The day of the Lord is coming. Advent resounds the promise of His coming: His justice, His glory, His light that overcomes all darkness. We step into the season of Advent like a child awaking before the dawn and exclaiming that the sun is coming. He cannot see the its piercing fire; he cannot feel its blanketing warmth, but he knows that it is coming. The day is ready to burst forth into newness. Continue reading
Page 5 of 72
Paul commands us to rejoice. Echoing the ancient Psalmist, he rehearses the call to “Rejoice in the Lord.” How can joy be commanded?
After several days at the beach, my siblings and I were growing weary with play. We started complaining, arguing, and expressing general discontent. Suddenly my dad’s voice boomed into the mix, “I paid good money for this trip and you had better enjoy it!”
Half fearful of the consequences of not enjoying the vacation, we quit complaining and stiffly tried to enjoy. Somehow joy under command seems odd, if not impossible. It seems inauthentic. Continue reading
Sabbath is like remembering home.
image courtesy of Thomas Hawk (via Creative Commons)
Singsong voices ringing in the air. Running through the house, out the back yard and circling round again. Burnt leaves lining the sides of the streets. Aromas of autumn float in the air. Rolling pastries to the hum of Christmas songs. Family and friends crowded around the dinner table. Long stories. Loud laughter. Drooping eyelids.
Longing for an innocence, a wonder, a place before.
Abraham Joshua Heschel tells the story of a prince sent away from his home, his father. He wanders the world alone, longing for his Father’s love and approval. One day a messenger arrives outside the lodging of the prince and announces, “Prepare to come home.” Filled with joy, the prince runs through the village and into the local tavern. “Food and drinks for all. Today is a day of great joy for I’ve heard the call to come home.” Heschel says that Sabbath is a day of great joy for we are going home to see the Father. Continue reading
“If we are not able to rest one day a week, we are taking ourselves far too seriously.” – Marva Dawn
“…faith is understood as the encounter of the whole person with God. And it is precisely the whole man that God desires to have before him. He wants for his Word the response of the whole man. God wants man not only with his intellect (which would, in any case, have to be sacrificed to a truth which is not self-evident), but, from the outset, also with his will; he wants man not only with his soul, but also and equally with his body.” (Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Volume 1, p. 213)
Living faith is not simply mental consent to a set of propositions about God and man. Von Balthasar reminds us that we participate in this living faith with our whole and undivided person. Spiritual experience encompasses our whole life and may overwhelm us in ways we had not expected. Continue reading
I was talking with a friend the other day about spiritual direction, and the conversation continued in my head long after I walked away. In fact, our conversation was an overflow of a conversation she had with another friend the day before. Words, thoughts, questions sometimes linger long after we leave the presence of another. Continue reading
In the lonely haunts of forsaken places, the people of God are building hope.
What does building hope look like? It looks like a glimpse, a hint, a promise of God’s coming Shalom. The Lord rescues the children of Israel from a world built and sustained by slavery. He leads them on pilgrimage through the stark barrenness of the wilderness. Far away from the Nile and the bounty of Egyptian food, his people face the threat of no water and no food. Stripped of necessary provisions, the people of God learn that we do not live by bread alone but by “every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 8:3). Continue reading
“Christianity does not make a new cosmos but makes the cosmos new.” – Herman Bavinck
I’ve got a questions about asking questions in Torah, and maybe you can help. I am trying to collect questions in Scripture and think about how they relate to questions in our lives. I am also thinking about how we group questions. A few cursory searches have revealed several interesting approaches to grouping questions from a range of viewpoints including teachers developing questions for tests, philosophical questions, grammatical questions, rhetorical questions and more.
Even as I ask questions about questions in Torah, I want to hear how other people think about questions in their own lives. Continue reading
“Flowers laughing in the sunlight of their sprightly names. Earth will write them up in its book of rising accounts.” John Hollander
