Abdication

Spring Point Ledge Lighthouse, Maine

In Wishful Thinking, Frederick Buechner writes: :Religion has often been denounced as escapism, and it often is. To deny the prevalence of pain the world and the perennial popularity of evil.  To abdicate responsibility for them by assuming that God will take care of them very nicely on his own."

Do we do that? I think all of us do at one time or another. How often do we pray for something, and then refuse to listen to God when God leads us to a solution that will involve service on our part? Do we pray for the homeless and then do nothing to find them homes? Do we pray for the hungry and then fail to feed them? Do we pray that someone else's behavior will change without ever examining our own behavior and how it perpetuates the behavior in another?

There are those things we cannot change, and pray is a God-given gift we can use to accept that, and lift it to God for solutions or help; or to just get through it. But there are those things we can change, and instead, we sometimes place it in God's hands and walk away.

We can't do it all, but aren't there some things we can do, with God's direction and help?

"The best moments we any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us."