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MY SUNDAY JOURNAL
By Dalton Roberts
IPS Features
1-19-03
STRONGER AND STRONGER INSIDE
Twenty years ago I bought a book titled "Twenty-seven Translations
of the Bible." Actually, it is not 27 translations but the best of
27 translations. I would never part with that book.
One verse came to life for me on this day in 1988 when I was doing my
morning meditation. It reads, "He who has clean hands shall be
stronger and stronger."
Surely you have noticed a quiet strength in people who simply live good
lives. Just to be in their presence is to have strength and goodness
imparted to us.
"So," you might be thinking, "Jesus had clean hands and
it got him killed." No, it just got his body killed and our bodies
are the most impermanent part of us. Those who had been around him daily
for three years assimilated so much of His quiet strength, the power of
his clean hands, that they, too, became stronger and stronger.
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King's birthday. His body was killed in
Memphis but each year he grows stronger and stronger. The power of his
words makes the timid brave. It made a tiny little black woman named
Rosa Parks refuse to move to the back of a bus and cower down like a
worthless, inferior person. It made her realize the same God who made
the president made her and therefore, she was just as important in His
eternal scales. The power imparted to us by King and Parks makes people
stand and risk their lives for justice.
The greatest power of all truths comes when they are personalized. As I
personalized "he who has clean hands shall be stronger and
stronger," I saw the highest meaning is that a person who has clean
hands becomes stronger and stronger inside. Inside their own being!
Every time we do right just because it is right, we strengthen the
muscles in our own souls. We sense a Presence and it is more than the
presence of God. It is the presence of everyone who has ever done the
right thing just because it was the right thing.
Hebrews mentions a "cloud of witnesses" to our lives and when
you read the chapter preceding that verse, it mentions a long list of
people who did right simply because it was right. They are with us.
Their strength has become our strength.
Once we experience that quiet inner strength and joy, and we do
experience it every time we do the right thing even in the smallest
decisions, we cannot be satisfied to sell our souls, to blithely stand
by while people are mistreated. And it's not necessarily a religious
thing. I know an agnostic who lives his life this way and he inspires
me. It's the best way to live.
These universal laws are set up to reward anyone of any belief system or
of no belief system. The truth sets you free and seeing any part of any
truth sets you free to the full extent of the power of that truth.
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