Lent Devotions: Choose life

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Editor’s note: This Lent season, Bread Blog is running a series of devotionals written by staff, alumni, and friends of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A).

By Rev. Bentley Stewart

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Choose Life.
Choose the good.
Choose to allow hope to heal your despair.
Choose dissatisfaction with half-truths, easy answers, and alternative facts. 
Choose to use your doubt to guide your quest for the Holy
Choose to refuse fatalism. Choose resilience; it will redeem your imagination.
Choose to transform your rage into fuel for activism.
Choose to march. Choose to organize. Choose to hold leaders accountable.
Choose to resist the temptation to “call out” others with shaming pejoratives.
Choose to call people into this movement for liberating justice.
Choose gender equality. Choose a full-throated proclamation that “Black Lives Matter.”
Choose diversity without division. Choose that vision.
Choose the ancestors. Choose those yet to come. Choose on behalf of seven generations.
Choose multi-dimensional chess without pawns.
Choose the New Heaven. Choose the New Earth. Choose God’s Shalom in the here and now
Choose Justice Now. Choose to bend the moral arc of the universe.
Choose to offer cups of water to the thirsty. Choose to thirst for justice.
Choose to share the food you have. Chose to hunger for righteousness.
Choose hospitality. Choose solidarity with the refugee.
Choose to enter the prison cell and demand that all our relatives be set free.
Choose to sit at the bedside as your loved one chooses their living right up into their dying.
Choose to plant a garden that can hold your grief and feed your body and soul.
Choose to consider the lilies of the field.
Choose lazy afternoons sipping tea and catching up with friends.|
Choose your family. Yes, relatives, choose your family.
Choose the ones that remind you that you are the beloved
Choose the ones who beckon you to manifest the glory of God that is within
Choose to refuse playing small.
Choose to reject the notion that you have to have a perfect offering.
Choose to ring the bells that still can ring.
Choose to dance. Yes relatives, choose to dance.
Choose to dance your weeping until your tears run dry.
Choose to dance to remember that we are bodies.
Choose to dance to remember that God chose to be a body.
Choose to be God’s body. Choose to care tenderly for God’s body.
Choose Heaven. Choose Earth.
Choose water. Choose wind.
Choose the Way,
Choose the Truth,
Choose Life.

Rev. Bentley Stewart is director of student life at Disciples Seminary Foundation in Claremont, Calif., and earned his master of divinity from the San Francisco Theological Seminary

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