Sick?

Are you sick or afflicted?

No, thanks, I’ll be alright.

Come and I will heal you.

What marvelous opportunities to experience God’s compassionate mercy are lost because I refuse to recognize my neediness and ask for help?

Work

My Father worketh, and I work.

I am startled.

Maybe because I picture God as a tranquil part of a perennial Sabbath,

I have imagined Him merely speaking, and it was done.

The Sabbath is but one in seven days: the same God moves mountains, divides waters, and works on dusty creations.

Although He may rest on the Sabbath, He never sleeps.

And whenever He sees me ready to receive His help, even on the Sabbath, My Father worketh, and I work.

God is not a God of laziness: His miracles are not effortless.

In spite of the pain it entails, God works hard to bless me.

Real, exertional work is a part of celestial glory.

Climbing

Whose ox have I taken? Whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed?

Not that I could be justified by these questions: there is a competition for things: Whom have I stepped on in process of climbing? How will I reduce the damage that I do and delegate wrongs that I cannot right into the hands of God, who can?

Sinners

A woman which was a sinner washed the Savior’s feet with her tears. The Pharisee thought that Jesus should not have let the woman touch Him.

Are sinners best abandoned as untouchables?

I should wrap my arms around sinners, trying to show them the Father’s love, as the Prodigal’s father who saw him when he was yet a great way off and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

Will I be tainted by having a sinner for a friend?

I should strive to continually include sinners in my circle of close associates: they that are whole need no physician, and friendship is a celestial therapy.

Will God judge me “guilty by association”?

To the contrary, the Judgment may hold me guilty by dissociation: For I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

I have an unspoken aim never to have sinner for a close associate. Why should I strive to be opposite from the Savior? Rather, I should aim to have sinners as my close associates.