What The Taj Mahal Taught Me About Love by Kim Reisman
Kim Reisman
January 10, 2018
It is not perfection that makes a love great, it is its willingness to persevere through the hardship, challenge, and pain.
It is not perfection that makes a love great, it is its willingness to persevere through the hardship, challenge, and pain.
We must become walking, talking clues pointing to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit.
The numerous physical healings performed by Jesus to alleviate human suffering are only a hint of the anguish in the heart of God’s Son for wounded humanity.
God’s love is so great, it will conquer all the world’s horrors. God’s love is so prodigious, no evil can possibly prevail against it.
“Jesus calls us at Christmas to enter into the Kingdom of Liberty, to be set free by his Father’s love.”
Advent is about an intensity of desire. It’s about deeply desiring the presence of God in our lives and our world.
In a world filled with brokenness and estrangement, poverty, violence and death, we need Godbearers.
From the beginning, God has desired a relationship of love and wholeness with something other than God.
As Christ followers, in all times and seasons, but especially during Advent and Christmas, we declare to the world that we’ve seen that great light.
That is the surprise of the Beatitudes—what appears to be a source of unhappiness, turns out to be a source of joy and blessedness.
Repeatedly, across denominations, both within and outside the church, I have encountered hesitation, frustration, misunderstanding, denial, negativity, and even outright hostility in response to the entire topic of evangelism. Few people, it seems – at least in Western context, are comfortable talking about evangelism, much less engaging in it.
We would do well to recall – especially in these days after Christmas – that the Gospels tell us about Jesus as a refugee child, whose family was forced to flee to Egypt to escape the wrath of a murderous monarch.
That our Prince of Peace entered the world as a helpless child and left it as a crucified outcast tells me that God’s kingdom is one in which self-giving, vulnerable, love reigns supreme.
But when we share faith with others, we don’t tell them what they should believe. We tell them what we believe – and more importantly, who we trust, which brings us once again to relationship.
Jesus reminds us that if we keep a seed in our hands and clutch it with a closed fist, it will never grow. We must open our hands and let go of the seed. The problem is that many of us are living with closed hands. When we live like that, nothing can grow either within us or within others.
The painting Reflections, celebrates the awesome process of changing into who we are and whose we are, God’s children, made in his image. God finds such delight in this process, especially when we reflect and acknowledge his grace within the journey.
It’s not easy to hold yourself in readiness. You have to be alert, your entire body engaged and prepared to move. You have to be focused, intent on watching for the necessary sign. You have to be willing to act, following the signal the moment it arrives.
These kinds of moments have come and gone in my ministry, and more are sure to unfold; as they do I need to ask myself, how am I treading? Lightly? With grace? Out in the open? Is it about me? Or am I the errand runner for the Spirit I need to be? Sadly for me, as my ministry moves
I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity, the Three in One and One in Three – the space-maker who is the source of my freedom, the one who empowers me to defy the forces that seek to restrict me to unbending characterizations or rigid roles.
Here’s the deal with the whole alarm clock thing – the wake part is God’s work, and God did a pretty good job of it in releasing all that God energy into the world 2000 years ago. But now it’s the get up part. The question is, are we going to sleep right through?
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