Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 18
I love you, O LORD, my strength, O LORD, my rock, my fortress, my deliverer.
Psalm 18: 2-3
The psalm is almost a mirror reflection of 2 Samuel 22, and has been interpreted as a song that David sang throughout his life to praise God’s goodness to him.
Today the psalm connects several readings, which together give us:
a command
and a hint about how to fulfill that command.
Bottom line, our readings tell us this:
First, Love God
And, second, here’s where to find the God you desire to love.
If we trust the hint, and act on the command, we will be able to sing – like David – throughout our lives.
"You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Here is a beautiful poetic interpretation of Psalm 18:
I open my heart to you, O God
for you are my strength, my fortress,
the rock on whom I build my life.
I have been lost in my fears and my angers
caught up in falseness, fearful, and furious.
I cried to you in my anguish.
You have brought me to an open space.
You saved me because you took delight in me.
I try to be good, to be just, to be generous
to walk in your ways.
I fail, but you are my lamp.
You make my darkness bright
With your help, I continue to scale the walls
and break down the barriers that fragment me.
I would be whole, and happy, and wise
and know your love
Always.
~ Christine Robinson
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 122, one of my favorites.
I rejoiced when they said to me “Let us go to the house of the LORD And now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.
The year 1963 was a dynamic time in the Church. The landmark Second Vatican Council was reaching full steam.
Several changes resulted from the Council, including the renewal of consecrated life with a revised charism, ecumenical efforts towards dialogue with other religions, and the universal call to holiness which, according to Pope Paul VI, was “the most characteristic and ultimate purpose of the teachings of the Council”.
Wikipedia
Simultaneously, a love and engagement with sacred scripture was blossoming throughout the Church. International scholars were completing their response to Pius XII’s 1943 call, in the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, to translate scriptures from the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts. The incomparable Jerusalem Bible was the fruit of these endeavors. It had already been published in French, and was nearing its 1966 English publication.
One of these gifted Bible scholars was a French Jesuit priest, Joseph Gelineau. Gelineau was himself part of the working group for the French Jerusalem Bible, and he developed a revised version of that psalter which respected the rhythms of the Hebrew original.
In my senior year in high school, 1962-63, we were introduced to the Gelineau Psalms. That introduction came at a perfect time for me, as I discerned a call to religious life. In that discernment, Gelineau Psalm 122 became a central part of my prayer.
Jerusalem, built as a city with compact unity. To it the tribes go up, the tribes of the LORD.
I felt rising in me a passionate desire to find and engage my “Jerusalem”, that journey which would pattern my life on the life of Jesus.
The outlines of the journey, the distant vision of “Jerusalem”, were so surreal and indefinite. And yet they were compelling. I came to believe and trust that I would find my path to holiness, my Jerusalem, as a Sister of Mercy.
Like Jesus, I was given the grace and courage to “steadfastly set my face toward Jerusalem” ( Luke 9:51) And it has been an indescribably amazing journey ever since!
As Vatican II so beautifully stated in the document Lumen Gentium, chapter 5, we all share in the universal call to holiness. We all have our own path to that one, glorious Jerusalem.
I know these Documents of Vatican II are over a half century old. But they are priceless classics that I never tire of studying. Here are some passages that might enrich our prayer today as we each consider our own call and response to God.
Therefore in the Church, everyone whether belonging to the hierarchy, or being cared for by it, is called to holiness, according to the saying of the Apostle: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification” (I Thes. 4:3; df. Eph. 1:4).
The classes and duties of life are many, but holiness is one-that sanctity which is cultivated by all who are moved by the Spirit of God, and who obey the voice of the Father and worship God the Father in spirit and in truth. These people follow the poor Christ, the humble and cross-bearing Christ in order to be worthy of being sharers in His glory. Every person must walk unhesitatingly according to his or her own personal gifts and duties in the path of living faith, which arouses hope and works through charity.
Finally all Christ’s faithful, whatever be the conditions, duties and circumstances of their lives-and indeed through all these, will daily increase in holiness, if they receive all things with faith from the hand of their heavenly Father and if they cooperate with the divine will. In this temporal service, they will manifest to all humanity the love with which God loved the world.
Poem: The Neophyte – Alice Meynell
Who knows what days I answer for to-day:
Giving the bud I give the flower. I bow
This yet unfaded and a faded brow;
Bending these knees and feeble knees, I pray.
Thoughts yet unripe in me I bend one way,
Give one repose to pain I know not now,
One leaven to joy that comes, I guess not how.
I dedicate my fields when Spring is grey.
Oh, rash! (I smile) to pledge my hidden wheat.
