grace without claws

Why do we insist that grace be a tamed animal, all cuddly and cute? Why do we think grace—all soft, fluffy and clawless—must spend her days purring softly? Why isn’t grace allowed to roar like a lion and rip apart such evils as hatred, bigotry and an unforgiving heart? Is it because such ideas as kindness, gentleness and tenderness are deemed weak, silly, sentimental and, yes, tame? Maybe it’s time to let grace out of her cage so she can wreak a little heavenly havoc.

need

i need to see a god who struggled with sanity,
and found darkness unbearable.
i need to see a god who prayed for relief,
but heard only silence.
i need to see a god whose heart and soul
were weightier than the heaviness of the entire world.
i need to see a god who felt abandoned by all.
i need to see a god who felt and experienced all these things;
for this one alone will understand my anguished soul;
for this one alone will reveal
the purpose and power
of the resurrection.

night vision

"Faith is a way of seeing in the dark. It is what makes the darkness endurable."
--FrederickBuechner

the crazy stuff of miracles

It was a wild day. It was a wilder miracle.

Hungry-enough-to-eat-a-bear people. A tired-to-the-bone Savior. A bunch of generally confused disciples. The Savior looks out at the starving masses, turns to his disciples and simply says , “Feed them.”

Feed them? With what?

The Savior has them pool their resources: two fish, five loaves. And how many were they to feed with a couple of pan fish and a few measly loaves? About 5,000.

Crazy stuff. The stuff of miracles.

The disciples brought him the food and he became Mr. Wizard, multiplying what they had into a massive meal that feed them all. Oh yeah, there were 12 big baskets of leftovers. (Read it in Matthew 14:13-21.)

Think about that miracle. It didn’t happen out of nothing. The disciples tossed in what they had, then God did his thing.

Crazy stuff, the stuff of miracles.

God comes to you and wants to do something pretty amazing with your life. He wants to take what little you have and multiple it over and over and over. He wants to take your ordinary life and push it upward to heaven and outward to the world.

Because God is God, he’ll always transcend the ordinary. But to do so, he’s satisfied to start with the ordinary. He’s satisfied to start with you.

Crazy stuff, the stuff of miracles.

pure poetry

"In science we have been reading only the notes of the poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself."
--C.S. Lewis in Miracles: A Preliminary Study

dissecting wonder

In science class and biology lab, little things matter. A fluke is far from just a fluke, but a grand study in regeneration. A microorganism under magnification is truly magnificent in its simplistic complexity. Even a frog dissected wide open is full of morbid wonder. But if our examination and dissection stops at that lab table, we have discovered nothing, really. We must look up from our microscopes and dissection tools at the universe so deep and wide. But if that is all the further we look, we have still missed the most splendid wonder of all. After all, the universe itself is not much when placed next to the God who put it all together. All of this wonderful creation--from the subatomic quark to the largest ball of burning gases in the greatest galaxy yet to be discovered--is simply a fingerprint smudge from hand of God.

beyond reason

“Poetry is sane because it floats easily on an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion.”
--G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy

“Those who reduce the world to matter risk withering the sense of wonder.”
--Philip Yancey in Rumors of Another World