Tag Archives: Mercy

Don’t Shoot the Wounded: 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 and the Perseverance of the Saints

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Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes,

To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge – even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you – so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. (1 Corinthians 1:1-9 ESV)

 

 

One of the greatest tragedies among orthodox evangelical Christians is our tendency to shoot the wounded. Often, whenever a brother or sister falls, instead of coming alongside them and helping them up, we have an inclination to stand over them, heaping upon them pitiless moral aphorisms and a conceptual theology that doesn’t recognize them as real human beings made in the image of the real, not-a-concept, living God. Continue reading →

Psalm 88: Praying When Hoping is Hard

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O LORD, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you. Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry! Psalm 88:1-2

 

You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness. Psalm 88:18

 

These verses bookend the cry of Heman the Ezrahite, the cry of the afflicted man. We expect, as the Psalms have trained us thus far, that at the end of this exasperated, barely-breathed lament that there will be some kind of conclusion, some denouement that gently replaces each fallen stone of this poor man’s life. But that’s not what we find. We find that he is forsaken – by his beloved, by his friends. The only companion he has left is the darkness in which he is drowning. Continue reading →

For My Grandmother

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The train is coming.

As surely as the second hand

Moves in ticking repetition,

Counting the days by increments,

It comes.

And the readiness she possesses is not perfect,

But how can one be perfectly ready to leave?

All her leavings until now spoke of now,

The last departure to a far country.

In the station the children walk by

Talking of little everythings,

Filling the hollow with bittersweet tones.

One by one, they come and bid adieu.

And she kisses them

Gently, sweetly,

As a mother should.

Despite the many voices, a unified whisper,

“All aboard.”

Goodnight, and goodbye.

But in the finality of night,

The dawn speaks a limit,

And creation replies in groan –

“For now.”