What path are you traveling?

(Photograph: Pacific Rim Trail, Yachats, Oregon, Julie Cook/ 2013)

This-Worldly Life—July 21, 1944

It is the complete this-worldliness of life that we must first learn how to believe. When we have fully renounced making something out of ourselves—be it a saint or a converted sinner or a church man or woman (a so-called priestly figure!) , a righteous or an unrighteous person, a sick or a healthy person—when we have renounced all of that, we fall completely into God’s arms and into what I call this-worldliness, namely, living in an abundance of tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences, and helplessness. We then take seriously no longer our own suffering, but the suffering of God in the world. We watch with Christ in Gethsemane. This, I think, is faith. This is conversion and in this way we become human beings and Christians (cf. Jer. 45). How can we get carried away with successes or failures if in the life of this world we empathetically suffer the sufferings of God?… I am thankful that I have been able to recognize this and I know that I have been able to do so only on the path that I am now traveling. Therefore, I think gratefully and peacefully about the past and the present.
May God lead us as a friend through these times, but above all, may he lead us to himself.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Letters from Prison

I realize the date on this “letter” from prison is dated actually from yesterday 1944–I thought the message most timely…be it yesterday 1944 or today July 22, 2013….so….On this new day to a new week…will you be taking the right path?