The End of Things

Can it be that the end of things paves the way for the beginning of the new? And yet it's hard to let go when the new is not yet apparent, has not yet arrived.

There is a certain inevitabity about the passing of the years, and of our days, but still we want to hold on, to hang back, to go back to what was. Even the Israelites, at one point in their wanderings, longed for the certainty of the old - though it were slavery - rather than the uncertainty of their present struggles and striving - and facing the unknowability of God's timing and will for any future entrance into Promise.

I wonder what my deep heart mostly fears as I face the days ahead . . .

Light at the year's end ? . . .

Am I - are we emerging to a better year or worse ?
And how will we move on - or hold on anyway?

Believing Anyway

It is our Lord Jesus alone who can bring hope in the darkness 
and faith in the most cold of days. 

Christmas - Enriched by His Poverty

You know the grace of our Lord Jesus, how that though He was rich,
yet for our sakes He became poor - that we through His poverty
might become rich. -- St. Paul

The poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it like this -
     Across my foundering deck shone
     A beacon, an eternal beam . . .

     In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
     I am all at once what Christ is,
    Since He was what I am . . .

The Paradox of Guidance

From an interview with Dallas Willard -

Comment: In your book (Hearing God) you talk about the paradox of guidance. What are the elements of that paradox?

Willard: Well, the paradox has to do with the fact that on the one hand we talk so much about God's guidance, and we especially want our leaders to be guided by God. Yet, when it comes down to us, we do the humble-mumble and say, "Well, you know, not me. I'm not big enough, or important enough for God to bother with."

It's that combination: on the one hand we expect guidance, and we desperately need it, but on the other hand we're not prepared to receive it and we think it wouldn't really be appropriate. You have to be "kicked upstairs" to become a so-called "full-time Christian worker" for it to be appropriate.

Generally people can't deal with this at all. Christians can't. There's that little joke about: "When we speak to God we call it prayer, and when he speaks to us we call it schizophrenia." It's a curious ambivalence that's driven by our deep need as finite human beings.

Comment: It's almost like that story about Joan of Arc. When her accusers said, "Those voices you hear, they're just your imagination," she answered, "Yes. I know. That's how God speaks to me."

Willard:That's a very good line. It's by using our natural faculties in a certain way that God speaks to us. In a way, the paradox is the same as in the Incarnation - it's the union of God with human beings in a relationship. The Incarnation (God taking on full humanity in Jesus Christ) is much more than that, but it is that.