breaking through…

There is nothing in all creation that is able to separate us from the love of God
that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:39

(Space shuttle Endeavor penetrates through the protective layers of Earth’s atmosphere / Wikipedia )

“An insulating layer formed by human thoughts and by mass impulses surrounds our planet earth.
God’s spirit, God’s love, must find an opening in this layer.
Somewhere, real love, genuine camaraderie and community, and complete clarity must break through.
Somewhere the readiness to fight against the surrounding forces of evil must break in.”

Whenever God’s is called uopn, this layer is broken and the spirit of peace
and of unity bursts forth.
This means that a fissure is made in the obstructing layer.

“…where Love breaks in, all other forces yield…
…as no human force is able to achieve anything in comparison to the power of Love”

Eberhard Arnold
Where Love Breaks In
When the Time Was Fulfilled
Christmas Meditations
Plough Publishing House

Holy Waiting

“Wait on the Lord” is a constant refrain in the Psalms,
and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting.
He is not in such a hurry as we are,
and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need
for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time.
When in doubt, do nothing, but continue to wait on God.
When action is needed,
light will come.”
― J.I. Packer

“Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty,
to carry within oneself the unanswered question,
lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts.”
Elisabeth Elliot

(The Holiness of God surrounded by Seraphim /Illuminated manuscript / Bibliotheque Nationale de France)

“Our world is shaking, about to erupt.
Demonic powers are storming the church, like autumn storms sweeping through the woods.
We live in a tine when people everywhere are agitated;
the masses are confused as to what is true and what is false;
and yet they are waiting for what is ultimately to come.
And it shall come!

We live in the midst of tyranny, encircled on all sides, seemingly unfree.
But let us lift our heads high; the hour of our liberation is drawing near.
Now we must be strong in the hope that God will reveal his redemption;
he who is coming will take away everything that is part of our fallen nature.”

In holy waiting we’re at home,
The windows open to the sun,
Though shades are spreading o’er us.
With joy expectant hearts are fed;
Till now hope’s flaming light has led
And brightly burned before us.
Eberhard Arnold
In Holy Waiting

When the Time Was Filled
Christmas Meditations
Plough House Publishing

“Certainty tolerates no limitation”

Hodie nobis caelorum Rex de virgine nasci dignatus est,
ut hominem perditum ad regna caelestia revocaret,
gaudet exercitus angelorum,
quia salus eterna humano …

(Today the King of heaven deigned to be born for us of a virgin,
that he might call lost man back to the heavenly kingdom,
the host of angels rejoices,
because eternal salvation has appeared to the human race.)

(Northern Italian antiphonal illuminated manuscript with text of song above / 15th century )

Whoever lives in God does not look behind him, but forward.
Whoever is alive (whoever does not fall prey to deathly atrophy of his inner life)
does not look backward—
be it over the short span of his own life or the greater span of history–
to find a realization of his longing.
He looks forward,
toward the goal,
toward the destiny of humanity as it should be and as it shall be.
He who puts his hand to the plow looks forward.
He lives “now” in the future.
He who looks back and loses himself
in historical speculation and his own inner reveries is not fit for God’s kingdom.

Advent hope is certainty of faith that shows itself in action through mutual
responsibility for the whole of life.
The church of Christ is the fellowship of this hope.
It believes so unreservedly that it is convinced that the divine must conquer the demonic,
that love must conquer hate, that the all-embracing must conquer the isolated.
Certainty tolerates no limitation.
God embraces everything.
When we trust in him for the future, we trust for the present.
When we have faith in him, our faith holds true for everything that touches our lives.

Eberhard Arnold
When the Time Was Fulfilled
Christmas Meditations
Plough Publishing House

prophetic spirit….

“I will cleanse them from all the sin they have committed against me”
Jeremiah 33:8

(image of the prophet Jeremiah by Michelangelo, the Sistine Chapel)

Despite the distress of our time, we have lost touch with this prophetic spirit.
In fact, the inmost nature of prophecy has become an enigma to us.
We no longer grasp its primary source anymore.
Eberhard Arnold

Where are the voices…
those strong, confident and defiant voices that portend the fate of man?
Those ancient distant voices which proclaimed, declared, lamented, warned and foretold…
Those quixotic ones, from the days of old, whose words spoke of both power and truth …

In this oh so modernly smug time of man, believers are left to silently wonder,
as the non believer ridicules and scoffs.
Taunting the faithful while arrogantly puffing their chests.
For modern man has declared himself his own deity and god.

As Eberhard Arnold pragamatically observes, we have lost touch with that part
within ourselves which allowed us to hear those prophetic voices.
We have grown cold to our spiritual nature…
As we have distanced ourselves to the point of total disregard,
For that innate piece of the Divine that was once very attuned…
Allowing rather the void to be filled by our haughty sense of self.

Those voices however have never been silenced…
Never stopped or cut short over the windswept history of time…
they have not grown cold as the hard stones of earth…
but rather it is man who has grown cold, having lost his ability to hear them.
For man has turned a deaf ear to the apocalyptical.

