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, that wealth can look like poverty, that the fullest life can look empty.
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 murky, often unfair world.
“Perhaps the question James is pressing upon us all is, “Will you turn your attention, turn your desires and your fears and your hurts, but also your joy and your hope and your gratitude, will you practice turning ever more of yourself and your life toward the aliveness of God that lives between us? Such turnings, such prayers, such intercessions really do still have the power to heal.”