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Poetry: Listen – Paul J. Willis

A lake lies all alone in its own shape. 
It’s not going anywhere. 
A lake can wait a long time 
for a hiker to come 
and camp on its shore. 
It will reflect the moonlight, 
give him a drink of pale silver. 
Toward dawn, the wind might ruffle 
it a little, and the water 
will have words with the granite. 
Once the hiker goes away 
through October meadows, 
the lake will sparkle by itself. 
You’ll never see it. There is
so much you will never see.

Music: Tender Hearted – Jeanne Cotter