Good morning…
God gives me space to connect the day’s dots. I sit on our back porch eating chicken noodle soup, breathing in the breezy grey, admiring the dance of bushy green. Early I woke to a short and sweet email. “GRACE – another acronym I learned years ago: God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense.”
A few hours later, I welcomed women into our basement for our April Listening Group. I heard myself slowly read the words of Jan Johnson: “A temple is where God dwells (Ephesians 2:21-22, 1 Corinthians 6:19). N.T. Wright emphasizes that the Jewish temple was ‘the place where heaven and earth meet.’ Heaven and earth are not ‘separated by a great gulf. Instead, they overlap and interlock…so that God makes his presence known, seen and heard within the sphere of earth.’ So every moment is a sacred one as heaven and earth meet within us. We are walking temples. When a server waits on us in a restaurant, when a friend calls, when someone reads our email – they are encountering a walking temple. This is who and what we are intended to be. Together as a body of Christ we form a temple: a place where God dwells.” (Meeting God in Scripture, 49-50)
After group ended, without skipping a beat, the Holy Spirit drew me into the first pages of a book I may teach in the fall, continuing the intimate invitation. “…I have been led to an inner place where I had not been before. It is the place within me where God has chosen to dwell. It is the place where I am held safe in the embrace of an all-loving Father who calls me by name and says, ‘You are my beloved, on you my favor rests.’ It is the place where I can taste the joy and the peace that are not of this world. This place has always been there. I had always been aware of it as the source of grace. But I had not been able to enter it and truly live there. Jesus says, ‘Anyone who loves me will keep my word and my father will love him, and we shall come and make our home in him.’ These words have impressed me so deeply. I am God’s home! …The emotional and physical crises that interrupted my daily life…compelled me – with violent force – to return home and to look for God where God can be found – in my own inner sanctuary.” (Henri Nouwen’s The Return of The Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, 16-17)
In the space of quiet time, God connects our dots. Christ has bought for every one of us all of God’s riches. Now we each are a walking temple where heaven and earth dwell. As we return home to our inner sanctuary, we find God nestled at home in us.
“Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can’t bear grapes by itself but only by being joined to the vine, you can’t bear fruit unless you are joined with me” (John 15:4, MSG).
…Sue…
