Unleashed: As You Go – Pray

“After the plague the LORD said to Moses and to Eleazar son of Aaron the priest, “Take a census of the whole congregation of the Israelites, from twenty years old and upward, by their ancestral house, everyone in Israel able to go to war.” Numbers 26:1-2

“Close to you I waken in the dead of night,

and start with fear-

are you lost to me once more? Is it always vainly that I seek you,

you, my past?

I stretch my hands out,

And I pray-

and a new thing now I hear:

The past will come to you once more,

and be your life’s enduring part,

through thanks and repentance.

Feel in the past God’s forgiveness and goodness,

Pray him to keep you today and tomorrow.”

These are the words from the last stanza of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem, “The Past.” Our past lives with us forever since our tomorrow will soon be our past. Our past is made up of events both ordinary and spectacular.  However, more importantly, our past is made up of people. Those individuals who shape us, teach us, love us and hurt us. We will remember events that impacted us because of the people who shared the event with us.

Moses has walked faithfully with God through the wilderness leading the nation of Israel. Now God commands Moses to count the people by their family heritage. The census will become a family tree for those getting ready to enter the promised land, a record of faith that has been passed down from one generation to the next and a past that is not always glorious, but a past that will link each generation to the next.

Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell at Tegel shortly before his execution these words to his great nephew on the day of his baptism:

“You are the first of a new generation in our family, and therefore the oldest representative of your generation. You will have the priceless advantage of spending a good part of your life with the third and fourth generation that went before you. Your great-grandfather will be able to tell you, from his own personal memories, of people who were born in the eighteenth century; and one day, long after the year 2000, you will be the living bridge over which your descendants will get an oral tradition of more than 250 years.” 

Biological family trees are important but the richness of your faith family tree will bond generations together. Our faith family trees will include many of our biological family members, but there will be a depth and richness that will be added to the tree from school teachers, neighbors, Sunday school teachers and many more. “To be deeply rooted in the soil of the past makes life harder, but it also makes it richer and more vigorous.” (Bonhoeffer)

Who makes up your faith family? What relationships, writers, artists or places have shaped your ways of believing and worshipping? During a personal spiritual retreat create a faith family tree of spiritual influencers in your life.  Draw a faith family tree, placing yourself at its base, then on the branches and trunk nearest you, write the names of those most directly engaged in your spiritual journey. As you move away from the base, place names or descriptions of other influences on your spiritual life.

Allow this exercise to become holy ground for you as you pray and reflect upon those who God used to water and shape your tree of faith.  Pray over each name, place, event that shaped you. Allow this experience to become a precious and moving time of worship.

“Take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children” Deuteronomy 4:9

God is great,

Pastor Lynn