One of my favorite experiences of the church has been writing songs for our Sunday meetings, and I’ve been honored to see how they’ve circulated in our community. Translating the poetry of Scripture and the church mothers and fathers into music is a meditative act for me, and I hope that you can get a sense of that this week. — Andrew Yang

Today’s Bible reading

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:11-13

More Thoughts for Meditation

https://music.circleofhope.net/songs/detail/1169

“When I Was a Child” was a song I wrote after I learned that a friend of mine was getting divorced. I hadn’t really thought about the possibility of divorce before that and I definitely wasn’t prepared for the grief that I felt. It felt like someone had died.

1 Corinthians 13 contains the famous passage about how “love never fails.” Paul is describing virtues that will continue into the next age, saying that faith, hope, and love will endure even as God transforms the rest of the world. There’s an irony in the fact that the passage is so often used at weddings, when marriage is an institution that, at least according to Jesus, will explicitly not continue in the age to come.

Most of my adult life has been re-evaluating my relationship to the things and people that I thought would be around forever. I hold tightly to things, so these have been hard lessons to learn:

“All things must end, help me know that your love will be, endlessly. At last I’ll see you clearly.”

Suggestions for action

A friend of mine told me that it’s easy to mistake the channel the water moves through for the water itself. We think that the channel itself is life-giving and we orient our lives around it, without realizing that it’s the water that gives us life. 

Sometimes I’ll give my rabbits an automatic feeder, and they’ll end up sitting around it, waiting for it to feed them even after it’s long empty, even ignoring me to stare at the feeder when I’m trying to get their attention with a cup of food.

We’re like rabbits, or children, as Paul says. We know things incompletely, so it’s helpful to remind ourselves of what lasts: faith, hope, especially love.