Listen

As Jesus walked along, he saw a man who was blind from birth. Jesus’ disciples asked, “Rabbi, who sinned so that he was born blind, this man or his parents?”

Jesus answered, “Neither he nor his parents. This happened so that God’s mighty works might be displayed in him. While it’s daytime, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” After he said this, he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and smeared the mud on the man’s eyes. Jesus said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (this word means sent). So the man went away and washed. When he returned, he could see.

John 9:1-7

Think

Many live with hard diagnoses and painful realities, each within our individual physical, mental, and emotional capacities. And of course, there are those with lives so much harder than our own. We face our challenges (as they do theirs) not because of sin (not as punishment for sin), but for purpose. And not that there is a reason for what is hard and horrible in our lives, but that there is an opportunity within what is hard and awful—that in such living, God would be revealed and revealed not as warrior, hero, imposing a new reality, but as shepherd, loving kindness within reality as it is.

When life is awful, God is with us. When we don’t see a way, God is looking out for us. It’s not the promise of a divine fix—our own personal get-out-of-circumstances-free card. It’s not a guaranteed happily-ever-after. That’s fairy tales, not gospel. It is the divine promise and commitment to go with us through whatever we live into. Open our eyes, God, we want to see truly.

John Ballenger

Question to Ponder:

How does thinking about an opportunity within things that happen in our lives, instead of a reason for those things happening, change the way we think about our God, our faith, our circumstances, and prayer?

Pray

Amidst all that is truly horrible, God, in the unfolding of circumstance (of decisions made, of decisions others make that affect us, of exposures and infections, of tragedies), we pray for peace and strength and stamina and hope and joy and … well, all those things on which you exhort us to think (Philippians 4:8). Amen.

Go

Go. God without the “d.”

Movement. Purpose (one hopes)—

direction—intention. Trajectory.

From all that brought us to this here and now,

we go—and maybe everything stays the same.

But maybe, everything changes.