...lift life heavenward

Lord, You make the common holy: “This My body, this My blood.”

Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily lift life heavenward,

asking that the world around us share Your children’s liberty:

with the Spirit’s gifts empower us for the work of ministry.

---Jeffrey Rowthorn, 1978

Have you ever known someone with the touch? Someone who could take the most ordinary day and imbue it with otherworldliness? Turn an everyday action into a ritual of uncommon beauty? Take a passing conversation and bless the words exchanged, draw out the pain and joy masked behind safely neutral words and phrases?

I feel like Jesus must have been one of these rare persons. There are so many recorded instances of him breathing holiness into the mundane everyday of existence—everyday tasks, everyday conversations, everyday touches. In Jesus’ hands, touch healed disease and stigma, the fruit of wheat and vine became sacred sign. In Jesus’ mouth, names spoken called fishermen from their nets, taxmen from their graft, the dead from their repose, faithful women from their grief.

Is the gift for crafting sacredness from ordinariness, then, Jesus’ gift uniquely? Or are we to be imitators of Christ in this too, always open for the Spirit to move in us to transform the common into the holy…in the midst of us…through us?

Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily lift life heavenward…

...all the yes

The hill of Zion yields a thousand sacred sweets,

Before we reach the heavenly fields,

Or walk the golden streets.

---Isaac Watts, 1707

#thisearthisnotmyhome #illflyaway #streetsofgold #homesickforheaven

At various times throughout Christian history, this world has not been a very hospitable place to live out life. This was sometimes true for most everyone walking the sod, and sometimes particularly for those folk of faith. It is easy, in times of hardship and earthly distress, to pin one’s hopes on a better tomorrow, a bright and shiny heaven to take the bitter edge off what seems a pale shadow-life lived out here on earth. Imagine the Twitter-life of those trapped in the flat reality of this existence, when they dreamt of, yearned for the richness of a hi-def heaven.

In Isaac Watts’ hymn from the turn of the 18^th century, the hymnist urges those who ‘love the Lord’ not to wait to start celebrating Kingdom life, but to let their joys be known. Yes, look forward to heaven, when the distractions of this world will be stripped away so that worship’s pure essence can be revealed, and those who will may dwell consciously in the presence of God.

But, yes! enjoy the thousand sacred sweets the hill of Zion has to offer before we ever reach those heavenly fields! And, yes! live abundantly here in this rich land where God also reigns! God didn’t create us for either/or; there is richness and abundance in this life for all time, and for all!

#alltheyes

A child should lead the way

Who would think that what was needed to transform and save the earth 
might not be a plan or army, proud in purpose, proved in worth?
Who would think, despite derision, that a child should lead the way?
God surprises earth with heaven, coming here on Christmas Day.
---John Bell and Graham Maule

Surprise! It's a baby, and it's just the thing for what ails us!
Merry merry Christmas!


...so here we stand, whoever we are,
bathed in the light of a star...