Our God Who Does Not Ask
a devotional for Juneteenth
Thank you for joining us!
Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:
commented on last week’s discussion about the things we feel we’ve lost, and what we want to do to regain them:I feel like I’m losing a general, open-ended, and sustained curiosity in subjects I’m unfamiliar with, which limits both experience and reading. As remedy: I want to actually lessen the volume of my reading intake, to deepen what I do read. Counterproductive or counterintuitive is to be determined. I just hope to refine my focus, which is ultimately the origin of enjoyment and wonder.
I love this, Kevin, and I resonate very strongly with it! Thank you for sharing! Kevin has been a longtime subscriber here and runs a newsletter on Substack called A Stylist Submits, where he investigates the overlap between Christian thought and the world of art. Highly recommend checking it out!
If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
we are asked
to lay down our assumptions
and we fail, O Lord
we fail.
we are asked
to lay down our suspicions
and we fail, O Lord
we fail.
we are asked
to lay down our enmity
and we fail, O Lord
we fail.
for centuries past
we fail when we’re asked
and our failure
spills
blood.
O Lord,
our God who Does Not Ask;
forgive us.
Your command
is in
the summer thunder,
Your voice
is thick
with the snap
of fire:
love, I tell you.
I Am not asking.
I Am not begging.
love, I tell you.
this was My chief command.
walk with peace
seek My face
and love, and love, and love again.
love, I tell you,
I Am not asking,
in this
there is no room
to fail.You may have noticed that I’m sharing quite a lot of poetry lately that I’ve labeled “from last year”. And that’s because these poems were included in the paid-only ebooks that I wrote that very few people saw. To those that did: you know who you are, and thanks for being here from the very start!
But now that our audience has grown so significantly, I wanted to share these poems a bit more widely, because there are pieces of myself in them.
The poem above I wrote as a meditation for Juneteenth, 2022. It was accompanied by this caption:
Finally made a federal holiday in 2021, Juneteenth is a celebration of the day when slavery officially ended in the United States, on June 19, 1865. It is a day of deep significance to many Black Americans, as well as a day inviting reflection for those of us who are white and must reckon with the day-to-day responsibility of dismantling our biases. Though slavery ended in 1865, the difficulties and trauma of Black people certainly did not. They continue to this day.
I present this meditation to you as one white woman, grappling with history and ancestry and my place within it, and yearning for societal healing that comes only from the Creator. I am not perfect. This meditation is not perfect. But it is sincere, and God’s chief commandment is clear: we are to love, every single time, in every single circumstance. He does not ask. He commands it.
When we are faced with a difficult thing that requires us to decide: will you love, or will you not? I believe it is crucial to understand that God Is Not Asking. When it comes to love—the difficult, muddy, bloody kind—God Does Not Ask.
We have been shown what God believes about love; He has the scars to prove it. And in a world where hate and apathy are easier, it is tempting to slide past the cross and hope no one will notice.
But there is no request in the command to love everyone. Sacrificially, up-to-your-knees. Your complaints and caveats and excuses are all empty, as are mine.
On this day, may we all hear the command in the summer thunder:
Love, I tell you. I Am Not Asking.
Thank you for reading!
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This morning, in rural Georgia, began with “the summer thunder” roaring and lightning streaking across the sky. Soon after waking I took a gander out of the window to make sure there was nothing more impending going on (tornado, hail, etc.) But as I stood at the sliding glass the thunder continued. This time it shook the floor beneath my feet. In seconds, I thought about the awesome power of God. I thought about the modern person checking their phone to find out if it’s raining, instead of just looking outside. I thought of the former native inhabitants of this land who would have surely taken this weather as a message from something from above, which it certainly is.
As I read this now, at work, the skies are calm and a dove paces in front of the office door, an obvious reminder of the Holy Spirit. Is there a better time to read about love than while observing a dove? Debatable.
Love is a command. Absolutely. Explicitly. Jesus tells us, "If you love me you will keep my commandments." And while the power of “the world” is constantly working to push us apart, the truth is that nothing can separate us from the love of God. But it is imperative we remember that to love God is to love one another. Indeed, we are his hands, his feet and his miracle-workers.
Thank you for this reflection. I LOVE the idea of summer thunder being what God uses to remind us that we are to demonstrate His love for all people and all creation.
Thanks for the kind words! Glad to hang around the WP precisely for the grappling of today’s poem.