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Morning Meditation
July 16, 2026
Reading: 1 John 4:7-10
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Meditation by Glenn Beamer
This past Saturday we commended our fellow parishioner & friend Cannie Shafer to God’s hands. In his mercifully brief homily our rector shared his spot-on perception that the word “Diffusion” best described Cannie’s grace and lifetime of contributions to her family, her friends, her profession and vocations, and our parish.
Of the thousands of words Peter could have chosen, diffusion struck me as being most apt for Cannie. The last time I talked with Cannie was just before a 9:30 liturgy in May or June when she returned to her role as a Eucharistic minister after completing cancer treatments. For several years Cannie reliably volunteered in the parish house one or two days a week. Understandably she took a break when her cancer was diagnosed. On that spring day I deadpanned “You know Cannie, while your sabbatical is open ended, the work is really piling up. You’re really just taxing yourself at this point.” Cannie laughed as if I had uttered the first joke on earth.
If love among us on earth means being willing to surrender the best of yourself to convey God’s love than Cannie surrendered much of herself to her students, her players, her relatives, and her friends. Paradoxically her surrenders never diminished God’s love for her or her love for us. Her surrenders enabled us and others to grow in God’s love.
What strikes me about Cannie’s diffusion of God’s love is that it required extraordinary security and discipline. To emit so much of God’s love Cannie had to be secure in God’s love for her, secure that she was indeed a gift to all of us. Whether she was endowed with it innately or more likely learned it as she grew up, Cannie’s gift was also the result of discipline – of discerning how to grow in God’s love so that she could convey love in so many ways to so many people. Sharing God’s love was neither serendipitous nor happenstance, it was the result of decades of humble practice, learning, and even making mistakes along the way. The irony of Cannie’s gifts was that she made sharing them appear effortless; they weren’t.
Cannie was the embodiment of the scripture passage from 1 John. She genuinely revealed, “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”
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