I fold to-day at altars far apart
Hands trembling with what toils? In their retreat
I seal my love to-be, my folded art.
I light the tapers at my head and feet,
And lay the crucifix on this silent heart.
Music: Jerusalem, My Destiny – Rory Cooney (All lyrics below)
Refrain: I have fixed my eyes on your hills, Jerusalem, my Destiny.
Though I cannot see the end for me I cannot turn away.
We have set our hearts for the way; this journey is our destiny.
Let no one walk alone. The journey makes us one.
1. Other spirits, lesser gods, have courted me with lies.
Here among you I have found a truth that bids me rise. Refrain
2. See, I leave the past behind; a new land calls to me.
Here among you now I find a glimpse of what might be. Refrain
3. In my thirst, you let me drink the waters of your life,
Here among you I have met, the Savior, Jesus Christ. Refrain
4. All the worlds I have not seen you open to my view.
Here among you I have found a vision bright and new. Refrain
5. To the tombs I went to mourn the hope I thought was gone,
Here among you I awoke to unexpected dawn. Refrain
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 24 which has been described as “an entrance psalm” for the Temple liturgies.
Praying Psalm 24 invites us to consider how we enter and meet God in the Holy Space of our lives.
That space, first of all, belongs to God Who created all things. We do not create it. God opens it.
The LORD’s are the earth and its fullness; the world and those who dwell in it. For the Lord founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.
Psalm 24: 1-2
Everything within us and around us — that “fullness” of life — belongs to God. When we acknowledge this truth in humble faith and loving awareness, we realize that we already exist within God’s sanctuary:
Who can ascend the mountain of the LORD? or who may stand in his holy place? The one whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain.
Psalm 24: 3-4
The journey of the spiritual life is about finding that still point in our souls where we see God’s Face in all things. That sacred stillness holds us in God’s Presence until we let go of ourselves within that Love. The Lord blesses that letting go with a “reward”:
That person shall receive a blessing from the LORD, a reward from God the savior. Such is the race that seeks the Lord, that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.
Psalm 24: 5-6
The psalm doesn’t clearly state what that “reward” is, but I think it might be the grace, insight, passion, and courage to live as Paul describes in our first reading:
to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace; one Body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
Poem: The light shouts in your tree-top, and the face — Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours
The light shouts in your tree-top, and the face of all things becomes radiant and vain; only at dusk do they find you again. The twilight hour, the tenderness of space, lays on a thousand heads a thousand hands, and strangeness grows devout where they have lain. With this gentlest of gestures you would hold the world, thus only and not otherwise. You lean from out its skies to capture earth, and feel it underneath your mantle’s folds. You have so mild a way of being. ……………………………………………They who name you loudly when they come to pray forget your nearness. From your hands that tower above us, mountainously, lo, there soars, to give the law whereby our senses live, dark-browed, your wordless power.
Music: I Have Loved You – Michael Joncas
I Have Loved You
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine;
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine.
Seek the face of the Lord and long for him: He will bring you his light and his peace.
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine;
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine.
Seek the face of the Lord and long for him: He will bring you his joy and his hope.
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine;
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine.
Seek the face of the Lord and long for him: He will bring you his care and his love.
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine;
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 119 whose refrain is beautiful to the ears of those who love Mercy.
We can invite Mercy in many ways.
One way is to ask Mercy to heal the fractured circumstances of our lives – the outside of the cup, if we would borrow an image from today’s Gospel:
to strengthen us against any pain or fear in our own lives
to deliver us and those we love from all that overwhelms
to forgive our inexcusable retreats into selfishness
to repair that which seems irrevocably broken
But another, deeper way is to invite Mercy to the inside of our “cup”:
to indwell our hearts
to transform, within us, the place where we encounter life
to inspire us to respond always with the heart of Jesus
to flow from us in continual witness to God’s Mercy
Today, in our prayer, let’s spend some time with Mercy, the most beautiful Face of God.
Poem:Blest are the undefiled in heart (Psalm 119) by Isaac Watts – (1674 – 1748) was an English Christian minister (Congregational), hymn writer, theologian, and logician. He was a prolific and popular hymn writer and is credited with some 750 hymns. He is recognized as the “Godfather of English Hymnody”; many of his hymns remain in use today and have been translated into numerous languages.
Blest are the undefiled in heart,
whose ways are right and clean;
who never from your law depart,
but flee from every sin.
Blest are the ones that keep your word,
and serve you with their hands;
with their whole heart they seek you, Lord,
obeying your commands.
Great is their peace who love your law;
how firm their souls abide!