Yet it is in that same breath of disheartened resignation that
Arnold offers us a bit of hope…

“The attitude is [still] possible only when a different heart beats within us,
different from that which has been in us so far, and when God’s spirit dwells in us,
as Ezekiel promises for these last days (Ezek.11:19).

If the earth is to be filled with the glory of God,
then the triune Spirit must fill and pervade the people who dwell on it.
Only when the Spirit gains influence over us, a sovereignty thus
far completely unknown,
can we expect the social and moral transformation that Mary sings about…”

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”
The Magnificat
Luke 1:46-55

“Maintain love and justice, and wait for your God always”
Hosea 12:6

be not discouraged

“In order to resist fear and discouragement,
it is necessary that through prayer–
through a personal experience of God re-encountered, recognized and loved in prayer–
we taste and see how good the Lord is (Psalm 34).”
Jacques Philippe

(even in late fall, seeds set forth / Julie Cook / 2016)

When we are discouraged by the apparently slow progress of all our honest efforts,
by the failure of this or that person, and by the ever new reappearance of enemy powers
and their apparent victories, then we should know: the time shall be fulfilled.
Because of the noise and activity of the struggle and the work, we often do not hear
the hidden gentle soul and movement of the life that is coming into being.
But here and there, at hours that are blessed, God lets us feel how he is everywhere
at work and how his cause is growing and moving forward.
The time is being fulfilled and the light shall shine, perhaps just when it seems
that the darkness is impenetrable.
Eberhard Arnold
When The Time Was Fulfilled
Plough Publishing House

Shaken not deterred

“The fact that the Son of man shall come again is more than a historic prophecy;
it is also a decree that God’s coming and the shaking up of humanity are somehow connected”
Alfred Delp

(broken bits within Sligo Abbey / Sligo, Co Sligo, Ireland/ Julie Cook / 2015)

Granted it seems a bit early yet to be looking toward the coming season of Advent…
but let’s try telling that to the giants of Sales and Marketing.

It certainly doesn’t seem to be too early for the department stores,
and all things merchandising, to giddily jump on the early bandwagon of Christmas.
as the mass marketing of Christmas frustratingly now precedes Halloween.

Yet we should remind ourselves that it’s really not Christmas,
not the Christmas that Christians know,
of which the Mass Marketing giants are now greedily rubbing their hands over.

And we must, year after year, work harder and harder to be mindful of such as it
becomes far too easy to get sucked into the maddening holiday hype which is currently
underway in earnest.
So much so that I find myself getting nervous just running in to pick up whatever from say
Target or the grocery store as Christmas is staring me in the face….

With the current state of my life being in a constant state of flux…
so unpredictable, so up in the air and so utterly chaotic these days,
I’m finding that I’ve got to grab at things when I can.
Hence why I jumped in a bit early to the Advent Book I received for Plough Publishing House

When the Time Was Fulfilled
Christmas Mediations by
Eberhard Arnold
Christoph Blumhardt
Alfred Delp.

And it was the entry by Delp, The Shaking Reality of Advent that has resonated so
deeply in my soul.

Maybe it’s because his words, written 72 years ago, seem as if they were penned last night.
Written by anyone with Christian conscious who is observing the tumultuous times of our world.

Maybe it’s because I know that he wrote these words while he was being held by the Nazis
as a presumed traitor of the state.
He had been tortured and beaten while awaiting his trial.
As a state prisoner in Tegel Prison in Berlin, Delp had been arrested on the grounds of a
connection with the final assassination plot against Hitler,
of which he was not involved,
it was customary for those prisoner’s hands to chained and handcuffed at all times,
yet Delp manages to secretly write spiritual reflections of Advent and Christmas while
secretly saying mass for his fellow prisoners.
We have his works to this day because they had been smuggled out of the prison and
shared with his fellow prisoners.

Delp was offered his freedom if he would denounce being a priest…
Yet he refused.
He was hung February 2, 1945 just a few months prior to the fall of Nazi Germany.
He was only 38 years old.

Maybe I am so drawn to Delp’s words because despite his position and his suffering,
he could joyfully look forward to Christ’s re-coming to a very darkened world…
because that’s what Advent translates to… ‘coming’…

So whereas, throughout these trying times of this nation of ours,
the family of Believers may be shaken, but we are not deterred…
Come what may…..

