Month: October 2024

             “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God,
            and not receive the bad?”
                         —Job 2.10


God is not a card dealer.
God is not a guy who distributes weal or woe
according to some inscrutable scheme.

God is the Love at the heart of all existence,
who is present with grace and blessing
in every moment, everything that happens.

God does not “send” us our experiences;
God experiences them with us, with love,
the “’good” and the “bad.”

Our judgments of “good” and “bad” experiences
are mostly a reflection of our pleasure or pain.
They all contain both difficulties and blessings.

Divine grace is present in all of them.
The Beloved imbues even our triumphs with challenges,
and even our disasters with possibility.

In both the good and the bad,
what we receive “at the hand of God”
is neither weal nor woe, but the hand of God.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             What God has joined together, let no one separate.
                         —Mark 10.9

Don’t pick this up as a club to beat divorcees.
It’s already caused enough harm.

Only men had the power to marry or divorce.
Jesus was protecting women from being used and discarded.

Jesus’ accusers want to know what is lawful;
but he always seeks what is life-giving.

Sometimes when a couple has married
it’s not God that has joined them.

What God has joined together is a whole person;
don’t let a bad marriage break them.

Sometimes what keeps the “bent over woman” down
is a marriage from which Jesus would set her free.

Sometimes the paralyzed need to get up and walk away first;
only then can the healing begin.

Sometimes when Jesus says “Follow me”
there are things he wants one to leave behind.

Always and ever Jesus invites us
not toward what is lawful but what is life-giving.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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When living in the real world is hard work,
when its needs come begging and its wounds cry out,
contemplation may seem like an escape.

But it’s the way we breathe-in the whole world
so we become greater than it is, and contain it;
and breathe in God until we are wholly contained.

It’s how we let God hold our fears and our wishes,
and enter the world, even its pain,
with infinite grace.

It’s the bee crawling into the lily, way deep,
the cypress roots working their way down,
the still moment before the athlete runs for the high bar.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net
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