This is part of an ongoing series during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. To engage further in the #QuarantineSoulCare series, click here.
The whole sense of Scripture, it seems to me, is that God the Father has this thing about being. He was absolutely wild about it. He kept thinking up new ways of being and new kinds of being to be. One afternoon the Son came along and said, “This is really great stuff; why don’t I go mix Us up a batch?” And God the Holy Spirit said, “Terrific! I’ll help You.”
So they got together that night and put on a terrific show of being for the Father. It was full of water and light and frogs; pussy willows kept dropping all over the place, and crazy fish swam around in the wine glasses. There were mushrooms and grapes, horseradishes and tigers; and men and women everywhere to taste them, to juggle them, to join with them and love them. God the Father looked at the whole wild party and said, “Wonderful! Just what I had in mind. Yay, yay, yay!” And all God the Son and God the Holy Spirit could think of to say was, “Yay, yay, yay!” They laughed for ages and ages, saying things like how great it was for being to be, how clever of the Father to conceive the idea, how kind of the Son to go to all the trouble of putting it together, and how considerate of the Spirit to spend so much time directing and choreographing.
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Creation, Scripture says, is good. Created things are just so many myriad responses to the delight of God who wills them into being. …
Admittedly, it is not always easy to see that all being is good. Earthquakes and poison toadstools, cancer cells, liver flukes, killer whales, and loan sharks have to be considered. But there is no going back on what the book of Genesis records: “God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good” (Genesis 1:31, emphasis added).
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Pain, inconvenience, sin—these are the problems of being, the alarming, embarrassing, even tragic things that God is apparently willing to put up with in order to have beings at all. But whatever the problems are, they are not the root of being. That root is joy and now.
May you have eyes to see, today, beyond the problems of being all the way to the root. May today the joy of the Lord be your strength. #quarantinesoulcare Click To TweetThis day is holy to God. Don’t feel bad. The joy of GOD is your strength!”
–Nehemiah 8:10, The Message
Today’s reading was taken from Souvenirs of Solitude by Brennan Manning.
