A Love Song, a Book, and a Healing Heart
Good Morning Friends,
Over the weekend, on Saturday, our church’s speaker series sponsored Laura Apol, a professor at Michigan State University, to lead a workshop on Open Heart Writing. On Sunday, I met her briefly before a talk she gave about her work with orphans in Africa where she is using writing for healing. She points out in the talk’s title that there is a challenge and responsibility of writers to be a witness. Regrettably I did not get to attend either the workshop or the talk. Regardless I am influenced to write a devotional on the thought of it alone, hopefully linking the masterpiece God’s creation in you to A Love Song, a Book, and a Healing Heart.
Scripture: My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses for the king; my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer.
Psalms 45:1:1 (NIV)
Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever:
Isaiah 30:8 (KJV)
“If only my words were written in a book— better yet, chiseled in stone! Still, I know that God lives—the One who gives me back my life— and eventually he’ll take his stand on earth. And I’ll see him—even though I get skinned alive! — see God myself, with my very own eyes. Oh, how I long for that day!
Job 19:23-27 (MSG)
“If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.”
John 15:7
You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Psalm 139:13-14 (NIV)
Message: Writing helps us to look inside to see the source of our pain and so to focus a means of healing it. In the writing of it we learn to remember things in new ways. The picture in our mind changes as we learn to live new ways by asking new questions. In writing we explore our words trusting that they might bringing peace to others. We smile through the words in a way that hopefully prompts another to smile. We have been fearfully and wonderfully made with words that heal or hurt, prompt anger or forgiveness. We share love with healing words. Here we believe that one little word can bring forth a flower to bear fruit. Our words frame the future in this world and the next. God’s Word knits us together for a purpose…love.
Pray we know the healing of music, the healing of words, the healing of a book etched on our hearts. Pray we woo nature with words of wisdom that caress our soul. Pray we learn the power of words made sacred by love. Pray our words witness to and praise God. Pray we share a word of love given as way of seeing the masterpieces of God’s creation in others now healed.
Blessings,
John Lawson
Daily Devotionals 