Listen

I will give thanks to you with a heart that does right as I learn your righteous rules. I will keep your statutes. Please don’t leave me all alone!

How can young people keep their paths pure? By guarding them according to what you’ve said.

Psalm 119:7-9

Think

Living in gratitude to God is a powerful, healing practice. It begins when we come to realize an eternal truth: there is no proper way to follow these righteous religious rules for living without God’s help. Whether we are young or old, we can depend on the presence, power, and guidance of God in life’s joys and sorrows.

Freedom does not mean unlimited opportunity to do whatever we want. There are sacred rules and statutes that limit and proscribe our behavior choices. The intention is that one person’s exercise of freedom does not take away someone else’s human rights. Freedom in Christ points toward living free to honor God and love our neighbors as ourselves.

Kamal Hassan

Pray

Holy Constant Companion, hear me as I express my gratitude for the rules for living you have shared with us. I need your divine help to follow them, because without you I can do nothing. Strengthen my resolve to free myself from the power of sin that causes separation from your will and alienation from people you have created us to join with to build a new heaven and earth. Amen.

Go

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Blackbird fly, blackbird fly
Into the light of a dark black night

John Lennon/Paul McCartney in “Blackbird” (1968)