Monday in The Week of The 2nd Sunday of Easter (04/20/09)

How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!

--Psalm 133:1

It's free agency that gets us in trouble. Mentally and spiritually, we occasionally wander off on our own and isolate ourselves from one other. We prepare little, delicate resentments toward folks we are angry with. We become experts at rationalization, but we keep it all to ourselves, of course; it wouldn't be "polite" to turn on a caustic torrent of words.

The goodness and pleasantry, of which the psalmist writes, does not occur when we pretend to be unified. Pretending to be unified produces only fake goodness and fake pleasantry. Living together in unity -- the genuine article! -- takes effort, but the results are real goodness and real pleasantry.

Jesus Himself didn't take unity for granted. He prayed for it:

I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

--John 17:20-23

No free agency there!

PD