Our Circumstances
The Lord didn't let me sleep last night, and though I find myself in that position all too often, sitting awake cursing what may very well be a developing problem, all I have found is that the words of the saints come trickling in too often in those times where I would otherwise be spinning in unconscienceness, oblivious to those revelations that the Holy Spirits inspires in our waking moments.
Earlier this week I was sitting in the midst of seminarians looking over the word when a building inspector interrupted our bible study. He was trying to find out if the house that we were meeting in had suffered any flood damage in the rains that flooded much of this area just a week earlier. We told him no, there had been no damage, this house remained quite safe during the downpours and he stopped long enough to say this before he left.
"I'm a believer," he began, in the voice of a working man, "and through all of this i've heard people ask 'Why did the Lord let this happen?' well, just because you love the Lord don't change the fact you live on a flood-plain."
I have heard too many a prophetic voice from men who in no way see themselves as prophets.
The joy of the Gospel is the joy of our accessibility to grace, the joy of a Lord who knows our experience from making himself a part of that experience. The word became flesh and dwelt among us, not just in the sense that He inhabited our world. He experienced the joy the pain the sorrow that all of us experience. He cried. He wept. He sweat blood in a garden so we could all know that he was among us. He did all this so we can know that to reach him, to encounter him we do not need to look to the Heavens and search scripture until our Greek is exhausted and our Hebrew is broken, no. To access him we look laterally, around us, in the experiences he knew then, and that we know currently.
I will never truly know what this means, but I can infer this much; we can access him. We can put our best intentions in a man who, fully human and fully divine, knows them all to well. He does not change our circumstances, but he enables us to trust in a strength that we alone CAN NOT know, and if we take that strength and squander it on useless endeavors of self fulfillment then we are not living up to the prophetic voices that surround us daily.
On our own we are useless to our brother. We can do nothing. God made flesh expressed through our actions with HIS empathy can change circumstances. When we curse heaven we do nothing, we look outside, not at the salvation that is available in us and for us and for our brothers who need more that we are able to conceive. THAT changes circumstances, ours and our brothers.
We can die and leave everything that was useless and trivial behind as we rally a strength that we did not know, because it is not our strength. You can look around, call it the human spirit, call it the son of man, call it inspiration, call it devotion. We drink from many springs but the source is the same.
The joy of the Gospel is that we can die, and through a strength we did not know, live again. We can live for our brothers, for this world that is consuming itself because it does not know what it needs. It does not know what it is capable of.
Call it the name that works for you, and know that we can move away from the flood plain.
Earlier this week I was sitting in the midst of seminarians looking over the word when a building inspector interrupted our bible study. He was trying to find out if the house that we were meeting in had suffered any flood damage in the rains that flooded much of this area just a week earlier. We told him no, there had been no damage, this house remained quite safe during the downpours and he stopped long enough to say this before he left.
"I'm a believer," he began, in the voice of a working man, "and through all of this i've heard people ask 'Why did the Lord let this happen?' well, just because you love the Lord don't change the fact you live on a flood-plain."
I have heard too many a prophetic voice from men who in no way see themselves as prophets.
The joy of the Gospel is the joy of our accessibility to grace, the joy of a Lord who knows our experience from making himself a part of that experience. The word became flesh and dwelt among us, not just in the sense that He inhabited our world. He experienced the joy the pain the sorrow that all of us experience. He cried. He wept. He sweat blood in a garden so we could all know that he was among us. He did all this so we can know that to reach him, to encounter him we do not need to look to the Heavens and search scripture until our Greek is exhausted and our Hebrew is broken, no. To access him we look laterally, around us, in the experiences he knew then, and that we know currently.
I will never truly know what this means, but I can infer this much; we can access him. We can put our best intentions in a man who, fully human and fully divine, knows them all to well. He does not change our circumstances, but he enables us to trust in a strength that we alone CAN NOT know, and if we take that strength and squander it on useless endeavors of self fulfillment then we are not living up to the prophetic voices that surround us daily.
On our own we are useless to our brother. We can do nothing. God made flesh expressed through our actions with HIS empathy can change circumstances. When we curse heaven we do nothing, we look outside, not at the salvation that is available in us and for us and for our brothers who need more that we are able to conceive. THAT changes circumstances, ours and our brothers.
We can die and leave everything that was useless and trivial behind as we rally a strength that we did not know, because it is not our strength. You can look around, call it the human spirit, call it the son of man, call it inspiration, call it devotion. We drink from many springs but the source is the same.
The joy of the Gospel is that we can die, and through a strength we did not know, live again. We can live for our brothers, for this world that is consuming itself because it does not know what it needs. It does not know what it is capable of.
Call it the name that works for you, and know that we can move away from the flood plain.
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