Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Monday, September 16, 2024
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Nothing we have belongs to us. You can take this story as a horrific example of God’s capricious testing of people, and a bewildering demand for human sacrifice if you want to. You can see God as cruel and nothing like the loving God you believe in. And that’s fine. Sometimes I look at it that way, too.
But these days, I’m far more likely to look at it metaphorically and ask myself what I’m hanging onto that gets in the way of my relationship with God. Early in recovery, I was challenged to respond to the writing prompt “Abstinence is the most important thing in my life.” Lots of people balk at this, horrified that we should put anything before our loved ones or even God. But the point is that if I am abusing my substance of choice (in my case food), I am making that substance my god, and I have zero chance of a relationship with God whatsoever. I had to sacrifice the “drug” that I’d been using to numb the pain of my chaotic, unmanageable life. As long as I held onto it, I wasn’t capable of fully showing up for my loved ones, or my employers, or my friends.
Anything that we put before God becomes our god. And I will tell you in no uncertain terms that the moment I became willing to sacrifice compulsive eating through working a rigorous recovery program, and at the same time sacrifice everything else in my life that wasn’t God, God showed up and gave me back everything good I was willing to stop worshipping and more. My relationships with my children, my friends, my colleagues, my family, even my then-husband vastly improved—flourished. God knew that I had not withheld from her the thing I was clinging to most tightly, the thing I was using to cope with my crazy life. God knew that I was willing to let go of my need to control and trust her with absolutely everything. And that was the beginning.
What am I holding onto that needs to get out of the way of my relationship with God?
