Jer 17:5-8 / 1 Cor 15:12, 16-20 / Lk 6:17, 20-26
Here are some hot tips for those who are dieting:
1. If no one sees you eat it, it has no calories.
2. If you drink a diet soda WITH your candy bar, they’ll cancel each other out.
3. If you fatten up everybody around you, you’ll look thinner.
4. Snacks consumed at a movie don’t count because they’re part of the entertainment. This includes popcorn with butter, Milk Duds, and M&Ms.
5. Pieces of cookies contain no calories. The process of breaking causes calorie leakage.
6. And finally, late-night snacks have no calories. That’s because the refrigerator light is not strong enough for the calories to see their way into the calorie counter.
Goofy tips, but lots of us act as if they were true!
Ignoring the truth is something of a specialty for us all. And nowhere is it more visible than at the very ground level of our lives, where certain facts demand our attention: We’re born. We work hard to build homes and families and make ourselves safe and secure. Then we die and leave it all behind. All we can ever take with us is our heart and whatever’s wrapped inside it. Those are the hard facts: We are truly poor.
But looking at those facts is no tea party, so we look away. We insulate ourselves from the truth with lots of stuff — the more the better — and with lots of activities: Stay very, very busy, and you won’t notice how empty and poor you are.
It is goofy, but that’s what we do: We hide from obvious facts and deny that we’re poor. And that gets us in deep trouble: It cuts us off from the only one that could make us rich, the only one that could give us hearts that are big enough to carry into eternity everything that’s worth having. Denying we’re poor cuts us off from God because it says we already have everything we need and we don’t need Him! And that’s crazy.
In the best translation of the first of the eight beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who KNOW you are poor; the kingdom of God is yours.” If we know we’re poor, if we see how much our hearts need His healing, reshaping and growing, then we’ll know what to do about it, and that is open our hearts all the way to the Lord who’s been waiting to come in since the day we were born.
He wants to make us rich and to fill us full of the things that last. He wants to grow our hearts large, and He will if we ask Him. So why not ask Him? It all begins with telling ourselves the truth.
“Blessed are you who know you are poor; the kingdom of God is yours!”
