The truth is I don’t want to live in a state of unknowing. I’d rather settle in cozily with the unwrapped mysteries of Christmas morning than experience the Advent uncertainty that must have thrilled the first hearers of John, who knew the source of the prophecy, but had no earthly idea how it might be coming true.
What Jesus calls us to search for is the more difficult hunt: not the signs of the end, but the signs of redemption, the signals that the Kingdom of God is nearer than anyone imagined or expected.
Our lives are to be lived out with the urgency inherent in Mark’s ancient words not that we might be saved for future reward but that we might live now in the fullness to which God in Christ has called us by doing our part to bring God’s realm on earth.
There is a spark of the divine image in every life. And if that spark is to burn on and burn a little more brightly tomorrow than it does today, it simply has to find some place of welcome in this world, a place where hospitality has been extended even to it. It’s how we were made by the
Both Martha and Mary truly see Jesus. It’s striking how truly seeing is a porthole into the presence of divinity. One wonders if it is no accident that our Creator attached the ducts from which our tears flow to the organ of sight–the eyes–our windows into the divine.
What healing in ourselves and in our world might result if we, like a son of Timaeus on the roadside one day, walked away from all the false and lesser stories and into the good and blessed cosmos of Jesus?
Can you love this little life of yours even when you can’t control it? Can you believe that you are loved even inside the whirlwind?
So, what if Christians came to be known not as those people who think they know how to fix everybody else in the world but as people who believe that we are changed as our lives are bound together with all kinds of other lives. Maybe even the lives of people who believe that faithfulness can look like hopelessness,
When the storms and winds bear down on us, the masks are torn off our faces. Our innermost souls are now bare to God and everyone and we become in touch with a greater reality – the reality that a good life is not about reward or punishment. It is instead about living faithfully, step by step in a