At Landis Homes we begin many of our gatherings with a meditation and prayer. In this blog I share a meditation by Landis Homes Chaplain Anne Kaufman Weaver in a morning devotions broadcast on our in-house TV channel at Landis Homes, and which was attended by the Landis Communities and Landis Homes Boards of Directors and Leadership Team at the start of a morning of board meetings. At the end of the devotions Board Members, Leadership Team, and Pastoral Services team members joined in song, part of which is captured in this video.
God Knows Me and Loves Me
Good morning, I am Chaplain Anne Weaver. Today is a special day. The Boards of Directors of Landis Homes and Landis Communities are meeting today on campus. Welcome to you and thank you for serving in this way. We are grateful for your wisdom and dedication. Larry Zook, our President, has invited the Boards and the Leadership Team to start their day here in West Bethany Chapel with us. I know that we cannot see you and you can only see the backs of their heads but the Spirit of God and WLH is joining us together for TV devotions this morning. I will share some devotional thoughts, Larry will introduce a new Vice President, and then we will sing a closing song together.
For the past five weeks, I have been using Bruce Epperly’s book The Power of Affirmative Faith on TV devotions. For those of you who are keeping track in your journals, the next affirmation of faith is “God Knows Me and Loves Me” 2x. Listen to the first six verses of Psalm 139.
1 You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain
The psalmist describes a loving God who is present, active, involved, attentive, interested, perceptive, discerning, focused, and inspiring. Those are also aspirational, descriptive words for our board members and leadership team members (repeat). Perhaps we can conclude from Psalm 139 that God is not the opposite: absent, inactive, aloof, dense, apathetic, impulsive, disinterested, and boring.
We worship a God who knows us and loves us. I admit that I do not fully understand how it is possible for God to know each of us and love each of us. I begin to understand the magnitude of this affirmation of faith by practicing it myself. For two years now, I have been getting to know you and you are getting acquainted with me. I learn something else about God’s capacity to love as I build relationships with God’s people. What a blessing it is to learn to know new persons and what it tells us about God’s creative and diverse world.
I witness you welcoming new persons into the community. The other day during Lititz House devotions, there was a woman sitting by herself on the far side of the living room. Another resident said, “Someone should sit next to her.” I simply smiled and she got up off the chair, grabbed onto her walker, and moved across the room to sit next to the woman. Simple acts of hospitality best describe living out Psalm 139. We learn about God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves. Your homework opportunity for the next week is to get to know someone new or go deeper in a conversation with someone you think you know. In so doing, I believe you will meet God face to face.
