Category: Love
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Advent is an invitation
Advent is more than a time of waiting. I believe it is also an invitation into an alternative way of being and alternative narrative (story).
An excerpt from ‘altǝr video magazine’ puts that invitation like this …“We believe there is an alternative narrative to the prevalent narrative of scarcity and fear.We believe God is moving and is behind an alternative narrative of abundance and freedom, a narrative in which fear gets defeated and love wins.
We believe God’s narrative requires we altǝr our perspective, that we step, in faith, into God’s upside down reality. In God’s reality we listen for, live and speak God’s upside down voice of faith, hope, peace, joy and love, not striving for ourselves but serving our neighbour. “
Advent, I believe, has imbedded in it a call to repentance – to alter our perspective so that we come into step with God’s reality. In so doing it becomes a springboard into the alternate adventure that God has in mind for us.
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Why doesn’t God just fix the world’s problems?
Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
C.S. LEWIS, Mere ChristianityGod is usually blamed for the evils that exist in the world because if He is God, He can remove any problem quite easily because He is big and powerful. But to rid the world of sin and its consequences would require something extremely dramatic—removing all sinners. And apart from being born again, how many of us would be left? C. S. Lewis once made a statement that has helped me quite a bit throughout the years—“once the author steps on the stage, the play is over.” He can fix it all in a moment. But when He does, time stops, eternity begins, and the final line has been drawn in the sand. His answer would be quite painful. His patience, which we see in full operation right now, is so that we can gather as many into the family as possible. His long-suffering is beyond all of our abilities to comprehend and comes at great personal cost. (more…)
