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Today's meditation
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Worthless things
Psalm 101: …to you, O Lord, will I sing praises. I will strive to follow a blameless course…I will walk with sincerity of heart within my house. I will set no worthless thing before my eyes; I hate the doers of evil deeds; they shall not remain with me.
A headline one day read, “If your garage is too cluttered to park in, this 6-by-4 shed is your answer.” The idea made me laugh uncomfortably, as I know we humans would rather buy more storage space than to get rid of stuff that we might need some day.
Why do we have so much junk in our lives and so little space to store it? I think it’s difficult for a modern human being to discern the important from the trivial. The more physical an item, the more important it feels to us. The invisible treasures—faith, compassion, forgiveness—feel less important because they aren’t physically tangible.
The writer of Psalm 101 declares to God, “I will set no worthless thing before my eyes,” a good and laudable intention. The catch, though, is determining which things are worthless. It isn’t always our intent that trips us up, but our discernment in distinguishing the eternal from the temporal.
I need, then, a dual prayer so that I can better order my life. I can pray that God will help me as I claim to “set no worthless thing before my eyes.”
But I need to pray just as much that God will give me the eyes to discern what is worth keeping.
Psalm 109:1-4, 20-30; Malachi 1:1, 6-14; James 3:13-4:12; Luke 17:11-19
Copyright 2024 by Carol Mead. For noncommercial use and sharing only. For more information on this ministry, and on a free subscription to these meditations, please contact the author by email (thenewmead@yahoo.com).
A headline one day read, “If your garage is too cluttered to park in, this 6-by-4 shed is your answer.” The idea made me laugh uncomfortably, as I know we humans would rather buy more storage space than to get rid of stuff that we might need some day.
Why do we have so much junk in our lives and so little space to store it? I think it’s difficult for a modern human being to discern the important from the trivial. The more physical an item, the more important it feels to us. The invisible treasures—faith, compassion, forgiveness—feel less important because they aren’t physically tangible.
The writer of Psalm 101 declares to God, “I will set no worthless thing before my eyes,” a good and laudable intention. The catch, though, is determining which things are worthless. It isn’t always our intent that trips us up, but our discernment in distinguishing the eternal from the temporal.
I need, then, a dual prayer so that I can better order my life. I can pray that God will help me as I claim to “set no worthless thing before my eyes.”
But I need to pray just as much that God will give me the eyes to discern what is worth keeping.
Psalm 109:1-4, 20-30; Malachi 1:1, 6-14; James 3:13-4:12; Luke 17:11-19
Copyright 2024 by Carol Mead. For noncommercial use and sharing only. For more information on this ministry, and on a free subscription to these meditations, please contact the author by email (thenewmead@yahoo.com).