Luke 10:25-37 – The Parable of the Good Samaritan

Along the highways and byways of life and the ministry, we have seen, met and heard not a few who in many sense are just like the wounded man in the Parable. Robbed, beaten, stripped and left half-dead by life’s events and ministry demands. Each feeling sidelined, abandoned, forgotten, used and abused and now alienated in one’s own isolated island of inner pain and struggle. Helpless and hopeless, some are feeling so desperate and beyond reach.

It has been along this “highways and byways” since 1991 that we have also seen how the Good Samaritan, the Rejected One, coming and moving towards the wounded ones with mercy and great compassionate love. With gentle tenderness how He attended and tended to each woundedness first without and then within, bringing about both soul-care and soul-cure of the human body and heart. And we have been privileged to be His “own donkey” traveling alongside in order to carry these into His Inn of restorative and redemptive love by returning to the spiritual disciplines of Biblical Meditation, Spiritual Direction, Silence and Solitude, and Reflective Journaling. All these involving intent Listening in the Inn of God’s Heart.

“…Do this and you shall live” is precisely what we have witnessed all these years of how the wounded ones gradually, day by day, came to life as a result of having been into the Inn of God’s Heart and have listened with and deeply in the core of their whole being. It is through the restorative and redemptive Love of a God Who do love us with all His soul, heart, strength and mind that we in turn can love Him and self and our neighbors with all our soul, heart, strength and mind. For apart from Christ we can do nothing, not even to love God, let alone to love our wounded self and our broken neighbors, yes, even the ones who have robbed, beaten, stripped and left us half-dead.