With
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
Walking, Running, Crawling: God is Right There With Us.
Psalms 91:9-10
Because you have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your dwelling-place, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent.
2 Corinthians 1:5
For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ.
Words of Grace For Today
It is a very, very tempting take on the world: If we do the right things for God, like make God our refuge, then nothing bad will happen to us, like scourge in our tents and evil falling on our heads.
But God does not work that way, nor did God create to make it so. All that because – therefore agency-consequence is taken from the daily doings of providing for our survival. If you do not hunt, kill, and eat, well you will go hungry. Unless of course you’re a vegetarian at least for a while. Trouble is we take that because therefore thinking into our relationships and come up with If I do this, then you must do that! And we call that love. Which is nothing like love at all. It is coercion, plain and simple coercion that demotes the other from being a full person in order to elevate one’s self to something more. Which is pure bull and foolishness.
God protects us from evil by walking with us right into it … and back out again.
So we suffer, rarely as much as Jesus, but we suffer greatly, God with us, too. The strength we have is what God provides. And the consolation is as powerful as any love can be, for it is divine love for us poor creatures.
That’s the kind of love we can aspire to give to others on this good planet: walking with, suffering with, consoling with love so powerful it ‘moves mountains.’