It has been a crazy week. So much information it’s hard to winnow it down, but here goes.
Forgiveness
Desmond Tutu wrote: “Until we can forgive, we remain locked in our pain and locked out of the possibility of experiencing healing and freedom, locked out of the possibility of being at peace.”
No atheist in a foxhole?
Godfrey Diekmann, a legendary Benedictine liturgist, recounted being sunk up to his hips in a swamp while gathering watercress and having to be pulled out by a truck hoist. It was delicate and dangerous business. In the Christmas letter he wrote following the event he said that after more than fifty years of monastic life, “What bothers me is that during the entire ordeal of about twenty-five minutes I didn’t have a single pious thought!”
from “Scarred by Suffering, Transformed by Hope”
The Essence of Life
The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us. And that’s all right.
Joan Chittister
Self-Deception
In their own eyes they flatter themselves
too much to detect or hate their sin.
Psalms 36:2
NT in one sentence
It will take the Word of God in concert with the Spirit of God to transform people of God into the image of God so they can participate in the will of God to redeem the world of God. If I had to reduce the New Testament to one sentence, that would be it.
J D Walt
Racism
“I recognize that most people who make this declaration of racism being ‘a sin issue, not a skin issue’ have good intentions. They rightly infer simple legislation can’t establish racial harmony. However, it is dangerous for the church and its relevance in society to continue to infer racism will only be made better by personal sin management. We must address the deeper complex implications of racism being an issue of idolatry. Otherwise the church will continue in it’s legacy of being complicit in the persistence of the racial divide.”
Mike Frost
Power to be
And what of social or political arrangements–however important in their own right–can guide and empower me to be the person I know I ought to be? Can anyone now seriously believe that if a people are only permitted or enabled to do what they want, they will then be happy or more disposed to do what is “right?”
Dallas Willard
Loving the unlikable
In the Church, we talk about loving our enemies. But truth be told, our enemies are not the hardest people to love. It’s not those who antagonize us, but the pariahs, the socially awkward—the people with boundary issues, the guy with the wildly inappropriate jokes, the girl who talks like she’s paid by the word count—who pose the real challenge.
Some people are just unlikable. Try as you might, you cannot muster the desire to spend time with them. You don’t want to talk to them, and when given the opportunity, you will go out of your way to avoid the awkward, culturally expected niceties.
We tell ourselves we love them; we just don’t want to spend time with them or be seen in public with them. One trick we are taught to master from a young age is the ability to justify. We rationalize not liking certain people because they just aren’t likable.
Yet Jesus has the audacity to tell us to love other people. Not just that, He says it’s the second most important commandment in all the law. The only thing more important than loving other people is loving God Himself.
Tyler Edwards
Broken spirituality
…we feel the spiritual yearning burning in our hearts and souls, but we struggle to keep this quest from devolving into superficiality and triviality. We long for spiritual depth, but I fear our “spiritual but not religious” approach to faith is just some mystical tinsel we’d sprinkled over our consumerism and self-absorption.
Richard Beck
Doing Nothing
My experience is that questioning our responsibility for history’s outcome will always be met with anxious objections that we would be agreeing “to do nothing” and the results would be terrible. Keeping the commandments of Christ is not doing nothing. It is, however, the refusal to use violence to force the world into ever-changing imaginary versions of the good.
Think with me for a moment and ask yourself this question – “Have you so rationalized the world around you that prayer and obedience to Christ and his teachings now feels like doing nothing?”
Fr Stephen Freeman
Remember this the next time you complain about having to walk your dog.
