Sunday-"For those of us that believe, the whole world is decorated in love."-- Ann Weems,
Monday-We can shutter our souls with activity, but powerful spiritual silence, if we allow it, will blow fresh winds of the Spirit through us. Not like a safe spring breeze. More like a hurricane. When the power of God comes to us in holy silence, we might be blown about, or even blown apart.Brent Bill
Tuesday-Jesus himself is both the start of that new creation and the Lord who gives his own Spirit so that his people can continue the project. You see, from Genesis 1 onwards it’s clear that the Creator God wants to rule his world through wise, image-bearing human beings. There is a Trinitarian base for all biblical political theology: the Creator wants to work in the world by his image of justice and mercy being reflected through obedient, humble, wise humans. The Davidic king is seen in some texts as the true Adam. N. T. Wright
Wednesday-Barbara brown Taylor on Incarnation-"It was a daring plan, and once the angels saw that God was dead set on it, they broke into applause. ... While they were still clapping, God turned around and left the cabinet chamber, shedding his robes as he went. The angels watched as his midnight blue mantle fell to the floor, so that all the stars on it collapsed in a heap. Then a strange thing happened. Where the robes had fallen, the floor melted and opened up to reveal a scrubby brown pasture speckled with sheep and - right in the middle of them - a bunch of shepherds, sitting around a campfire drinking wine out of a skin. It was hard to say who was more startled, the shepherds or the angels, but as the shepherds looked up at them, the angels pushed their senior archangel to the edge of the hole. Looking down at the human beings who were all trying to hide behind each other (poor things, no wings), the angel said in as gentle a voice as he could muster, 'Do not be afraid
Thursday-That is the Gospel, this meeting of darkness and light and the final victory of light. That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, the one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still." [Frederick Buechner)
Friday-you learn how to live in heaven now. And no one lives in heaven alone. Either you learn how to live in communion with the human race and with all that God has created, or, quite simply, you’re not ready for heaven. If you want to live an isolated life, trying to prove that you’re better than everybody else or believing you’re worse than everybody else, you are already in hell. You have been invited—even now, even today, even this moment—to live in the Communion of Saints, in the Presence, in the Body, in the Life of the eternal and eternally Risen Christ." Richard Rohr
Saturday-“Thomas Merton says that to be a saint means to be myself. This sounds so simple. And yet, we know how challenging it is, how many obstacles we set before ourselves, how many layers of fear and resistance have built up over the years, how much our egos are attached to being viewed in a certain way, and what we are grasping onto.” Christine Valters Paintner, PhD
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