The Face Of The Deep预览

The Spirit Who Invites

The Comforter soothes; soothes and invites.

The hope of re-creation lives in everything that has ever been made or marred in our world so good and so bent. The hope of re-creation lives in the life of seeds, in the dormant stump on the borders of the wilderness mountain. It lives in the skin of the fingers, the stars set in the hands of craftsmen. The hope of re-creation glitters in the butterflies, the moss agates waiting on the shores of the river. It flashes in the bellies of catfish, in the hue of red apples, in the barbed iron and cacti of the Golan heights. The hope of re-creation cries with the raven and the dove above the flood, bounds like the deer with a star in its flank, roars with the lion that chases to play or to prey, splashes with the pilgrims who dive into the river, holds its breath like the boy hanging under the surface of the black lake.

Hope is everywhere; there is nowhere in creation that it does not groan out for the life of God that the Spirit promises.

The hope is for the original very good, but it does not stop there. God is ever a doer of new things, and the re-creation will be good, even in its scars, in a depth and strength of goodness that the original creation was not capable of. Whatever loss and destruction and pain the brutality of all wrong things have wreaked upon the world, the coming restoration will go limitlessly, effortlessly, joyously beyond—catching up the whole world in the arms of God and laughing for eternity, the doors to all things thrown open.

Hallelujah!

The descending sun, the True Dawn of Christ come again will consume the earth in a burning at once inexorable and good. The fire from above will devour, but how happy that devouring! In the end, whatever pain of burning, it will be a joy to be refined, the joy of compressing like carbon, turning into Hopkins’ “immortal diamond.”

The nature of God is love, and all of everything must settle accounts with the fierce Lover, the Bridegroom of heaven, the ultimate Beloved. It will be seen in that flashing moment that existence has always been an invitation; can be nothing other than an invitation; an invitation and a joyful acceptance forever and ever.

All shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well.

World without end.

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