Benediction of a Day
George MacLeod (1895-1991)
To take a natural analogy, there is a living flower. You want to have it, so you pluck it. But, by your act of plucking, it dies.
You are fascinated by a sparkling running stream, a living stream of water. But, if you grasp it, it runs through your fingers, you scoop it into a pail, you no longer have life, but just a bucket of H2O.
There is a sunbeam dancing in your room, life from the sun. If you pull down the curtain to capture the beam, it is gone.
There is a bracing wind that enlivens your whole being. But try to catch it in a bag and you have stagnant air.
All this reminds us how not to get in touch with life. Here is the root trouble of our lives. We all love life, but the moment we try to hold it, we miss it. The fact that things change and move and flow is their life. Try to make them static and you die of worry.
This is just as true of God who is the Life of life. The only way to achieve a sense of God’s presence is to put yourself in the way of Him. In our analogy, you achieve a sense of life in the presence of a flower, by a running stream, in a bracing wind, with sunbeams falling on the stream. You come home to say you have had a perfectly lovely day, which means a lively day. It has been a benediction of a day.
You can only achieve a sense of God in a similar way … You can only find God in the now.
~George MacLeod, founder of the modern day community at Iona, July 1955.
