Author: Jim Gordon

TFTD: Wednesday

Psalm 16.1 “Keep me safe, O God, for in you I take refuge.”

This is an arrow prayer, a one liner that goes straight to the point. There’s no waiting patiently in this prayer, just the need of the moment, and that instinctive turning in faith to the One who is our refuge. By the way, when we pray this prayer, and turn to God for protection in the emergency of feeling threatened, that makes us refugees in the arms of God. The theme of refuge, and of care for the refugee, is dyed into the fabric of the Bible, from Abraham to the Exodus, to the Exiles, and the flight from Herod to Egypt. Before God we are all refugees, looking for a place to find safety.

This afternoon, preparing to cut the grass at the back of my neighbour’s house, I’m lowering my cable extension over the fence between us. On our side, as I leaned over, I had to negotiate my way around this rose, carefully feeding the cable behind it and up over the fence.

The last day of September, sunny but breezy, the tail end of a storm on its way in a day or two, and today, for a moment or two, this floral miracle was right in my face!

Yes, I’m easily pleased – maybe that’s a low-key form of gratitude, to hear an echo of the Creator’s grace when face to face with a rose. Or so it seemed to me

Psalm 27.1 “The Lord is my light and my salvation – whom shall I fear.”

That’s a good line to start the day; it might also be a fitting line to end a bad day! The truth is, every day of our lives we live through a host of moods and emotions, which make it either a good day or a bad day. The Psalm poet knows that in all the change he needs constancy, when things pile up and we are struggling to find a way forward, “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” The fixed point is not our own energy and capacity, but God’s promised presence. “If God be for us, who can be against us?”

Monday

Psalm 40.1 “I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry.”

I am not good at waiting patiently. It’s a learned discipline, an intentional training of the mind and the heart to trust, in a world where things don’t always happen on demand. God is not tied to our agenda or our timetable, thank God! The Psalm poet has learned that waiting is an act of trust that comes from knowing the One for whom we wait. That lovely phrase, ‘he turned to me’, has all the reassurance of the child who sees the face of her mother or father. “He bent down to me and listened to my cry.” (REB) Prayer is answered when we know we are heard and listened to. 

As this is all new to me, I’ll keep it simple – for my benefit! For more than 18 years Living Wittily lived on the Typepad platform. Now that Typepad is going out of commission we are moving to this temporary home before a full migration to WordPress.

All new content will be posted here, and at a later stage on WordPress.

The link you will need is https://livingwittily.woodvale.uk