Prayer for the week...

My wife found this one from John Wesley:

I am no longer my own but yours,
Put me to what you will
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for you or laid aside for you.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to Your pleasure and disposal
And now glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
You are mine and I am yours. So be it.
And this covenant now made on earth, let it be satisfied in heaven.

This is one we should pray slowly and often...

The bottom line is the moral question...

I am not a big Newsweek fan, but this article really summed up to me the difference between the Canadian and the US perspective on Universal Health Care. It's a question that doesn't get as much play as "How do we afford it?" (another great question) and "Shouldn't the government leave me alone?", but it is, from my perspective the most important question - "Is for-profit health care really a moral option?"

The fundamental truth about health care in every country," notes Princeton professor Uwe Reinhardt, one of the world's preeminent health-care economists, "is that national values, national character, determine how each system works."

Read the rest of the article here.

It's in all of us...

My prayers go out to all the wounded and the families of the fallen from the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, today. Although no one can know the motives behind something like this, it reminds me of what Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago as he writes about what he took to be the great moral gift that he had received in prison.

"It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an uprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: they destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more."

I am convinced that we cannot continue in the path we are heading without destroying ourselves. The way of Jesus is the only answer that deals with both the beauty of the image of God in humanity and the transformation necessary for the evil that lies within us.