The Healing Death

"Faith also came to believe in doing things I could not understand, in trusting that authenticity wasn’t always about feeling something and then acting on that feeling; that it could involve acting toward feeling a different way—trusting that there might be something on the other side of intention that felt less willed, more sublime. So much of that 'trust-fall' shows up in other parts of life, of course: Showing up for another day of marriage. Showing up for another day of writing. Showing up for another day of parenting. Feeling frustrated, cloistered, doubtful, but believing in the other side of all those feelings. Believing in another horizon, beyond what you can see".

Jamie Quatro.


"Put this in any liquid thing you will, 
And drink it off; and, if you had the strength
Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight".

Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet.


Gone, now, are the days of being carefree, perhaps allowing careless negligence.
Now, the most basic of behaviours must be preceded by cleansing to avoid the vileness of a cruel death.

No place now for what we may define as rash piety or indulgent nonchalance - each are equally burned in the bite of indiscriminate and exhaustive excise.

All of life, from the arrangement of our hours at home with others or alone to the very routine of buying goods or walking the dog must be considered with great care in order to escape the shadow of a peril that could truly end us.

Cleanliness and separation, coupled with concern and consideration, are no longer options; things we take for granted - they are matters of life and death to each of us.

And so, we are constantly entreated via the media - look to this vital distance apart if you wish to be safe, and to live!

This all sounds very familiar to anyone who has spent a while reading the Bible.

A great deal of the Old Testament is about the need to find in us a purity - a cleanliness on the outside that is a reflection of what's going on on the inside, and the problem that we all have that disrupts and breaks down attaining this - an infection called sin that leads to spiritual and physical death. God is constantly expressed as the one who is entreating us to put aside this malady by trusting in Him (rather than ourselves) to rescue and cleanse us and thereby provide the true remedy to our lawless nature and the means to be those free of the evil that is distancing us from Him and each other.

It's easy for people to think that none of this actually applies to them  - we've seen that played out numerous times in the last few weeks here - but that is a folly which merely increases the problem and the consequences this death creates. The fact is that we're all carriers of something highly destructive and only when a very real vaccine is provided can something work in us that eliminates what is so wrong.

A few weeks of living under the reality of a infected world has totally changed things, and people are now keenly aware that a remedy is imperative if they are to return to the kind of things they so liked to take for granted.
The same is true about us in a far deeper sense, and only God's work in Jesus Christ provides our world with the cure so urgently and deeply needed for us to be whole once again.

Something to really think about during this life-changing crisis.