Lord, it is so easy to take things into our own hands,
get ahead of Your timing, mess things up.
How impatient I am!
How arrogant sometimes--
thinking I can bring about justice,
hoping I can precipitate heart change,
believing that I can hasten the coming of Your kingdom
in the souls of other people.
Let me learn from the river, Lord.
Day by day,
year by year,
decade by decade it flows to the sea.
No matter what men do to try to change its course
to accommodate and facilitate their self-serving purposes,
the river persistently, consistently responds
to the magnet of the great waters.
It seeks its own destination from a source deep
in the bedrock of the planet.
For a while men and engineering genius
can reroute the river--
but rise the high floods,
descend the drought years,
the river from its deep source re-carves its path
to the sea, to the arms of the embracing sea.
And in its pure and unquenchable thirst for the sea,
its current carves through any obstacle in its path.
Mountains are dissected; plains are traversed,
valleys are created.
In the natural course of its mission, the river serves.
It carries rich soil to the riverbed farmlands.
It makes a way of transportation across flat stretches of prairie.
It irrigates strips of food-producing and life-sustaining land
in the midst of the desert.
Fish thrive in its cool moving waters.
Birds and wildlife grow fat along its banks.
But all these things are only results,
never for the river's own purpose.
The driving force is just the simple and powerful pull of the sea.
Lord, I want to seek You.
Let the passion of my life be to lose myself in You.
Let the deep desire that springs from the bedrock of my being
be to flow to You.
Keep me unaware of any result
except the deep peace of knowing
that part of my spirit has already reached
its destination and is at rest in You.
May the journey of my life cut its way through any obstacle
for the insatiable hunger to empty myself
into the great sea of Yourself.
You--the Source.
You--the destination.
Whatever else may happen today, let it only and always
be the natural result of a river, flowing to the sea.
