I thought of a hundred families and and hundreds more this week mourning the pain, suffering, and loss of their loved ones while the familiar excuses of powerlessness to stop the chain of death and destruction ooze up from every direction. And tears welled in my eyes all over again.
We all belong to the group of things that die and Jesus has joined us on the journey. He not only died for us, he dies with us. He gives us the greatest gift of his presence and he does not hold himself aloof from us or our mortality.
But sometimes He is just the God of carrying on. It’s the work of the saints, and of sinners like us. It is the heroic work of following Jesus to bear our scars and to carry on.
We all make mistakes. We all want forgiveness. At times we all need a Barnabas to stand with us and to help us to reestablish ourselves. We also have friends who, God willing, are the kind of friends who will do just that.
But here’s the problem with walls: as much as we think they keep “undesirable” people out, they also keep the fortunate ones penned in. In the end, both are in a cage. And even a cage of your own making is still a cage.
We ourselves are icons – temples pointing toward God. Quirky and mixed up as we are, we still belong to the body of Christ, and God will use us whenever God can.
“I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me! And why? Because I do not love you? God knows I do!”
How does today compare with days gone by? (Wait–don’t answer that until you’ve read today’s reading from Ecclesiastes.)
by Linda McMillan “The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” ― Robert Frost When I was a little girl I would get together
What if we could see whitewater as an opportunity? We can learn from turbulence, even if the experience itself is far from pleasant. We can learn that overwhelmed doesn’t necessarily mean overcome.