God’s Call has nothing whatsoever to do with your worthiness — or your un-worthiness.
Our Psalm calls us to cultivate spaces, and to be people together who are safe, who help each other be fully ourselves, who welcome those around us to be fully themselves, as well. That is how we all find rest.
Jesus Loves us so much that He encourages us to be what He sees in us—which could be more. Painting by Michael J. Card: “Jesus at the Home of Mary and Martha”
I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Ezekiel. You’ve dealt with stubborn people before, right?
On any given day, we can be hard-hearted or shallow or distracted — or productive — to various degrees.
Jesus calms the wind and waves, and in the stunning silence that follows, we watch real fear erupt.
What Jesus wants us to understand is that — when it comes to the Seed of the Gospel, or his Work in the world, or the way God is at work among us every day — it is beyond our imagination.
Nobody wants to live an un-blessed life. Everybody yearns to hear someone say the blessing for them, to them, about them: I love you, I delight in you, and I am proud of you — not because of what you have done, but because of who you are.
God calls to us. God’s Holiness — God’s Otherness — calls us in, creating not distance, but closeness, connection, relationship. Image: “Trinity in Dark Tones (Genesis 18)” by Alek Rapoport, 1994.
Even though the Church — wherever it is found — has fallen short of bringing people together, the Church has still inherited the Gift of Diversity.