Psalm 71:1-12
Isaiah 49:1-6
I Corinthians 1:18-31
John 12:37-38, 42-50
If Lazarus were really dead, Christ couldn’t have brought him back. He must have been in a deep coma or something. Burning bushes? Loaves and fishes? I don’t think so. These colorful stories and hundreds more like them surely were fables designed to enthrall the easily enthrallable, not me. I hoped that God existed. But he had not as yet revealed himself to me in any way that I understood. I would figure him out and find my faith on my own in my own good time.
Well, I hadn’t figured him out, and my own good time was running out, until the fateful moment not long ago when I finally realized that all my wondering — and my propensity for playing doubting Thomas — had landed me nowhere. I decided to give my restless brain a rest. I stopped thinking about God.
I just let go and allowed myself to feel. In time my heart came to understand that the Scriptures and the liturgy and the music and the art and the fellowship I had rediscovered within the walls of Ascension had not so much offered me answers to profound questions, but had blessed me with beautiful and true ways to perceive the presence of God in my life and to understand Christ’s abiding interest in my welfare.
In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he preaches that we must find God through the surrender of ourselves to God’s power. Such a sacrifice is much to ask of the worldly, until you discover how profoundly the awareness of God’s presence, in turn, can warm — and transform — your life.
