Can I give you something else to read? Can I give you something else to scroll through? Can I give you something else to like and follow and share and tweet?
Haven’t you got enough of the destruction of our times and the destruction of your own heart?
What if I showed you a story where humans don’t actually devour themselves but where peace happens and love happens. “Whispers from afar,” as Frederick Buechner calls them, that give us a different answer to the world’s destructive problems.
This different story is of a God that created all things, even us in all of our mess and absurdity. Not just a creator God that has left the room and told us to fend for ourselves, but a God who is love. In that love he made us and loves us and made us to love. Can this be true?
Let me present Jesus, God’s son, who healed desperate ones, wicked ones, lonely ones, and spiritually sick ones, just like us. How can it not be true?
This is where faith has to show up. Buechner states, “Faith is looking at what is seen and understanding with a new sense…by faith we come up with a different answer.”
Those moments where love seeps through despite all odds. That gathering of friends and family that felt sent from heaven above. That relationship that is an oasis in the midst of desolation. That word from scripture that seems to be written just for you. Hold on to these things with dear life. Because these are realities of the Kingdom of God; where what God wants done is being done.
He is giving us a new story, a Christ story, that is worth falling in love with. Buechner again, “The world and all of us in it are half in love with our own destruction and thus mad. The world and all of us in it are hungry to devour ourselves and thus lost.” This is not the Christian story so stop embracing this message that tells us we are doomed. As followers of Christ, we are never doomed. Instead, by faith, we are walking in love, joy, and peace. The world isn’t turned rosy in an instant but by faith there is enough evidence that God’s love will prevail and that our lives can be peaceful and full of Christlike power.
This is the good news that Jesus brought. By faith, we set aside the narrative of the world that is so hell bent on brokenness and embrace the narrative of a good and beautiful God who knows what is best for us and longs to give it to us.
Will you have faith to see it?
Grow Up Blog 