Read by the Word – Principles Day 17

Day Seventeen — The Second Way of Service: Study
‘This is eternal life: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.’ John 17.3

True knowledge is knowledge of God. Tertiaries therefore give priority to devotional study of scripture as one of the chief means of attaining that knowledge of God that leads to eternal life.

To know you is eternal life: life full,
life lived, not just endured; a joyous gift
to give away; on course when set adrift,
buoyed only on your tide of love for all.
How to receive that gift, to heed that call
to die that we may live? With ego left
behind, naked and bruised, we float bereft
of anchors, moorings, havens great and small,

and wait. Wait out the murmurings of the world,
and wait. Wait out the mutterings of our fear;
wait on the Word made flesh, attend and hear
the words that witness to the one true Word,
the cloud of witnesses to our true Friend
who reads us, knows us, loves us to the end.