By Monica Miller, a senior music major from Greencastle, Pennsylvania
This week’s theme: Let it be whole!
I wipe the dirt from my face and try to stand tall, here at the end of the most prolonged and complete period of exhaustion I have ever endured. I miss a few spots, and my heavy shoulders still hang. “Student teaching was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” confess more than one wise mentor; I can only nod and sigh.
Leafing through the pages of this week’s scripture passages, my unfocused thoughts flit from one image to the next, mixing and matching them like clothes on a paper doll. Oaks of righteousness… rapturous praise… one crying out in the wilderness… Words begin to stick in the cobwebs of my tired imagination, and like fine poetry they steal through the back door of Reason to arrest my weary soul with a kaleidoscope of beauty. Resplendent shards of multicolored glass awash with light, bits and pieces forming a mosaic of wholeness, a herald of restoration.
This week, our patient people’s oaken roots drive deep into the heart of the earth, and with their leaves they tickle the sky, their boughs woven with joyful song. Oh, you oaks of righteousness, do not quench the Spirit, do not put out the Spirit’s fire! Let your anointing of gladness burn brightly as you are not consumed. For the fire is not of you, it is the One who came, the One who is always coming, the One who is to come. Make straight the way of the Lord!
The spirit of the Lord God is upon us, because the Lord has anointed us to bring wholeness to the earth.
Yes! Let it be whole!