God does this forgiving thing and this healing thing so much better than us. God shows us how to do it, how to let it go, how to turn it lose, how to be whole, how to increase our muscles of forgiveness, so that before you know it, you’re not just forgiving your neighbor who neither shovels their snowy sidewalk nor recycles, you’re forgiving that one who really wished you harm back in the day and on whose head you’ve wished the retribution of God more than once. And suddenly, you don’t feel that anymore.

Where two or three are gathered…It reminds us that we are more together than we are alone. It’s easier to be Christian when we’re doing it in community, especially the difficult parts like long-term faithfulness, discernment, confrontation, and forgiving. Christianity thrives on community, in relationships, when the webs of connection between us continue to grow, as we do this work together in the name of Jesus. 

Image: “Prayer Circle” by Deborah Shedrick

This is the way of God, the strange logic of the king of the universe, the one that goes against everything that makes sense if we’re looking with eyes of this world. The first shall be last. The meek will inherit the earth. The proud are scattered in the imagination of their hearts. And loss, if you participate in it, letting the light of God shine on it, weeping, mourning, and refusing to pretend that everything is ok, leaning on your community and even accepting help sometimes, that loss turns into great strength.

God does the work in us that needs to get done: He steps in and teaches us, frees us, loves us, holds us, walks with us, and somehow, beautifully, we change. God is the one who makes us one body, one ecosystem, through the Eucharist, through fellowship, through vulnerabilities, through God’s work happening through us and in us so that we become the people, the community, the ekklesia that we’re called to be. It’s a beautiful place, natural, organic, with diversity and beauty and bugs and amphibians and ponds and even beavers. 

God speaks to us with empathy and understanding, with gentleness and compassion, especially those who struggle. 

Do you hear it? This is God’s love song to people. 

It’s easy to pay more attention to what’s collapsing than what’s growing, to see the weeds first and to lament them. But remember. You’re not alone, nor am I. Our job is to grow, not to sort out the wheat and the weeds. We might not see the effect of our work in this lifetime, but that doesn’t mean we should give up the work! We can hold fast to the truth that God is God and we are not and that our job is to grow. 

I think we’re all called to be farmers, sowers, all of us, throwing seeds all the time, our deeds of love in the world. So keep on. Keep on being ridiculously excessive. Love, even when you know it might be rejected. Give more than is necessary, without expecting to get anything back. We’re not playing the game of chess here. We have been given so much, so much goodness, so much love, so much beauty. It’s on us to pass it on. We never know what will grow.  

Let the unexpected welcome extended to you change you, so that you might become more tender, more loving, knowing yourself to be beloved even more deeply. Let it help you see rightly so that we might become even more like our early Christian siblings, who welcomed the orphan and the widow, who called women apostles, who opened their arms to the uncircumcised and the eunuchs, the ones who had before been spit out.

And let this beautiful welcome, one offered to us in the most unexpected of places by the most unexpected of people change our hearts, our minds, and our lives. Accept those cold cups of water. Drink them with joy. The Church needs it. 

Image Credit: Pineapple Bright by Kellie Day