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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

This Side of Paradise

How helpful is it for you to hear the stories of the way God has worked in the lives of other Christians? Why? (Serendipity Bible Fourth Edition, page 1350).


What does great literature and Sunday school class have in common?  The answer: both deal with imperfect people and intimations of redemption.  The key fact revealed in both–we very much live in the real world and not some plastic, antiseptic paradise of perfection.  We are surrounded by broken dreams, broken hearts, broken lives, broken people.  Rebirth involves the pain of rebirth.  Redemption is never without some prior rendering of suffering.  This is not a bleak observation.  Quite to the contrary–we can only effectively deal with life as it is once we have a cache of experience honestly and humbly examined. This leads (when not short-circuited by resentment) to contrition and a state of mind that induces nascent intimations of a better way–a path however arduous to heaven.


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