Interim Senior Pastor Paul Svingen shares some reflections on Easter.
Fellow Friends of our crucified and risen Lord at Our Savior’s,
In this holy season, let us contemplate the power for life that our Lord gives us in his new commandment given first to his disciples on the night before his death: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
May we this holy season hear the plea of Howard Thurman as he invites us to grow in love. Holy Week and Easter Blessings to you.
–Pr. Paul
More Loving In My Heart
by Dr. Howard Thurman, from
The Inward Journey:
Meditations on the Spiritual Quest (1961)
I want to be more loving in my heart. I want to be more loving.
Often there are good and sufficient reasons for exercising what seems a clean, direct resentment. Again and again I find it hard to hold in check the sharp retort, the biting comeback when it seems that someone has done violence to my self respect and decent regard. How natural it seems to give as good as I get, to take nothing lying down, to announce to all and sundry in a thousand ways that no one can run over me and get away with it.
All this is part of the thicket in which my heart gets caught again and again. Deep within me, I want to be more loving in my heart. To glow with a warmth that will take the chill off a room which I share with those whose lives touch mine in the traffic of my goings and comings. I want to be more loving.
I want to be more loving in my heart. It is often easy to have the idea in mind, to plan to be more loving, to see it with the mind and give ascent to the thought of being loving. This is crystal clear. But I want to be more loving in my heart. I must feel like loving. I must ease the tension in my heart that ejects the sharp barb, the stinging word.
I want to be more loving in my heart, that with unconscious awareness and deliberate intent I shall be a kind, a gracious human being. Thus those who walk the path with me may find it easier to be loving, to be gracious because of the love of God which is increasingly expressed in my living. I want to be more loving in my heart.