Thursday, July 17, 2014

Well so much for my New Year's Resolution...

I put up two posts in January... and now it's the end of July.

As it turned out this was the winter of horrible colds, flus and other fun things largely brought home by my son from daycare. I think the longest consecutive stretch any of us was well all winter was about 2 weeks (and that was me, my poor wife I think had 5 days). Anyway it's the summer and I'm trying to decide whether to post some of the backlog of Bible Study material or just start fresh with some new items.

In the mean time here is some content from the prayer book I'm using for my personal devotions. It's called Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals and is a prayer book that comes out of the new monastic movement. The lead author (there are several who worked on it) is Shane Claiborne, who you may know for his work with the 'Red-Letter Christian' movement along with Tony Campolo. You can buy the book online in full or pocket format, or you can get the daily devotional online here: http://commonprayer.net/

Here's part of the daily reflection from earlier this week that really caught my attention:

Listen to these words from the Shepherd of Hermas, whose second-century writings were cherished by the early Christians: “You know that you who are God’s servants are living in a foreign country, for your own city-state is far away from this City-state. Knowing, then, which one is to be your own City-state, why do you acquire fields, costly furnishings, buildings, and frail dwellings here? Instead of fields, buy for yourselves people in distress in accordance with your means. It is far, far better to buy this kind of field, property, or building, which is quite different and which you can find again in your own City when you come home. This ‘extravagance’ is beautiful and holy; it brings no grief and no fear; it brings nothing but joy.”

Claiborne, Shane; Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan; Okoro, Enuma (2010-11-23). Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (p. 358). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.


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