Walk VIII: Your Everyday Life as an Offering

Scripture

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12.1-2, The Message)

Prayer

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for
our learning: grant that we may in such wise hear them,
read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them,
that by patience and comfort of thy holy word,
we may embrace and ever hold fast
the blessed hope of everlasting life,
which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Reflection

Walnut fruit falls on the forest floor in a kind of cymbal crash, a bounce from boughs. It accelerates as it goes, but it’s all over, pretty much, in a second, and the moment I hear its traveling is when I realize what has happened. This is just to say, when a walnut falls, I hear the time passing. I might have, I think to myself, predicted what was going to happen, as if I could hear the inevitability of the fall. Prodigious, the forest, fearsome in fecundity. The whole place has gone Sleeping Beauty, the part before the kissing prince when the land grows wild in a hundred-year isolation. Time’s principle is scarcity, but the forest is not scarce.

— Tiffany Eberle Kriner