A Look Inside

Bread and Wine Reading: "A Look Inside", by Edna Hong

Scripture Reading: Psalm 139: 1-14
O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night’, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.

Just as Lent is a time of refocusing and redirecting, it is also a time of reclaiming our true identity, of finding that self that God calls you to be. It is a hard journey. The journey through the wilderness of our souls is fraught with hidden dangers and perils that most of us would rather not experience. We will be forced to look at those parts of our lives that are impeding our soul’s vision of who it is, if only so that we will know what parts we need to strip away or even discard. It is a journey with the mission to free our souls to be with God, to finally be who God calls each of us to be from the very beginning of our being. God know this part of us so well. Perhaps God has hidden it so well that we will have to journey to find it.

Edna Hong contends that “the purpose of Lent is to arouse. To arouse the sense of sin…To arouse the sense of gratitude for the forgiveness of sins. To arouse or to motivate the works of love and the work of justice that one does out of gratitude for the forgiveness of one’s sins.” She describes the Christian life, then, as a journey of downward descent, a journey deep down into who we are, deep down into the depths of ourselves, into that part that God knows so well. “It ends,” she says, “before the cross, where we stand in the white light of a new beginning.”

Discussion Questions:
1.) What keeps us from seeing our true self?
2.) What will you find when “you search and know yourself”?
3.) What meaning does the image of the Christian life as one of a “downward descent” hold for you?

So go forth toward deep into your self, the self that God is calling you to find!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli