Blog # 31 WORDS IN ACTION

Blog # 29 WORDS IN ACTION If ever you have dropped a heavy wrench on your toe or had the experience of someone close a car door on your finger you know how a simple action that occurs in a brief moment can have an effect that lasts for a long while. Two weeks later our toe is still sore and our finger is still colorful. Something similar is true not only of wrenches that fall on toes or doors that close on fingers but of anything we do or say that affects the relationship we have with one another. For example, isn't it easy to recall something that someone said to us perhaps last week, just a few kind words, that had an effect upon our whole day? Conversely, we could perhaps recall an unkind word the someone spoke to us in the morning that caused the remainder of our day to be difficult and sad. The words and actions of those around us and our thoughts words and actions have an effect upon our world and ourselves that lasts beyond the duration of the thought word or deed itself. You write a poem for someone you love and he/she saves it for the rest of his/her life. You express a few words of anger toward a person and it may take a week to heal the injury you have done. The words of the Bible can have a similar effect upon us. If we are in the habit of reading the Bible faithfully each morning, even for a few minutes, throughout the day it tends to have an influence upon us. This influence certainly seems to be part of the intention God had in giving us the bible. In giving us the words of the prophets and the story of the life of Jesus God did not intend merely to point out to us the wisdom of the prophets or aquaint us with the historical details of the life of Jesus. Rather it would seem God wanted us to sharethe wisdom of the prophets, to understand and reproduce in our lives the experience of Jesus as God's Son. In other words, what Jesus said and did in His life here on earth was to have a lasting effect upon our lives today. This is the way holy men and women throughout the hitory of the Church have always related to the Bible, making it come alive in their everyday experience of the life of Jesus in them. (Gal 2: 20). Here it is in the prayer of Jesus to the Father the night before He died for us: "...that they may be one , as we are one,I living in them, you living in me...so that your love may live in them and I may live in them."(Jn 17:23,26).