Hovering Above 2017

Holy Spirit

    With your wind, stir my soul

    With your words, order my day

    With your wings, gather me in

And I will be grateful

I will be glad

Amen

— Jack Levison, 40 Days with the Holy Spirit

As the New Year 2017 is about to dawn, I hope you have identified a Bible reading and reflection plan that will encourage your steps into the new year.  One of the pieces I will be using is cited above and it comes just in time for me, and I am betting for you as well.

Levison begins the 40 days by citing Genesis 1:1-2 and making this comment: “The Bible begins simply — with soup.  Murky, muddy soup. Right where many of us live, smack in the middle of chaos, too much to do and too little time, expectations left unmet, disorganization and disappointment and disasters waiting to happen.  The only glimmer of hope for creation rests in the appearance of the Spirit of God ‘hovering’ over this primal soup, this abyss, this deep.”

How are you coming to 2017?  Do you have any of that murkiness going on in your life?

I appreciate the way Levison goes on to well-describe the use of that word “hover” in the Hebrew Scripture.  It’s the Spirit’s first activity in the Bible and this word only occurs one more time in the Old Testament — Deuteronomy 32:11-12 — when God is an eagle that “stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young; as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions.”  This is a reminder of the tender care of the Holy Spirit hovering above all the times we feel “exasperated by the utter chaos or exhausted by the barrage of demands and responsibilities we bear” into a new year.

I am thankful to be journying in this look at the Holy Spirit into 2017. It’s good news to know that an order will come, that power will stir, and that strength to care will be in our future because the Holy Spirit hovers above our days.

I WILL be grateful, I WILL be glad!

Tony Tench