Nor can a bold temptation draw
their steady feet aside.
Then shall my heart have inward joy!
I’ll keep my steps from shame;
your statutes help me to obey,
and glorify your name.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 105, a recounting of the marvelous works God has done from the Abrahamic covenant to the Exodus.
Sing to God, sing praise, proclaim all God’s wondrous deeds. Glory in the Holy Name; rejoice, O hearts that seek the LORD!
Psalm 105: 2-3
Our psalm today enjoins us to remember God’s faithful mercy to us and to praise God as we remember.
Such sacred “remembering” is an act of radical faith which, first, recognizes God as the Center of our life, and second, acts from that radical awareness.
The word “obedience”, so commonly misconstrued as subservience, is another way of describing this radical faith which hears, listens, acknowledges, responds and centers itself on the voice of God. The word “obedience” comes from the same root as the word “listen”.
This freely-given and continually deepened obedience allows us to hear and discern the loving truth God weaves through our lives.
The counter-world of the Psalms contradicts our closely held world of amnesia and mediates to us a world of lively remembering…. … In Psalm 105, a long recital of the great deeds climaxes, “in order that they might keep his statutes and observe his laws” (v. 45). The purpose of remembering is thus to evoke a contemporary practice of obedience in the wake of the memory. The implied negative is that when the inventory of miracles is forgotten, there will be no contemporary obedience .
Walter Brueggemann, From Whom No Secrets Are Hid
In the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis points out how this obedience, (this holy remembering, listening and acting), is tied to the course of human affairs. Francis quotes JPII here:
In this regard, I wish to cite the following memorable statement: “If there is no transcendent truth, in obedience to which the human person achieves full identity, then there is no sure principle for guaranteeing just relations between people. Their self-interest as a class, group or nation would inevitably set them in opposition to one another. If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over, and each person tends to make full use of the means at their disposal in order to impose personal interests or opinion, with no regard for the rights of others… The root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by very nature the subject of rights that no one may violate – no individual, group, class, nation or state.
St. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus (1 May 1991)
Rootedness in this “remembering obedience” begins with each person’s own sincere prayer. With the psalmist, let us remember God’s loving fidelity to us and, in grateful response, live that Love faithfully into our conflicted world:
Look to the LORD’s strength; seek to serve the Lord constantly. Recall the wondrous deeds that God has wrought, the signs, and the graces God has spoken in your life.
Psalm 105: 4-5
Poem: Called to Become – Edwina Gateley
You are called to become A perfect creation. No one else is called to become Who you are called to be. It does not matter How short or tall Or thick-set or slow You may be. It does not matter Whether you sparkle with life Or are as silent as a still pool. Whether you sing your song aloud Or weep alone in darkness. It does not matter Whether you feel loved and admired Or unloved and alone For you are called to become A perfect creation. No one's shadow Should cloud your becoming. No one's light Should dispel your spark. For the Lord delights in you. Jealously looks upon you And encourages with gentle joy Every movement of the Spirit Within you. Unique and loved you stand. Beautiful or stunted in your growth But never without hope and life. For you are called to become A perfect creation. This becoming may be Gentle or harsh. Subtle or violent. But it never ceases. Never pauses or hesitates. Only is— Creative force— Calling you Calling you to become A perfect creation.
Celebrating the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi October 4-5, 2020
This year, in normal liturgical custom, our Sunday celebration supersedes the Feastday of Francis. But I can’t let this special day go by without notice. Therefore, I am publishing tomorrow’s reflection early, hoping that you will read some of it today. I write with warmest greeting to all Franciscans, especially my dear Sisters in Aston. PA. (The Franciscan Spiritual Center has designed some wonderful programs and made them accessible even during the pandemic. Here is a link to explore their wonderful offerings.)
For reflection, I plan to spend this evening and tomorrow morning with Pope Francis’s new encyclical Fratelli Tutti (Brothers and Sisters All), issued on this feast. St. Francis inspired the world with a renewed Gospel vision. Our Holy Father seeks to do the same with this ground-breaking teaching.
These will be the first of many prayerful days with this powerful document which Michael Sean Winters, in the National Catholic Reporter, describes:
What is clear is that Pope Francis has given the church a testament of authentic solidarity at a time when our president — and his nationalistic allies abroad — offers a counterfeit of solidarity. Both varieties of solidarity are responses to the excesses and the poverties created by neo-liberalism. Yes, poverties, it is clear, … that the material wealth neoliberal economies generate is precisely coincident with the generation of spiritual and moral poverty. The whole world groans to move beyond the moral slovenliness of laissez-faire ideas. But only the pope’s version represents an authentically Christian version of solidarity and, I would add, an authentically human version. This text challenges Christians in unique ways, but it challenges all…. …. If this pandemic does not shake us out of our post-modern cultural and moral and spiritual lethargy, what will? Pope Francis is throwing the Catholic Church and the whole world a lifeline. Will we grab it?
