Week 34—Saturday Acts 26:15-18
Acts 26:15-18
“HE’S OFFERING ME SECURITY”
We ended yesterday with the emphasis that personal witness is personal power. A very sensitive woman was listening to a speaker and she said to herself, “Listen ears, this is not preaching, this is revelation.” When such a speaker is speaking, you hear more than you hear and see more than you see. The life behind the words witnesses.
We had in our Ashrams this summer in America Sister Lila, a Greek Orthodox nun of the Bethany Convent in Jerusalem. I first met her in India. She is an expert masseuse. And as she gave me a massage I asked her, “What is the meaning of life?” And without a moment’s hesitation she replied, “The meaning of life is to love.” And she literally makes that the meaning for her—she lives by and for love. She loves everybody, so all doors are open to her. Hindus dying by the Ganges would ask to hold her hand as they slipped into the unknown. I was so impressed by her amazing capacity to love everybody that I wrote her a letter suggesting that she allow me to provide her bare travel expenses and food, and then she could be free to serve everybody—Hindus, Muslims, and Christians—with her message, for she travels about without money, trusting God implicitly. Someone told me of her reaction when she got the letter, “Why it is a temptation of the devil. He is offering me security and I don’t want security—I want adventure in the will of God.” She let us have a glimpse of a New Testament Christian. What she said was illuminating, but what she did not say was more illuminating—it was what she was—the Word made flesh.
O Jesus, we thank you for Heaven-sent souls like Sister Lila, the breath of another world upon our spirits. In them we see revelation. We thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: In some small way may the words said of an Abbe, as he was about to speak to a mob in the French Revolution, be true of me: “Forty years of pure living are about to address you.”