We began our journey learning about and practicing the spiritual disciplines this past Sunday. And since we had not yet begun to explore a particular discipline, I encouraged you all to practice “awareness,” insisting that awareness is one of those ways of seeing that grows with practice.
My expectations in commending this practice to you were small in scale: that you might notice that nudge of God here and there, or recognize a provision that would otherwise have gone unnoticed, or have the confidence to ask God about God’s apparent absence when you needed God to show up sometime this week.
As it turned out, however, this has been one of the more news-saturated weeks. And I know myself well enough to know the ways that can intrude on my practice of being more aware of God. Thankfully, the Spirit has a way of showing up and helping us in our weakness. And so, she did for me: it seemed each news story came with a kind of “echo”:
- The firebombing of protesters at the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder was echoed by the memory of working with Pine Street Church (an ABC church just blocks from there) when the area experienced terrible flooding some years back. I knew that our ABC siblings would be among those “helpers” running toward the crisis and advocating for a better world.
- Ukraine’s successful “Operation Spider’s Web” against Russia took out significant part of Russia’s bombing capability by damaging or destroying at least 40 Russian warplanes. Each of the 117 drones cost less than $1000 and each of the destroyed planes cost millions. I could not get David and Goliath out of my head for days.
- With the tragic news of the Israel Defense Forces once again shooting into a crowd of aid seekers at the Rafah distribution site, killing at least 31 and injuring 170 more, echoes emerged of the trauma of war prior to the exile as recorded in Jeremiah and other places. And yet with those echoes came further reverberations of promise that a new tomorrow is always possible… that a day is coming when death will be no more.
And so things went, all the way up to yesterday’s “breakup” between the president and Elon Musk, which brought an immediate echo of “How the mighty have fallen!”
And fall they will. For such evil, greed, violence, and malice are such impermanent and insubstantial things when confronted with true reality such as Love.
In Love we trust,
Pastor Michael