The Daily: Tuesday July 30, 2024

Daily Lectionary Reading: Psalm 37:12-22 (NRSV, The Message); 2 Samuel 11:14-21 (NRSV, The Message); Philippians 4:10-20 (NRSV, The Message)

I’ve learned by now to be quite content whatever my circumstances. I’m just as happy with little as with much, with much as with little. I’ve found the recipe for being happy whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty. Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am.
Philppians 4:11-13 (The Message)

The quote "What lies before us and what lies behind us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us," is often attrbuted to Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau. It turns out neither is true. It actually is from a book published in 1940, Meditations in Wall Street. In 1947 the New York Times identified the author as securities trader Henry S. Haskins. I think that makes the statement all that much more remarkable. It wasn't written on Walden Pon or in a gentleman's study. It was written from the real-life rough and tumble world of the trading floor by a man who was having a tough time at work!

The letter writer to the Philppians who may be, and definitely was made out to be, Paul, has learned from deep experience of lack and abundance, privilege and prison. They can stand and say that what matters MOST is what is IN me, what I am in the One. From that place I can face and endure anything.

Such is not a Pollyanaish, spitting-in-the-wind, everything-will-be-ok pep talk. It is a statement and practice of fatih.