For Meditation: "and when my all of strength shall fail"

"What though my shrinking flesh complain
  And murmur to contend so long?
I rise superior to my pain;
  When I am weak, then I am strong;
And when my all of strength shall fail
I shall with the God-man prevail.

Yield to me now--for I am weak
 But confident in self-despair!
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak,
  Be conquered by my instant prayer;
Speak, or thou never hence shall move,
  And tell me if thy name is LOVE.

'Tis Love!  'Tis Love!  Thou diedst for me;
  I hear thy whisper in my heart,
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
  Pure Universal Love thou art;
To me, to all, thy bowels move--
  Thy nature, and thy name, is LOVE."

Charles Wesley, "Wrestling Jacob"

Drugs or Jesus

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.”  St. Luke 21:34

I’d been asked to give the prayer for the Law Day ceremony.  This was an annual event in the little town where I last served, a gathering of the County Bar Association in the chamber of our handsome Victorian Courthouse.  They’d recognize new lawyers, remember those who had died.  There was a prayer and then an address, presented this year by Judge Burns, long respected on the bench, looking the quintessence of judicial dignity in his long black robes.

I was expecting something suitably grand and rhetorical on the meaning of law, liberally sprinkled with quotations from the Constitution and Blackstone’s Commentaries.  But Judge Burns told us instead about a pending crisis.  Cheap heroin was beginning to flood into our rural community.  The police aren’t equipped to handle it, he said.  We don’t have nearly enough treatment facilities.  Petty crime is going to go through the roof.  We’re going to see overdoses among the young, a whole new class of people incapable of holding jobs and participating in civic life.