If you would like to pray with this profound and challenging instruction from Pope Francis, here is a link to it.
A second opportunity for prayer over today and tomorrow comes from our Mercy Sister Eileen Dooling. On our Sisters of Mercy blog, Eileen offers a lovely reflection on the Franciscan-Mercy connection. I’m sure you will enjoy it.
As you can see, there are so many ways to reflect, pray and grow on this beautiful feast. May your prayer be blessed by Francis (both of them) and by this amazing music!
Music: St. Francis Preaching to the Birds by Franz Liszt, played by Kotaro Fukuma
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 25, set perfectly in the midst of a few readings that speak to us about, among other things , “the Father’s Will”.
I think there is no greater spiritual mystery than the meaning of “God’s Will”, (and not wanting to show up Thomas Aquinas, I’ll resist explaining it here. 😂🧐)
But we’ve all heard attempts at explaining it, haven’t we, especially as it relates to suffering— as in:
everything that happens is God’s Will, so we must accept it
God wills our suffering to test us
if God wills that we suffer, He will give us the strength to endure it
I just don’t think so … not the God I love and Who loves me.
But these attempts to explain suffering are understandable because we want to rationalize the things we fear. Most of us, I think, struggle with the problem of evil and suffering in the world. We want to know what to do when, as Rabbi Kushner wrote, “… Bad Things Happen to Good People”.
Our first reading from Ezekiel shows us that even the ancient peoples met this struggle. The prophet seems to suggest that if you’re bad, you’ll suffer. If you repent, you won’t. Well, we all know that’s not quite the reality! But nice try, Ezekiel.
Our psalm gently leads to another way of facing suffering as the psalmist prays for wisdom, compassion and divine guidance. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus himself prayed like this as he confronted his impending suffering.
In our second reading, Paul places before us the example of Jesus who, in the face of suffering, was transformed by love:
Praying with these readings, each one of us must come to our own peace with the mystery of suffering. What we can be sure of is this: God’s Will is always for our wholeness and joy as so simply taught to us when we were little children:
God made me to know, love, and serve God, and to be happy with God in this world and forever.
Our Gospel tells us that such happiness comes through faith and loving service, through responding to “the Father’s Will”. May we have the insight, the love and the courage!
Poetry: Of Being by Denise Levertov
I know this happiness
is provisional:
the looming presences—
great suffering, great fear—
withdraw only
into peripheral vision:
but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:
this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:
this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
this mystery:
Memorial of Saint Pius of Pietrelcina, Priest … also commonly known as Padre Pio. Padre Pio died during the night of 23 September 1968, at the age of 81. On 16 June 2002, he was proclaimed a saint by Pope John Paul II. In his homily, the Pope said, “The life and mission of Padre Pio prove that difficulties and sorrows, if accepted out of love, are transformed into a privileged way of holiness, which opens onto the horizons of a greater good, known only to the Lord.”
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we continue praying with Psalm 119 which, with its 176 verses, is the longest psalm as well as the longest chapter in the Bible. So this could go on forever, right?
Well, it doesn’t. Even though Psalm 119 is used for the Responsorial a total of 22 times during the total liturgical cycle, we won’t see it again for a week or so.
However, the liturgical frequency of this psalm should alert us to the importance of its teachings. Although long and somewhat complex in its acrostic structure, the psalm is direct and simple in its message:
Learn, love and live God’s ways.
Today’s verses liken such pursuit to finding a lamp in the darkness:
Praying with this refrain, we might be able to recall a time we were enveloped in darkness, either material, emotional, or spiritual. Most of us become at least a little frightened by such conditions. We get disoriented. We don’t know if we will be able to find our way out.
The psalmist attests to similar experiences, and voices a confident call on God for deliverance. That confidence grows from the psalmist’s desire and commitment to walk in holy discernment:
From every evil way I withhold my feet, that I may keep your words. Through your precepts I gain discernment; therefore I hate every false way. Falsehood I hate and abhor; your law I love.
In this beautiful verse, the psalmist’s confidence is confirmed by God’s faithful endurance:
The law of your mouth is to me more precious than thousands of gold and silver pieces. Your word, O LORD, endures forever; it is firm as the heavens.
Poetry: One, One, One – Rumi
The lamps are different.
But the Light is the same.
So many garish lamps in the dying brain's lamp shop,
Forget about them.