“Many of the things that are happening today would never have happened if we had been
living in that longing, that disquiet of heart which comes when we are faced with God,
and when we look clearly at things as they really are.
If we had done this, God would have withheld his hand from many of the things that now
shake and crush our lives.
We would have come to terms with and judged the limits of our own competence.
But we have lived in a false confidence, in a delusional security;
in our spiritual insanity we really believe we can bring the stars down from heaven
and kindle flames of eternity in the world.
We believe that with our own forces we can avert the dangers and banish the night,
switch off and halt the internal quaking of the universe.
We believe we can harness everything and fit it into an ultimate scheme that will last…

If we want Advent to transform us–our homes and hearts,
and even nations–then the great question for us is whether we will come out
of the convulsions of our time to awaken from sleep.
A waking up must begin somewhere.
It is time to put things back where God intended them.
It is time for each of us to go to work–certain that the Lord will come–
to set our life in God’s order wherever we can.
Where God’s word is heard, he will not cheat us of the truth;
where our life rebels he will reprimand it.
We need people who are moved by the horrific calamities and emerge from them with
the knowledge that those who look to the Lord will be preserved by him,
even if they are hounded from earth”

Father Alfred Delp’s writings on Advent smuggled out of
Tegel Prison, Berlin 1944
Delp was hanged by the Nazi’s in 1945
Excerpt taken from When the Time was Fulfilled

God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him,
though he is not far from any one of us.
Acts 17:27

words, deeds and offered kindness

If there was a little more light and truth in the world through one human being,
his life has had meaning.”
Alfred Delp, priest

(a cache of books from Plough Publishing House)

When life seems to be endlessly hard fraught with struggles, isn’t it amazing how
one small gesture, one small act of kindness or recognition, can mean so very much…

Over the better part of almost two years,
my life has, more often than not, felt like a battleground.

Some days there has been advancement,
some days there has been retreat,
some days there has been a stalemate,
and some days there has been defeat.

For a myriad of reasons, every last one of us faces moments in our lives
that are hard and difficult… some of those moments are downright devastating.
And much like the Geico Insurance ads that so famously highlight life’s absurdities
with that famous tag line “because that’s what you do”
we in like turn muddle through, power through or simply manage to make it
through such times…because, that’s what we do….

So imagine my surprise when one evening I received a comment on my blog
from an editor from Plough Publishing House.
She had read a recent post in which I used a quote by Eberhard Arnold,
the early 20th century Christian theologian and writer.

You must know that I do not choose the quotes that I use for each post randomly
as I am very purposeful in selecting the right words spoken…
In that I use other’s words,
in order to add impact or highlight a particular point or post,
is not something I take lightly.

There are times when I have stumbled across a quote or statement that I think appropriate
yet I may be unfamiliar with the owner of the words and thoughts.
So I’ll do a little background research.
And in that research I often find intriguing backdoor stories that draw me ever inward…
as I find myself wanting to know more about the particular individual of choice.
Such was the case with Eberhard Arnold.

I don’t want to spend time today jumping off on a side pig trail but it is
interesting that I have found the words and stories behind many German Theologians intriguing—
certainly with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I often quote and write about,
to Maximilian Kolbe and Alfred Delp…
two Catholic priests whose lives, words and deeds we remember to this day
due in part to their martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis in the death camps of the Holocaust.

I like to think that I am not discriminatory with the words I include in my posts
as I greatly welcome the thoughts and words from a wide range of the faithful…
be they Protestant or Evangelical, Catholic or even Jew—
I have a deep respect for those individuals who have spent their lives,
if not having given up their lives, for our shared Judaeo / Christian faith and beliefs…
As they are in part the stone pavers to the pathway we walk today.

And so was the case with my inclusion of Eberhard Arnold…
which in turn brought the attention of a senior publishing editor my way.
She asked if I would be interested in maybe receiving a few of their newest releases
in hopes that I might find time to not only read them but to share them on the blog.

I was more than humbled as well as honored by her offer.

Delightfully a small package arrived Tuesday afternoon containing five books.
Five faith-filled books…
Of which I look forward to exploring and sharing from time to time here on cookiecrumbs with you…

There is so much to learn as well as to apply to our own 21st century lives from the thoughts and experiences of those who, having often walked their journey prior to our own, have put their
experiences of both their lives and faith in action to pen and paper…

We should note that the written word has such a way of
transcending both space and time…as does a simple act of kindness…

All be they seemingly insignificant, it would behoove us to be mindful of the
importance of our own actions and words… .
That to reach out, to speak, to touch, to offer kind thoughts,
gestures and words to another…can, as a stone dropped into a still pond,
ripple outward reverberating far beyond our limited sight…
touching those who we may never meet or know….
Such is the power of our words and deeds…

The final Kingdom is near, and the whole world should be on the watch.
But the world will not take heed unless the Church of Jesus Christ puts the unity
and justice of this Kingdom into practice daily.
Faith will bring about true unity among believers
who are ready to live a life of unlimited,
active love.

Eberhard Arnold, 1934

only one

“God’s heart is never limited in its sphere of action”
Eberhard Arnold

(the lone little wild flowers hanging on in the woods / Julie Cook / 2016)

“Everything depends on seeing the mystery of the risen Christ as unconditional love.

There is only one thing that knows no conditions:
that is love.

There is only one absolute:
That is God’s rulership.

There is only one direct way: that is the experience of God’s love in Jesus Christ.
In Christ, his love is put into practice.”
Eberhard Arnold
Spirit of Fire