Tuesday Remix – This is a popular post from last year, updated and re-posted for your consideration and comments.
Last Summer, my family vacationed in San Francisco. The real cause for the trip was a family wedding that took place in the Redwood Forest (Kent and Amanda, my niece and her husband). Finding such a breathtaking place to start their married lives together is a testimony in itself about the spirits of these two much-loved family members. The ceremony was beautiful and amazing and images from it will remain burned in our memories forever. It was enough to help us all forget the hundreds of forest fires raging around us in the Northern California area, at least until we got back to our hotel rooms and watched the local news.
The irony is thick, isn’t it? A home filled with creative expressions of love is birthed in the midst of fire and destruction. What kind of divine entity masterminds that? What is the character of a God Who brings us such joy while permitting such devastation?
I could not help but think about the church and its dizzying tendency to provide us with some of our most beautiful and some of our most painful memories, all within days of one another. Even in the midst of real firestorms, God continues to move and to work in the hearts of His people. The God of the universe can do that. This is no God conceived in the small mind of a human being. Who could have ever written such a story?
This same God has left his fingerprints all over the church. His people carry with them the same incredible ability to provide a place of powerfully positive emotions and enormously damaging circumstances. The church is very much like that: painful, loving, destructive, and unbelievably edifying… all at the same time. Gotta love it.
© Blake Coffee
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