I got up to see the sunrise this morning. Most of you know I am not a morning person, but I got out of bed to confirm for myself what I know to be true in my heart. I needed to see that sun creep up over the edge of the horizon and lift the world into being with its glorious light for yet another day. God does that for us. 

Whether the dawn is absolutely radiant or altogether muted, God faithfully has set the world in motion with sunrise as a part of each day. I like to believe in doing this he sets an example each morning of His faithfulness to His people so that we will respond just as faithfully. How? By solely yielding, giving up or ceasing to resist, what God requires if we love Him, taught to us by His Son, Jesus Christ – that we give our love wholeheartedly to our neighbor. 

I don’t often see the sunrise but I have faith that each day it rises. We walk not by sight but by faith, as I was recently reminded by one of my friends. After hearing Pastor Joel’s sermon Sunday, I add that we should also walk in love. He spoke that it was important for us to love and gather in unity not only with those who are like us, that is easy to do, isn’t it? God’s ask of us is to walk in unity and love with those who are like us as well as those who are not like us. 

That’s always the rub when you have chosen this walk – it is not easy. The choices we are called to make are usually truly simple but can be incredibly difficult to actually choose to live out. 

We fear so much in life when God already knows our fears and is ready to love us. We are reluctant to show who we stand for when God has shown us faithfully through the ages that He stands for us, for we are His children. Our eyes will not open to see what is plainly before us to be seen; when God has been speaking His truths into our hearts from the moment of our first breath in His creation. Our ears cannot hear truth though reverberations round us ring, the music of the spheres. God’s true tones. 

Today, as every day, the sunrise lovingly lifted us into a new day of God’s making. Let us to rise to meet it with the worthiness and grace that God bestows upon each one of us no matter whether others believe we deserve it or not. It is not for others to decide. If they do, they trespass on God’s Holy Ground. Pay them no mind. Look only to God and let His love lift you to a new dawn and a new day and a new life. 

I, for one, yearn to meet God often as he calls me to service in this world. Do you yearn to do the same? Come, let all of us in love add to our own stories each day and share them with the world. You realize, we are known as God’s people by the stories we tell. You will see yourself in the stories of others and you will hear stories that seem new and unlike us. We will be quick to call them unfamiliar and not ours, yet they will continually ring uncomfortably true deep somewhere in us, as if the heart knows what the mind cannot. 

Pray for discernment on why that may be so. Release the things that inhibit you and let yourself be lifted up with love to share. God does not ask anything of us that He has not already shown us. 

~Shauna Weil

A devotion provided by the Devotion Ministry of Goodrich UMC