Album: My Work
P E R S O N A L N O T E S
Obedience to God in the pressures and stresses of day-by-day living and trust in God's ways in the large sweep of history are always at risk, but especially in times of suffering and persecution.
Obedience to God is difficult when we are bullied into compliance to the God-ignoring culture out of sheer survival.
Trust in God is likewise at risk of being abandoned in favor of the glamorous seduction of might and size.
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Catastrophe strikes and person's world falls apart. People respond variously, but two of the more common responses are denial and despair. Element in the human condition
Denial refuses to acknowledge the catastrophe. It shuts the eyes tight or looks the other way; it manages to act as if thing is going to be just fine; it takes refuge in distractions and lies and fantasies.
Despair is paralyzing by the catastrophe and accepts it as the end of the world. It is unwilling to do anything, concluding that life for all intents and purposes is over.
Despair listlessly closes its eyes to a world in which all the color has drained out a world gone dead.
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Suffering is a huge, unavoidable element in the human condition. To be human is to suffer.
No one gets exemption.
It comes as no surprise then to find that our Holy Scriptures, immersed as they provide extensive witness to suffering.
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When we find ourselves having to live through difficult times and want some trustworthy help in knowing what to think, how to pray, how to carry on.
We'd like some verification of credentials. We live in disruptive times. The decades preceding and following the pivotal third millennium are not exactly unprecedented.
They have certainly been comparable times of disruption in the past that left everyone reeling, wondering what on earth and in heaven was going on.
But whatever their occasion or size, troubles require attention.
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Our main and central task is to live in responsive obedience to God's action revealed in Jesus. Our part in the action is the act of faith.
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What happens when everything you believe in and live by is smashed to bits by circumstances? Sometimes the reversals of what we expect from God come to us as individuals, others times
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We live in a world awash in love stories. Most of them are lies. They are not love stories at all.
They are lust stories, sex-fantasy stories, and domination stories.
From the cradle we are fed on lies about love. This would be bad enough if it only mess up human relationships- man and woman, parents and child, friend and friend-but also messes up God-relationships.
The huge mountainous reality of all existence is that God is love, that God loves the world. Each single detail of the real world that we face and deal with day after day is permeated by this love.
But when our minds and imaginations are crippled with lies about love, we have a hard time understanding this fundamental ingredient of daily living,” love" either as noun or
And if the basic orienting phrase “God is love “is plastered over with cultural graffiti that obscure and deface the truth of the way the world is, we are not going to get very far in living well.
We require true stories of love if we are to live truly.