Concentrate on essence, concentrate on Light.
In lucid bliss, calmly smoking off its own holy fire,
The Light streams toward you from all things,
All people, all possible permutations of good, evil, thought, passion.
The lamps are different,
But the Light is the same.
One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind,
Endlessly emanating all things.
One turning and burning diamond,
One, one, one.
Ground yourself, strip yourself down,
To blind loving silence.
Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes.
Music: Beati Quorem Via – Charles Villiers Stanford, sung by voces 8 The title of this hymn is the first verse of Psalm 119 in Latin. Translation below.
Blessed are they whose road is straight, who walk in the law of the Lord.
Beati quorum via integra est: qui ambulant in lege Domini
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 19, one of the unique “Torah Psalms” (1, 19, 119) in which Israel celebrates the divine structure of life in all Creation, including ourselves.
James Luther Mays, in his article The Place of the Torah-Psalms in the Psalter, suggests that these psalms serve as a guide to how all the other psalms are to be read, interpreted and prayed.
Walter Brueggemann describes life without God as “normless” – without the structure of grace and relationship with God that holds all Creation in abundant Life. He refers to the Torah as a “norming” dynamism, and writes:
And when Israel … used the term “Torah” (never meaning simply or simplistically “law”), it refers to the entire legacy of norming that is elastic, dynamic, fluid, and summoning. The outcome of that legacy in the Psalter is the great Torah Psalms in which Israel celebrates, with joy, that the creator God has not left the world as a normless blob but has instilled in the very structure of creation the transformative capacity for enacted fidelity. That is why Psalm 19 juxtaposes the glory of creation that attests the creator (vv. 1–6) with the commandments that are the source of life.
Our verses today for the Feast of St. Matthew include this phrase…
Their message goes out through all the earth.
… perhaps equating the universal ministry of the Apostles to the transformative power and witness of the heavens to God’s immutable glory.
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day pours out the word to day, and night to night imparts knowledge. Not a word nor a discourse whose voice is not heard; Through all the earth their voice resounds, and to the ends of the world, their message.
The teaching of the Apostles is codified for Catholics in the Apostles Creed. We might want to pray it slowly today, attentive to those “norming ” beliefs – our sort of fundamental “Torah” – which hold our lives in graceful relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
Apostles Creed
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.
Poetry: XIX Caeli Ennarant by Malcolm Guite
In that still place where earth and heaven meet Under mysterious starlight, raise your head And gaze up at their glory: ‘the complete
Consort dancing’ as a poet said Of his own words. But these are all God’s words; A shining poem, waiting to be read
Afresh in every heart. Now look towards The brightening east, and see the splendid sun Rise and rejoice, the icon of his lord’s
True light. Be joyful with him, watch him run His course, receive the gift and treasure of his light Pouring like honeyed gold till day is done
As sweet and strong as all God’s laws, as right As all his judgements and as clean and pure, All given for your growth, and your delight!
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 145 which, with our Sunday readings, ties together the themes of call and commitment.
In our first reading, Isaiah proclaims a repentant urgency to that call:
Seek the LORD while he may be found, call him while he is still near.
In our second reading, Paul confirms his own ultimate commitment to that call and urges his followers to imitate him:
Christ will be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death….
Only, conduct yourselves in a way worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear news of you, that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind struggling together for the faith of the gospel.
But our Gospel reveals that not everyone responds immediately to God’s voice in their lives. Some of us come late to the call of grace. Nevertheless, our generous God seeks us, time and again, and embraces us fully no matter how close to the evening.
The early hires chafe against this system, imagining themselves somehow deprived by the Master’s abundance. Perhaps we heard attitudes like theirs expressed in self-sufficient phrases like:
but I’ve worked hard for everything I have
you need to earn your way in life
it’s not a free ride
if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen
Walter Brueggemann writes that the Psalms refute such an attitude:
The counter-world of the Psalms contradicts our closely held world of self-sufficiency by mediating to us a world confident in God’s preferential option for those who call on him in their ultimate dependence.
Psalm 145 lifts us beyond our selfish imaginations. It expresses the grateful praise of one who, swaddled in God’s lavish blessing, recognizes that Divine Justice looks like Mercy not calculation.
The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness. The LORD is good to all and compassionate toward all his works.
Poem: by Rumi
By the mercy of God, Paradise has eight doors. One of those is the door of repentance, child. All the others are sometimes open, sometimes shut, but the door of repentance is never closed. Come seize the opportunity: the door is open; carry your baggage there at once.
Music: I Will Praise Your Name – Marty Haugen, David Haas
Lavish Mercy 