Members News

New item from Charles Parker

We Are a People of Hope

A Maranatha member has written to me saying “I am sending a reading from 'You Are The Beloved' by Henri Nouwen. It is an affirmation to remain faithful in a time when “a great misery descends on the land and wrath upon it's people” (Luke 21: 24 -26) and to ultimately claim our heavenly inheritance by remaining attentive to the voice of God through His Spirit and Through Jesus. It is clearly 'for such a time as this'. I commend it to the Maranatha Community as it waits and listens from an ascended position“, so I am sharing it here with you all:

We Are a People of Hope

The state of the world suggests to me the urgent need a spirituality that takes the end things very seriously, not a spirituality of withdrawal, nor of blindness to the powers of the world, but a spirituality that allows us to live in this world without belonging to it, a spirituality that allows us to take the joy and peace of the divine life even when we are surrounded by the powers and principalities of evil, death, and destruction.

I wonder if a spirituality of liberation does not need to be deepened by a spirituality of exile or captivity. I wonder if a spirituality that focuses on the alleviation of poverty should not be deepened by a spirituality that allows people to continue their lives when their poverty only increases. I wonder if a spirituality that encourages peacemaking should not be deepened by a spirituality that allows us to remain faithful when the only things we see are dying children, burning houses, and the total destruction of our civilization. May God prevent any of these horrors from taking place, may we do all that is possible to prevent them, but may we never lose our faith when “great misery [descends] on the land and wrath on this people … [when there are] signs in the sun and moon and stars … [when] nations [are] in agony, bewildered by the clamour of the ocean and its waves” (Luke 21:24-26). I pray that we will not be swept away by our own curiosity, sensationalism, and panic, but remain attentive to him who comes and will say: “Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34-35)

 

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