Amid Life’s Complexity

Good morning…

Amid life’s complexity, I choose a mug each morning. Black coffee is warm and welcoming, a half-caff companion. Here’s a perfect mug choice for this very day. Misshapen and made by a stranger named Jillian, this Goodwill treasure understands the patchiness of our lives, our one-of-a-kind fragments oddly molded together. Naked. Stained crimson. Random parts form our whole.

These are some of the many people I now cup in my prayers. Tom. Marie. Dawn. Debbie. Brooke. James. Corinne. Jeff. Joan. Frank. Elizabeth. Graham. Elizabeth. Scott. Gretchen. Doug. Gretchen. Beth. Skip. Hollis. Cappy. Pete. Audrey. Jennifer. Ben. Tammie. Art. Cathy. Vilda. Karen. Laura. Laura. Lara. LeighAnne. LaTonya. Larenzia. Anthony. Mike. Marilyn. Martha. Martha. Tom. My personal prayer list goes on and on and on, mysteriously merging with yours and hers and his.

Today we face biopsies and boredom. Colostomy bags and chemo rounds. Painful procedures and positive results. High hopes and hard truths. Freedom of life and fear of dying. This cup of ours will not pass soon from our lips, as we are quietly reshaped into the breathing body of Christ.

Who in the world do you think you are to second-guess God? Do you for one moment suppose any of us knows enough to call God into question? Clay doesn’t talk back to the fingers that mold it, saying, “Why did you shape me like this?” Isn’t it obvious that a potter has a perfect right to shape one lump of clay into a vase for holding flowers and another into a pot for cooking beans? If God needs one style of pottery especially designed to show his angry displeasure and another style carefully crafted to show his glorious goodness, isn’t that all right? Either or both happens to Jews, but it also happens to the other people.

Hosea put it well: I’ll call nobodies and make them somebodies; I’ll call the unloved and make them beloved. In the place where they yelled out, “You’re nobody!” they’re calling you “God’s living children.”

Isaiah maintained this same emphasis: If each grain of sand on the seashore were numbered and the sum labeled “chosen of God,” They’d be numbers still, not names; salvation comes by personal selection. God doesn’t count us; he calls us by name (Romans 9:20-28, MSG).

As we slowly savor our morning coffee, might we sense our own names living on the loving lips of God? But now this is what Adonai says, he who created you…he who formed you… “Don’t be afraid, for I have redeemed you; I am calling you by your name; you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1, CJB). Resting in the strong hands of our gracious God, we are creatively cupped together.

Amid life’s complexity, we are never alone. My dear friends, we are never alone.

…Sue…