大象传媒

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Julia Loveless

Good morning. Do you remember the film Sliding Doors? It was a simple premise: how someone鈥檚 life can spin out in two dramatically different directions from a brief moment or choice. By the end of the film, the two versions of the main character鈥檚 life are completely unrecognisable from each other.

It鈥檚 something like the butterfly effect - a tiny thing, a tiny change, over time, has a massive impact on how things turn out. And I think we all understand this from experiences in own lives, to an extent. If you take all of our choices, our subtle, innumerable, every day choices all of our life long - we see that we are constantly forming ourselves into either a heavenly creature or a hellish creature. In other words, as CS Lewis says, 鈥渆ither into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with
other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself; to be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.鈥� And this process is active and happening all the time - it happens when I decide to honour - or not honour - the people around me, when I decide to abuse my body, rather than respect and love it, when I choose to belittle rather than elevate, when I choose to dismiss rather than accept and embrace.

God, I realise, once again, that I am being constantly formed by my little, subtle every day decisions. Help me today to direct those decisions in a way that honours you, that offers love to those around me and that respects the gift of my own life and body.

Amen.