Tuesday in the Fourth Week of Lent at Mississippi Abbey

The “Daily Reflections for Lent” booklets that some of you are reading noted this morning that the word John uses for “told” (as when the cured man “told the religious leaders Jesus was the one who made him well”) actually means “announce.” Being “made well” is another way of saying the man had a conversion experience. At depth, the meaning and purpose of his life changed. That’s the kind of thing one wants to announce!   

And the religious leaders objected. Jesus had not played His cards according to Hoyle. In their eyes, the man had had an unauthorized conversion!

What happened to him, it happened to me and I’d guess it happened to each of you, too, what happened to him is that he had an experience of being loved like he’d never been loved before…and like he could never be loved by anyone else again. God has the effect on people. It doesn’t give them errorless judgment or flawless behavior, but it does change what matters most and over time that affects those other things. After all, they have to be done freely!

And I’ll bet that experience brought him to tears because it was so out of proportion to anything he did or could have done to deserve it.

It happened that way to me. That is why how I got here is more important than being here. I’d be very happy if it happened that way to you.