Lent Devotional 2021 - Pittsburg - Flipbook - Page 21
PRAYER
“Abba!” Father!” Beyond the law, I see your grace in the
glory of the Cross. It’s finished! Yes, the work is done through
Christ, your only Son. And so, I have started on that road of
freedom, faith and love. Lord, help me rest, yet daily run the
race, and rise with Christ above. Amen!
MONDAY, MARCH 15, 2021
The Rev. Deborah Evanovich ’94
SCRIPTURE
Jeremiah 16:1-21
1 The word of the LORD came to me: 2 You shall not take a
wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place.
3 For thus says the LORD concerning the sons and daughters
who are born in this place, and concerning the mothers who
bear them and the fathers who beget them in this land:
4 They shall die of deadly diseases. They shall not be
lamented, nor shall they be buried; they shall become like
dung on the surface of the ground. They shall perish by the
sword and by famine, and their dead bodies shall become
food for the birds of the air and for the wild animals of the
earth. 5 For thus says the LORD: Do not enter the house
of mourning, or go to lament, or bemoan them; for I have
taken away my peace from this people, says the LORD, my
steadfast love and mercy. 6 Both great and small shall die in
this land; they shall not be buried, and no one shall lament
for them; there shall be no gashing, no shaving of the head
for them. 7 No one shall break bread for the mourner, to
offer comfort for the dead; nor shall anyone give them the
cup of consolation to drink for their fathers or their mothers.
8 You shall not go into the house of feasting to sit with them,
to eat and drink. 9 For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God
of Israel: I am going to banish from this place, in your days
and before your eyes, the voice of mirth and the voice of
gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the
bride. 10 And when you tell this people all these words, and
they say to you, “Why has the LORD pronounced all this
great evil against us? What is our iniquity? What is the sin
that we have committed against the LORD our God?”
11 then you shall say to them: It is because your ancestors
have forsaken me, says the LORD, and have gone after
other gods and have served and worshiped them, and have
forsaken me and have not kept my law; 12 and because you
have behaved worse than your ancestors, for here you are,
every one of you, following your stubborn evil will, refusing
to listen to me. 13 Therefore I will hurl you out of this land
into a land that neither you nor your ancestors have known,
and there you shall serve other gods day and night, for I will
show you no favor. 14 Therefore, the days are surely coming,
says the LORD, when it shall no longer be said, “As the LORD
lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of
Egypt,” 15 but “As the LORD lives who brought the people
of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the
lands where he had driven them.” For I will bring them back
to their own land that I gave to their ancestors. 16 I am now
sending for many fishermen, says the LORD, and they shall
catch them; and afterward I will send for many hunters, and
they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and
out of the clefts of the rocks. 17 For my eyes are on all their
ways; they are not hidden from my presence, nor is their
iniquity concealed from my sight. 18 And I will doubly repay
their iniquity and their sin, because they have polluted my
land with the carcasses of their detestable idols, and have
filled my inheritance with their abominations. 19 O LORD,
my strength and my stronghold, my refuge in the day of
trouble, to you shall the nations come from the ends of the
earth and say: Our ancestors have inherited nothing but lies,
worthless things in which there is no profit. 20 Can mortals
make for themselves gods? Such are no gods! 21 “Therefore
I am surely going to teach them, this time I am going to teach
them my power and my might, and they shall know that my
name is the LORD.”
DEVOTIONAL
My house of cards was beginning to fall all around me.
Fifteen years of leading ministry in the church was going
to disappear to a temporary supply because I could no
longer make it through a Celebration of Worship without
running to the bathroom. Six months had gone by—months
spent suffering pneumonia . . . whooping cough . . . a
strep infection . . . the indignity of always hiding behind a
bathroom door—before someone was able to put a name on
the problem: Crohn’s Disease.
All these infirmities left me stranded on a couch . . . under
a quilt . . . staring at the ceiling. No television. No reading.
No music. Just biding my time and drug trials until I was so
emaciated that, unable to walk, I entered the hospital in a
wheelchair. The cards kept falling.
Crohn’s Disease is supposedly an inherited disease, but my
genome could not be identified in any of my ancestors that
I knew. It was hidden in the very distant lineage only to be
shaken awake in my body—probably due to the stress of
pastoring a church in crisis.
In the next 14 years there would be surgeries, transfusions, IV
drugs, breast cancer and radiation, and more surgery. At least
twice, there was no assurance I would make it through the
night. But I did—with the power and might of God!
God’s power and might,
seen in the faces of those who prayed when I could not . . .
felt in the hands that ministered to me through each new
hospitalization and home recovery . . .
heard in the voices of those who pulled me out of the mire of
self-pity . . .
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