Dreadful thoughts

I was praying this morning as is my routine. Into my thoughts came a matter that I have tried to avoid thinking about because it fills me with such horror. I can see euthanasia approaching in this country. The clouds are darkening and a storm of evil is approaching. I worry and feel helpless.

There will be poor souls who choose to die before their time because they hate to be a burden. There will be evil souls who manipulate their relatives to take their own lives in order to gain their wealth. There will be deluded souls who glory in “putting people out of their misery”. Gradually, as this country follows countries who have made this choice, there will be children killed because they have some deficiency or are in trauma. Healing will be replaced by extermination, no matter how well it masquerades as compassion. All of these things will happen and the blood of the innocent will flow.

What am I to do? I am nothing, powerless. My prayer today began with these negative thoughts.

Remedy

I continue praying. He who has come into this world, the Lord Jesus, tells me to come in prayer with him to the Father. I am standing within the Trinity. The world is small and utterly incapable of resisting for long the divine will. He tells me that this Trinity is my true home. I am to worship our Father and learn the peace that all is still in his hands. There will come the day when people see the folly of all of this. The realisation will gradually dawn and these evil laws will be repealed.

What will make the difference? The growth of the kingdom, the growing willingness of people to make their home in the Trinity, and join in the transforming prayer of contemplation. It is none other than gradually letting the knowing of God our Father fill their hearts and minds. As they grow in loving union with him, their persons become increasingly enlightened, and light spreads in real but hidden ways into the hearts of others. That is the dynamic of intercessory prayer.

Such prayer reveals the inalienable plan of God to gather mankind into his Trinity of love. Increasingly, we become aware of the confidence of God that this is already accomplished in heaven and the victory of truth and life are busily developing here on earth, even though darkness is gathering over the country at this moment.

Elijah’s crisis

In a time when idolatry dominated Israel, Elijah summoned the priests of the idol Baal to a sacrifice competition in front of all the people. If their God consumed by fire the victim they offered, it would prove that he was real. Of course, that did not happen, but the God of Israel consumed the sacrifice of Elijah by fire. He demonstrated in the most dramatic gesture that the God of Israel is real. All the prophets of Baal were slaughtered. Yet the pagan Queen Jezebel struck back violently murdering all Elijah's fellow prophets.

He flees into the desert and gives up. It is all too much. But food is given him which enables him to make the long journey to the Mountain of God.

The journey, though physical, is really an entering into the depth of his own soul where he longs to find the strength of God blazing like fire, unleashed like the earthquake and irresistible like the howling storm. But instead he finds the “small voice” which emerges in the stillness of contemplation and lifts the corner of the veil covering the future to prove that thing will change.

A new beginning is starting. He is to carry on step by step, faithfully following the path that God has set for him. It is in his perseverance in faith that the deepest battle is being won. God has made provision for the next, stage of the kingdom to emerge, and Elijah’s faithfulness has aided that.

Of course we have to do all that is in our power to right the wrong of Euthanasia, but if we neglect contemplative intercession, we will have seriously underperformed.