In our lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, the strange signs of wind and fire point not to themselves but to the wild power of the Holy Spirit unleashed not to scatter but to gather, unleashed not to destroy but to re-create.
Jesus says that love is what makes space for the truth to emerge. Love and truth are twin pillars, we might even say, that hold things up so the walls we hide behind can finally come down. Only in truthfulness and love will we become one as Jesus and the God he still draws us to are one.
I don’t always know how to do this: how to love this broken place and these broken people and my own broken self. I’m wondering now if staying put is in and of itself an act of love.
What might it look like if all of the sustaining energy in your life and mine were to come directly from the life of Jesus? So much so that if we were to lose contact with his life, we’d wither? Just as crucially, what is the essential, life giving energy of Jesus?
In reading or singing of the beautiful imagery of Psalm 23, we may be too quick to enter the realm of metaphor and not appreciate the real places being described. Just as young Joe and Charlie were blessed to grow up in and then fall in love with the Old Forest, we are blessed to have real places to go to in our city to lie down in green pastures, and reflect beside still waters.