Forward Movement is an official, non-profit agency of the Episcopal Church whose mission is to create compelling content for Christian living. Since 1935 we have published the quarterly devotional Forward Day by Day, as well as pamphlets, booklets, and books that encourage and nourish people in their lives of prayer and faith.
TUESDAY, March 29
John 7:37-52. Search and you will see that no prophet is to arise from Galilee.
People who speak the word of God to us are supposed to be like us. If they’re not like us, we tend to dismiss them as strange or irrelevant. My wife was once part of a church support group consisting, apart from her, entirely of divorced women. They spoke of the hurt and anger they felt when their husbands had betrayed them. All men were dismissed as untrustworthy and obsessed with sex. When my wife intimated that her husband wasn’t like that, the group looked at her as if to dismiss her comments as irrelevant. From their vantage point, my wife was strange.
My wife understood where those other women were coming from. They had been dismissed for most of their lives, first as women in a male-oriented society, then by their husbands, and then as divorcees, whereas for my wife being discounted was not a defining experience. She later told me that she found herself growing angry at the other women, just as they were angry at their husbands. Being discounted can do that to you.
The thing about Jesus is that he was repeatedly discounted, for his Galilean accent and for other rea-sons, but he didn’t respond in anger.
PRAY for the Diocese of Mpumalanga (Southern Africa)
Ps 78:1-39 * 78:40-72; Jeremiah 7:21-34; Romans 4:13-25
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A Meditation for Pentecost
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