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Namaste


Ezekiel 28:9

Will you still say, “I am a god,” in the presence of those who kill you, though you are but a mortal and no god, in the hands of those who pierce you?

 

Thought for the day – Namaste

Have you ever used the word ‘namaste’. It’s a traditional greeting used in India by Hindus, Buddhists and Jainists. When you say it, you hold your hands together like you’re praying, bow slightly and say ‘namaste’. And in translation it means ‘the sacred in me recognizes the sacred in you’. The god in me recognises the god in you. And I think it has entrenched that new age principle that I am divine. I am my own god.

As Christians, we might read that differently. We are not divine, but we are made in the image of God. But we are definitely mortal. I remember having a conversation with someone who had an eclectic approach to faith. She wanted to take the best bits from every religion and incorporate it into her own faith system (her word not mine). She was dying of cancer and wanted to know what would happen to her after she died. Because in her desire to be as all-embracing of different religions as she could, she hadn’t thought about what was going to happen after she died. Her mortality was causing a very real existential crisis. Death was confronting her ideas of divinity. I can’t remember how the conversation ended. I most certainly would have prayed with her and I hope that the Holy Spirit would have guided her to accepting that Jesus was the only way, I don’t know. Only God does.

We are not gods. At the end we all will have to stand before God and account for our lives. And until Jesus returns in glory, death will always be the great reminder of our mortality.

 

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