Day By Day #13

Day by Day #13

MORNING/MIDDAY OFFICE

Silence and Stillness before God (2 minutes)

Scripture Reading: Genesis 12:1–4

The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.

            “I will make you into a great nation,

               and I will bless you.

            I will make your name great,

               and you will be a blessing.

            I will bless those who bless you,

               and whoever curses you I will curse;

            and all peoples on earth

               will be blessed through you.”

So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran.

Devotional

When the Bible uses the word family, it refers not just to parents and children but to an entire extended family over three to four generations. That means your family, in the biblical sense, includes your brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-uncles and aunts, and significant others going back to the mid-1800s. The blessings and sins of this extended family over generations profoundly impact who we are today. For this reason, we say, “Jesus may be in your heart, but Grandpa is in your bones,” meaning the proverbial grandpas cast a long shadow over the generations in any family.

In order to respond to God’s invitation and receive God’s promise, Abraham had to leave his family behind. Much as we have to do today, he had to put off the sinful and unhealthy patterns of his family of origin and learn to do life God’s way in God’s family.

Kaethe Weingarten, a professor at Harvard Medical School, has done extensive research on how the traumatic experiences of one generation are passed to those in the next generation. She studied, for example, Holocaust survivors and their families, survivors of terrorist attacks, and children of parents with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She writes:

What is passed is not the trauma itself, but its impact. . . . Silence is a key mechanism by which trauma in one generation is communicated to the next. We are accustomed to think of silence as an absence of sound, but it functions in families in much more complex and confusing ways. Silence can communicate a wealth of meanings. It is its own map: Don’t go there; don’t say that; don’t touch; too much; too little; this hurts; this doesn’t. . . . Silence . . . co-occurs with numbers of other phenomena. Shame, a painful affect in which one feels exposed as “fundamentally deficient in some vital way as a human being” is one of them.^a

Scripture teaches us that we can unlearn negative patterns that were passed on to us over generations. And by God’s grace and power, we can learn healthier ways to do life in the new family of Jesus. Change and freedom are possible through the truth that sets us free.

Question to Consider

What first comes to mind when you think about an unhealthy message that was communicated by silence in your family of origin? How do you sense Jesus may be inviting you to unlearn that message in order to live in a healthier way in God’s family?

Prayer

PRAYER OF ABANDONMENT

Charles de Foucauld

My Father,

I abandon myself to you.

Make of me what you will.

Whatever you make of me,

I thank you.

I am ready for everything.

I accept everything.

Provided that your will be done in me,

In all your creatures,

I desire nothing else, Lord.

I put my soul in your hands,

I give it to you, Lord,

With all the love in my heart,

Because I love you,

And because it is for me a need of love

To give myself,

To put myself in your hands unreservedly,

With infinite trust.

For you are my Father.^b

Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)

MIDDAY/EVENING OFFICE

Silence and Stillness before God (2 minutes)

Scripture Reading: Luke 2:41–43, 49–52

Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover.

When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom. After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. . . .

“Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he was saying to them.

Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

Devotional

Jesus spent nearly thirty years with a seemingly delayed destiny before he began his public ministry. We learn about him at age twelve in this passage, but then hear little else until he begins his ministry as an adult. We know only that he “grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and all the people” (Luke 2:52 NLT), embracing the hidden, slow work of God in him during those unseen years.

Author Alicia Britt Chole writes compellingly about these anonymous years in Jesus’ life:

Only three years, less than 10 percent, of Jesus’ days are visible through the writings of the Bible. Over 90 percent of his earthly life is submerged in the unseen. . . . Onlookers saw only the tip of the iceberg of who Jesus truly was, and they could have never imagined the indestructible greatness growing just beneath the surface of Jesus’ unapplauded life. . . .

“What would Jesus do?” we ask sincerely. . . . Well, for starters, he embraced a life of hiddenness. . . . With his life (and with ours), it is critical that we not mistake unseen for unimportant. . . . From God’s perspective, anonymous seasons are sacred spaces. They are quite literally formative; to be rested in, not rushed through—and most definitely never to be regretted. . . . Hidden years are the surprising birthplace of true spiritual greatness.”^c

The pattern of Jesus’ life is meant to be a model for us. We too are to make disciples, carry our cross, and access resurrection power. Our anonymous, unseen seasons are sacred and not to be rushed. Just as he did in Jesus, God is birthing true spiritual greatness in us during our times and places of hiddenness.

Question to Consider

How might God be doing an important but unseen work in, through, and in spite of any hiddenness you are experiencing right now?

Prayer

Father, sometimes I act as though I am in charge of running the world. Forgive me. Teach me to be patient and to remain hidden when appropriate. May I not rush your slow, sacred work of forming Christ in me—even when I don’t understand what you are doing. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)

^a Kaethe Weingarten, “Witnessing the Effects of Political Violence in Families: Mechanisms of Intergenerational Transmission and Clinical Interventions,” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, January 2004, vol. 30, no. 1, 49–51.

^b Quoted in Bonnie Thurston, Hidden in God: Discovering the Desert Vision of Charles De Foucauld (Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 2016), xiii.

^c Alicia Britt Chole, Anonymous: Jesus’ Hidden Years and Yours (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 8–10, 12–13, 27.