Mystery

I'm watching "It's a Wonderful Life," with the family. It's a beautiful time spent reflecting on a beautiful moment.

Living in our age, now, we can't truly appreciate the depth of the prophesy given to the Jews. Surely we can reflect on, and we must, as followers of Jesus praise God for the fulfillment of it, but I don't know that we can truly appreciate it.

Which is why we don't see the beauty of taking part in the Kingdom of God. I write this blog on this night for a reason. In the morning we will awake and we will celebrate that the Kingdom is here. The Kingdom is now. We've celebrated the Advent season and it all culminates in the morning. What a beautiful moment!

So may you, with your family and friends, celebrate this mysterious birth and remember that the Kingdom is now. Christ has come, Christ has died, Christ is risen and Christ will come again!

Blessings and Peace
Jared

Passions

I know that I've written about this before, but it's one of my favorite subjects. And my last couple of blogs have been pretty weighty. I don't think that's a bad thing, just time to lighten things up a bit.

Music and coffee are two of my deepest passions. I believe them both to be gifts God wrapped up just for me. I could talk about either for hours on end. I'm a pretty passionate guy, so to be honest I could talk about a lot of things for hours on end.

That's the reason I love Wikipedia so much, it fills my arsenal of knowledge so I can hold conversations about other's passions, because that is another passion of mine, deep conversations. Stay with me here...

I love to talk to people about the things they love. I had a great conversation this weekend about coffee. Coffee. It was great! We talked about the love of the local coffee shop, the bitter taste of burnt beans from a national chain and the sweet science of mixing drinks.

I had another talk with someone last week about art. I know nothing about art but to hear this guy talk about it was beautiful.

My brother loves people. He talk about the intricacies of the human soul for hours. I get absolutely drawn in when he does this. For my sister, it's compassion. For anything. She cried in High School Musical. All three of them. Why? Because she hurts along with every other living thing that hurts. It's one of the most beautiful things I've seen, the way she loves.

I think it's beautiful the way our Creator has wired us. I think he's wired all of us to be passionate about something. The tragedy is, most people ignore this. They go about life living safely in hobbies when instead they could be living richly in passions. Don't walk through life. Chase after those things that drive your spirit.

This leads me to my next passion, stories. Tell me your story. What are you passionate about? What things light up your heart and stir your soul? Tell me! I want to know!

The Great Divorce

I'm reading The Great Divorce again. I think this makes it the fifth reading of the C.S. Lewis classic. I love this book. It's one of Lewis' easier reads, in that it is only around a hundred pages long and the stories of the characters are all fairly self-contained.

This book makes me think. A lot. It's important to note that Lewis never says that this view of the heaven/hell relationship is theologically accurate, or that he even thinks that this is what it will look like. But it still makes me think.

It makes me think that the view of hell that we've gathered from Dante and other forms of mythology have snippets of truth, but they miss the biggest tragedy of hell. The absence of love. This is something that Lewis points out clearly in his book. It's also a theme of God and His words through Paul in Romans that "they were given over to dishonorable passions." This scares me more than the fire and brimstone.

This also goes back to the cross. It wasn't the physical beating, terrible as it was, that hurt Christ the most. What hurt Christ was the absence of the love of God when all the sin of the world was placed on Him. He had never felt shame. Now He felt all the shame of the world at once. All He had known was close community with the Father. Now that community was temporarily cut off.

As terrible as I think hell is, I don't think a fear of it is what should force people to follow Christ. See, I believe heaven is filled with people who love Christ passionately, not people who are scared of hell. There is a huge difference. Heaven is the opposite of hell. While hell is a place devoid of God's love, heaven is a place filled with love.

Giving this thought helps to drive my life. I want people to feel love. So I love here, now, in preparation for what is to come. At the same time, I believe many people choose hell daily by refusing to love. This should make Matthew 25 some of the most terrifying words in scripture. It drives me daily. Am I a sheep or a goat? Do I feed the hungry? Do I clothe the naked? Do I visit those imprisoned in life? Or do I bring hell to earth by ignoring the suffering around me?