St Francis Webguy

Denying self …. and taking up ..

Jesus has been healing people, calming storms, feeding thousands of people with few provisions, and teaching them in parables. But, suddenly, he tells them the most shocking thing they have ever heard from him so far …
Peter … and the other disciples, were expecting that Jesus was the promised deliverer of God’s people from the Romans. He was to be their King and rule over them, and “everything in the garden would be rosy”. Now Jesus had shattered that dream …

Sunday’s a-Comin’

In the startling economy of God, even a dangerous desert can become holy. Even our wilderness wanderings can reveal the divine. This is not because God takes pleasure in our pain, but because we live in a chaotic, fragile and broken world that includes deserts, and because God’s way is to take the things of shadow and death, and wring from them resurrection.

Tribalism – the Common Cause?

Read a moving example of reconciliation and unity during the week past. Stuff (the news outlet) has been telling stories from the Christchurch earthquake, ten years ago. On that day, two men were rebuilding St Paul’s church, which had collapsed in the earthquake of some months before. As soon as this second one was over they came out to view the devastation, and immediately ran across the road to the CTV building, which had pancaked, to see how they could help.
…. the ubiquity of tribalism. My tribe is better than yours!

Not Just a Martian Satellite

Hope lifts one’s view from hints of despair. Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl wrote that Jewish inmates of concentration camps who retained hope stood a far better chance of survival than those who didn’t. Hope drives the student in an important exam; Hope sustains the frail patient going into a risky operation, and the woman undergoing yet another in vitro treatment; Hope attends the sailor making her way in fog; forlorn Hope drove the rebels in Les Miserables, and Hope hoists all other uprisings; Hope makes a man stand up again, who has fallen down many times.

Hope is the subject of a well known painting ….