“To a Pharisee who observed to perfection the purity laws, the idea of a bloody, naked Messiah, powerless and on display before everyone in his helplessness as he died, must have been beyond abhorrent. It must have been incomprehensible. But Paul had been protesting way too much. In his soul he had always been a Jesus-follower.”
“With God, there is no social distancing, masking, or sanitizing. We can just be as we are, without fear, through sickness and health, abnormal times, or regular times. Think how grateful we should be when we finally reach “normal” times again. God will be there waiting for us, just as God is now, by our sides, walking with us.”
“Names transform; the Name-Giver does this
Transcended are circumstance, experience
Soul-name is reborn; renamed by God”
“Last year, after that crazy Lent and Holy Week, it seemed as though Lent never ended. Some of my churchy friends and I joked that the entirety of 2020 was ‘the Lentiest Lent we ever Lented.'”
After well over an hour, with the canopy darkening and the narrow path dimming into that grainy soft focus that comes with the dusk, we were afraid that we might, in fact, be lost in the jungle, reputed still to harbour the occasional tiger, and definitely full of scorpions, spiders, and large and small lizards, along with our baby, toddler, and child. It was too late to turn back; the darkness would be upon us within minutes.
“Is this prayer?
this note
and words
the tapping of keys across the screen
the waiting and wondering.”
“Personally, I have no interest in becoming the matriarch of nations. But I’m hard pressed to know what my deepest yearning would truly be. If God were to make a covenant with me and were to change my name — what do I want most in all the world?”
“We spend our lives learning. Newborns have to learn to breathe and then to suck. The rest is progressive. Children want to know, so they ask, ‘Why?’ with seemingly every other breath. It’s their way of finding out how the world works, something they’re going to need to know, and, I think, they revel in learning about it.”
“What’s probably lost on us, though, as we read this passage, is that “a scene at the well” was a well known plot device of storytellers of the Middle East, including ancient Hebrew stories. Listeners at the time expected stories of encounters of men and women at wells to be betrothal stories, much in the same way we expect the typical encounter in a romantic comedy to be a meeting where the main female character can’t stand the guy, but will later fall for him.”
“However, it doesn’t just go to suffering. The core of discipleship is self-denial. It is at this point especially that Jesus makes it quite clear that the gospel is certainly counter-cultural. However, one could take “losing your life” more than one way. Losing your life can also be seen as shedding the old way of living that was in harmony with the values of the world.”