Good morning…
“What a wonderful message, Sue!” she emailed after yesterday’s post, Follow The Purple Path. “I just love anything purple. In the area around our farm in NC, people paint purple lines on trees around their property to indicate no hunting is allowed there. There is a big deer hunting season up there. And we have put purple in our trees. From now on, it will make me think of your line, ‘Do no harm.'”
“What a great addition to what God is teaching us,” I replied. “Maybe I was walking through a ‘no hunting zone’ in the Pennsylvania woods. By pondering the wisdom of this little brown book, Three Simple Rules: A Wesleyan Way of Living by Rueben P. Job, might we envision a purple “no hurting zone” painted for all people created and loved by God?” 💜
“I too will determine every day that my life will always be invested in the effort of bringing healing instead of hurt; wholeness instead of division; and harmony with the ways of Jesus rather than with the ways of the world,” writes Rueben on page 31. “When I commit myself to this way, I must see each person as a child of God – a recipient of love unearned, unlimited, and undeserved – just like myself. And it is this vision of every other person as the object of God’s love and deep awareness that I too live in that loving Presence that can hold me accountable to my commitment to do no harm.”
“Perhaps the greatest consequence of all is that we are formed and transformed to live more and more as Jesus lived,” Job concludes. “And this personal transformation leads to transformation of the world around us.”
Now all of us, with our faces unveiled, reflect the glory of the Lord as if we are mirrors; and so we are being transformed, metamorphosed, into His same image from one radiance of glory to another, just as the Spirit of the Lord accomplishes it (2 Corinthians 3:18, VOICE).
The Spirit of the living Lord accomplishes our gradual transformation by leading us on the purple path through the “no hurting zone.”
…Sue…