A Message Of Hope

My mind is still on yesterdays blog.

1 Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3 Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.

Why is it that we are unable to grasp this truth of God’s offer?  

I just wonder why we don’t get, the truth, that God simply does not think, nor act, with our limited reason and logic. 

So we remain just stunned, astounded, stupefied at God’s unconditional reaction to our feelings of failure to live up to his expectations.  Actually our failure to live up to, what we think are, his expectation.  

That is the clue — what we think.  What we think we know.  When all God truly wants for us is the tinniest desire to walk with him.

That all God expects; at least in my understanding.

Then God lets his Spirit move-in and do the rest.

Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher,  has this to say about our human understanding of our invisible God:  

"What can be seen on earth points to neither the total absence, nor the obvious presence of divinity; but to the presence of a hidden God! Yet, everything bears his mark." (Pensee 1962 Harpers)

You and I know that, in solid truth, we have limited control and no absolute certainty with respect to the future.  However, because we believe in a God without limits we have the precious ability to hope.

And like Tigger might say:  hope "is a wonderful thing!"

Do you remember when Mother Teresa's memoirs came out?  The title is: 'Mother Teresa And The Mystery of God's Absence.'

It caused quite a stir among the "religious." They wanted to have her band from her position of honor in the Roman Catholic Church; calling her a "phony."  A phony because she admitted to her "doubt and dark night of the soul."

I continue to be appalled by such judgments.  

First of all, no one has the privilege, nor right, to judge someone's else heart.  

Secondly, how many of those "religious" folks would bow low and pick up a dong-dirty person out of the cutter and hug them close speaking of God's love for them?  

She may have had her doubts; but she lived her life serving the God she sometimes found difficult to believe in.  

Mother Teresa, instead of falling away from the faith, continued to enter the conversation by living in the grace of God.  Knowing, sometimes doubting, yet pursuing this truth that sustains us all in time of our own "dark nights of the soul."  

Choosing to believe in the midst of it all.  

Hoping beyond hope that she would see "the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living."

She did that, and we do that, by "waiting for the Lord, being strong and taking courage," by the grace of God. 

May we, like Mother Teresa, continue our own faith journeys that leads us every closer to a very real God;   living within each and every one of us.