I am certain that God will bless me, but I don’t need to know how. When we think we know exactly how the one who made us is going to take care of us, we’re apt to ignore the angel messengers sent us along the way.
— Madeleine L’Engle, Glimpses of Grace, p. 55
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 21, 2023
Take a look at Luke 13:10-17. Jesus is in a synagogue on the Sabbath. The rabbis had rules about what you could and could not do on the Sabbath, but Jesus sees a powerless and infirm woman there, feeble and frail, bent over. She’d been disabled, Luke says, “by a spirit for eighteen years.” “When he saw her, Jesus called her to him and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your sickness.’ He placed his hands on her and she straightened up at once and praised God” (verses 12-13). Can I tell you how much I love this picture of Jesus? He knows what he’s about to do is against the rules. Furthermore, he is in the synagogue and there is a religious leader there! But he cannot help himself. This woman has been in pain for eighteen years. This is one of the things I hope you will remember about Jesus: Jesus put people ahead of rules. The synagogue leader is undone and he chastises this woman and the crowd around, “There are six days during which work is permitted. Come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath day” (verse 14). I’ll let you read Jesus’s response in Luke 13:15-16 and how the crowd responded in verse 17.
Notice, though, that he saw the woman. Notice that he had compassion for her. Notice that he refused to let her suffer anymore, Sabbath or not.
— Adam Hamilton, Luke: Jesus and the Outsiders, Outcasts, and Outlaws, p. 67.
Photo: From Klosterruine Disibodenberg, Germany, August 23, 2008.
But does the defeat of sin within the person take place only in the temporal realm, within time itself, while we live in this body? Why should it? If we are beings who live on after death, like the Bible seems to say, what makes us think that God limits the bestowing of eternal grace to one time period? Why can’t God extend the offer of grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation through Jesus even at judgment — when all will be laid bare, when all persons will see the extent of their sin and the extravagance of God’s love? If the effectiveness of Jesus’ work on our behalf extends even beyond the grave, that means that no one is ever beyond grace.
— Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell, p. 107
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, August 5, 2023
What I think, my fellow second sons, is that we were told the truth. This story is for us. We are the prodigal son. But we are also the lost and hungry sheep. We have gone unfed, walked without rest, been chased by wolves, and our friends and leaders did not see our pain. But God, in big and little ways, has donned a shepherd’s cloak and come running after us. God, in big and little ways, has clambered over rocks and climbed down cliffs. God has found us, hungrier and more hurt and terrified, and cradled us close to say: No matter why you left or where you went, you are mine.
— Emmy Kegler, One Coin Found, p. 8
Photo: Above Gundersweiler, Germany, June 14, 1998
God does not lead the soul by shaming it, just as a good parent would not shame his or her child. It doesn’t work anyway. We all have done it at times and, if we were raised in a punitive way ourselves, we still tend to think that is the way to motivate people — by shaming them or making them feel guilty. I’ve done it enough and I’ve received it enough to know that it eventually backfires. It never works. We close down and stop trusting after that, and we use all kinds of defense mechanisms to avoid further vulnerability. God’s way actually works — to love us at even-deeper levels than we can know or love ourselves. It is really quite wonderful, and one wonders why anyone would want to miss out on this.
— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…, p. 101
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 10, 2023
Fellowship is both our nature and our necessity.
— Amanda Gorman, from “Another Nautical,” Call Us What We Carry, p. 38
Photo: Sondra Eklund and her kids, May 21, 2023
We ask ourselves, what can move the dial on God’s love for us? Nothing. It is always at its highest setting. After all, God’s love for me is zero dependent on my love for God. But our notion of God can atrophy and get stuck in our own arrested development. And it can be hard to shake the transactional god who puts us in debt. The I-love-you, now-love-me-back god. Yet our God is utterly reliable in this unconditional love that does not waver. It has pleased God not to be God without us. God never has second thoughts about loving us. Never.
— Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language, p. 4-5
Photo: Oregon Coast, May 17, 2023
Reflect on what loss has given you, as counterintuitive as that sounds. Think of the solitude, self-reflection, self-reliance as gifts. Of course they don’t weigh the same as the grief — they don’t balance the scales — but be grateful for them anyway.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 150
Photo: Oregon Coast, May 13, 2023
That’s the funny thing about who Jesus has to be if he’s who we hope he is: He has to be able to out-love us. That means the scandalous dinner invite isn’t just for us, it’s for the people we despise, for those we disagree with, for everyone who pushes our buttons and boils our blood and twists our insides — and we have to be on board with that. Not only do we need to accept the fact that the table is wide open, but we have to be at the ready with a chair and an extra setting for those we find it most challenging to welcome. If you’re at all like me, you’ve spent a good deal of time and effort crafting what you believe is a compelling, air-tight case against breaking bread with certain people because of the message that would send to them. We don’t want people whose religion or politics or behavior are adversarial to ours to “get away with it” by giving them proximity or showing them generosity, and that self-righteousness feels good until we realize that someone somewhere is asking Jesus why he sits with us.
— John Pavlovitz, Rise, p. 18-19
Photo: Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, April 7, 2023
The church was meant to be that group that constantly went to the edges, to the least of the brothers and sisters, and even to the enemy. Jesus was not just a theological genius; he was also a psychological and sociological genius. Therefore, when any church defines itself by exclusion of anybody, it is always wrong. It is avoiding its only vocation, which is to be the Christ. The only groups that Jesus seriously critiques are those who include themselves and exclude others from the always-given grace of God.
Only as the People of God receive the stranger, the sinner, and the immigrant, those who don’t play our game our way, do we discover not only the hidden, feared, and hated parts of our own souls, but also the fullness of Jesus himself.
— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…, p. 186.
Photo: Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness, Ireland, July 2001