Sacred Ground
Good Morning Friends,
There have been a lot of auto related deaths of kids. Perhaps you know one of them. As one drives along the Florida roads you can see the memorial flowers. Doves, broken hearts and crosses lovingly arranged at the places of what we call accidents. Hispanics call them descansos, or resting places. Similar memorials, street shrines, are placed at the site where people have died because of violence. One of my friends movingly described a highway mowing crew carefully trimming around flowers that had been planted at one of these roadside memorials. As he was sharing the image I know he was thinking of his son who died from injuries sustained in an auto accident. Technically I am not sure if it is legal to even put theses memorials up but it is worse to take them down before the grieving has ended. Some think them unlawful taking of public lands for private purposes and others think them forms of creative expressions to be protected under the First Amendment. I think these places reconnect the social and the spiritual and are not private at all. I think that these places where a loved one breathed their last breathe…these places where souls are taken somehow become, at least for a time, Sacred Ground.
Scripture: To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
1 Corinthians 12:7 (NRSV)
But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.
1 Corinthians 12:18 (NRSV)
“Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”
1 Corinthians 15:54-55 (NIV)
Message: It is beyond my mind’s ability to fully grasp why things happen the way they do. I do not know why the Spirit has been placed in me. Oh I know of being born again, but like my own birth, how it happens just boggles my mind for it is not what I have done but the grace of God. And why I receive it and it is removed from others, I have no answer. The Holy Spirit is the gift of life that is nothing less than God dwelling in us and living out His life through us, and carrying out His purposes as well. And I am convinced that the Spirit will manifest Himself through your life, not for your good alone, but for the benefit of those around you. The Spirit has an assignment for you that may well live beyond your individual body as the collective body is equipped in ways by the presence of God for the work that needs to be done. Perhaps so it is with those who have died on our roadsides and somehow they are connected to a blessing for people to slow down to a safe speed and remember they are not God but might well be too part of a living body that lives on. Friends, somehow when we reconnect the social reality and the spiritual we heal the damage from the violence done when they are separated. For me these roadside memorials are manifestations of the Spirit that will in time overflow into all things.
Pray for the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in the lives of those around us. Pray we are equipped for a good work. Pray that even in death and beyond death that the Spirit will continue to work benefiting others. Pray we realize that we each are a vital part of a living body placed here to glorify God.
Blessings,
John Lawson
Daily Devotionals 