Where it begins

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.
Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
Edgar Allan Poe

(chives / Julie Cook / 2016)

Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose it must be at an end.
Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists!
Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality;
it must be born of nothingness,
it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way
that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.
H. J. Iwand

It has its beginning in the depths of despair…
for it is not to be found in the rapture of joy.

Stripped of pretense and facade,
Its secret roots penetrate far and wide…

It resides deep within, hidden from plain sight…
Scattered across the dusty barren recesses of the heart.

It takes hold in the blackness of night,
During the empty isolation of the tortured soul.

It is during that bleakest and empty affair of abandonment…
the very moment the smug conclude that both it and we are finished…
As finally all our talk and foolishness will thankfully come to an end…

It is exactly within this bitter tasted instance of nothingness…
that our Grace explodes into existence…

Lovely waiting

Our Father which art in heaven, we Thy children are often troubled in mind, hearing within us at once the affirmations of faith and the accusations of conscience. We are sure that there is in us nothing that could attract the love of One as holy and as just as Thou art. Yet nothing in us can win Thy love, nothing in the universe can prevent Thee from loving us. Thy love is uncaused and undeserved. Thou art Thyself the reason for the love wherewith we are loved. Help us to believe the intensity, the eternity of the love that has found us. Then love will cast out fear; and our troubled hearts will be at peace, trusting not in what we are but in what Thou hast declared Thyself to be.
Amen
A. W. Tozer

(swans at Ross Castle / County Kerry, Ireland / Julie Cook / 2015)

Love…a word which rolls easily and readily off the tongue.
Four simple letters offered to one and all with causal abandon.
Yet the question hangs heavy over humankind… what exactly does it mean?
What does love mean within the realm of life for each human being?

The news is rife with the stories of those who apparently have either never known
or have sadly forgotten….Love…
There are those who would argue that theirs, those who torment their fellow man, is but self love…
Love that is self obsessed and self contained…
yet the brazen heinous crimes speak of anything but love…
the lack of
the void of,
the emptiness of,
the opposite of…

As in…
Hate
Loathing
Disgust
Contempt…
of others and of self….

Is it perhaps because certain members of this large family of humankind simply believes themselves unworthy and less than?
Perhaps having never been shown nor having ever witnessed Love being demonstrated?
Is that then to be the argument for our hate, our crimes, our violence?

Yet it is there….
It is there…waiting.
It has always been there.
It was there when the light fell from grace…
It was was there in the garden when the two hid from The One
It was there when the Laws were issued and quickly forgotten
It was there when the innocents were slaughtered
It was there when the blind saw, the deaf heard and the lame walked
It was there after the mocking, the beating, the humiliating…
It was there during the anguish and in the silence of the parting of the last breathe
It was there in the blackness of nothingness
It has been to hell…and back….

and it waits still…

Through the violence, the guns, the pain, the sickness, the loneliness, the selfishness, the anger, the resentment, the isolation, the mob mentality, the gangs, the rapes, the shootings, the stealing, the looting, the psychoticness, the brokeness, the hate…

It is there…
having never left…

It waits.
It waits for you,
for me,
for them…

It waits….

So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.
1 John 4:16