Be cheerful; Church Fathers: Day 118

You can’t be a Christian and a grump at the same time, the visionary Hermas is told. If you let grief take hold of you,it will lead you away from God.

Get rid of your grief. Don’t crush the Holy Spirit who lives in you, or he might withdraw from you and plead against you to God.

For the Spirit of God, who has been given to us to dwell in this body, doesn’t stand for grief or narrowness. So put on cheerfulness, which is always agreeable and acceptable to God, and rejoice in it. For every cheerful man does what is good, and pays attention to what is good, and despises grief.

But the sorrowful man always acts wickedly. First, he acts wickedly because he grieves the Holy Spirit, which was given to us as a cheerful Spirit. Second, when he grieves the Holy Spirit, he does what is evil, neither pleading to the Lord nor confessing it to him. –Hermas, Commandment 9

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

Sometimes it’s hard not to grieve—at losing a loved one, for example. But do I let the grief run its course and be done, or do I reject opportunities to cheer up and instead wallow in my grief ?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord, remember all the people I have loved, and let me have faith that they rest in the land of the living, in the bosom of Abraham, from which all pain, grief, and mourning have fled.

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