Kingdom Ready

This author puts his finger on a major reason why the idea of heaven fails to arrest people’s attention. Thanks, Xavier, for sending this over.

“But to those who search in faith for the ending of the Story, our Enemy has whispered an even more diabolical lie, harder to dispel because it is veiled in religious imagery: ‘Heaven will be a never-ending church service in the sky.’ All those silly images of clouds and harps. I’ve heard innumerable times that ‘we shall worship God forever.’ That ‘we shall sing one glorious hymn after another, forever and ever, amen.’ It sounds like hell to me.

from Karen’s quote for the day email:

In Dunkin’ Donuts this morning,
an old lady wearing a tattered watch cap
started speaking to no one in particular.
“I can’t sleep at night.
I have pains in my chest all the time.
My leg hurts and my children do not love me.”

People waiting in line
hid in their cellphones, looked away
or stared straight ahead.

“I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know where to turn.
My husband died two years ago on the 27th.”

I received this a few days back from Karen Nathan’s email list. Enjoy:

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity…They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. …They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives.
–Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus, c. 200

Faith is realizing that I am useful to God not in spite of my scars but because of them.
–Pamela Reeve