Uniting Community and Christ

“Through it all,” God is faithfully developing beautiful spirits – strong, trusting, courageous, understanding hearts of mercy and grace, compassion and love, peace and joy, and kindness.

We enjoy observing and analyzing the animal “kingdom.” Their world intrigues us. We are both amused by critter antics and appalled by the brute “law of the jungle”. Yet, we have an intuitive sense that we fit somewhere in this picture. Some would say that humans are part of a created order; others say we are the result of an evolutionary process. Some theories attempt to combine the two ideas into a single creative, evolutionary process.

Surprisingly, we tend to live in spiritual shadows, but when God steps onto the scene, there is light because “God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all.”(1 John 1:5) When we begin to understand who God is, who we are, who we are meant to be, and how to become that person, He dispels the darkness of our insecurities and doubts and of our feelings of being minimized and unloved.

We tend to associate meaning and joy with good times, happy moments, positive happenings, and special people in whom we find pleasure. But what happens with loss, difficult times and offensive, oppressive people? We often find ourselves in the world of “what has been” or “what might have been” or “what might be.” We all seek a world free from the baggage and consequences of our misdeeds and bad behaviors.

Anxiety and discouragement occur when we lose confidence in God. If we perceive He is unseeing, distant, uncaring, unable, and uninvolved, if we sense there is little or no possibility of resolving our situation, if we feel we are alone, our faith waivers