Jesus came down from heaven to be with us as one of us. That we can easily see. But His descent didn’t end there—with becoming like us. He descended further and became what we had always been meant to be. Then He descended even further to become what we had never been meant to be. We, on the other hand, can hardly wait to rise higher. We all too often hate and fear the descent, even though it is life-saving…
Centering clay on a potter’s wheel is a messy and demanding operation, requiring tremendous concentration. Why? Because the clay doesn’t want to be centered! It resists “surrendering” to the potter’s hands. Don’t we all? I learned pottery during my hippie years one summer when I was trapped in DC, trying to get to the West Coast on my motorcycle, but with never enough money to leave town. I had no idea in those days…
I have heard so much confusion around the promise of redemption that I hope this will clarify a few things about why we suffer the curse and its consequences and how God works through it all. Just because God works in a redemptive way with the curse doesn’t mean that He needed or wanted us to be messed up by it! Can you agree with this statement? God would surely much rather work creatively through us than redemptively for us.…
Who has the right to complain? One of the students in the recovery program at the Mission where I work made this comment, only slightly refined by me: “The only person with a right to complain about how they are being treated is the one who is treating everyone else perfectly.” The context for this discussion was the perennial poor treatment of the students, who run the program, by the “friends and neighbors,”…
