Abiding Monday

I read this a few days ago in "Listening To Your Life" by Frederick Buechner.

"What I began to see was that the Bible is not essentially, as I had always more or less supposed, a book of ethical principles, of moral exhortations, of cautionary tales about exemplary people, of uplifting thoughts - in fact, not really a religious book at all in the sense that most of the books you would be apt to find in a minister's study or reviewed in a special religion issue of the New York Times book section are religious. I saw it instead as a great, tattered compendium of writings, the underlying and unifying purpose of all of which is to show how God works through the Jacobs and Jabboks of history to make himself known to the world and to draw the world back to himself.

For all its vast diversity and unevenness, it is a book with a plot and a plot that can be readily stated. God makes the world in love. For one reason or another the world chooses to reject God. God will not reject the world but continues his mysterious and relentless pursuit of it to the end of time. That is what he is doing by choosing Israel to be his special people. That is what he is doing through all the passion and poetry and invective of the prophets. That is why history plays such a crucial part in the Old Testament - all those kings and renegades and battles and invasions and apostasies - because it was precisely through people like that and events like those that God was a work, as, later, in the New Testament, he was supremely at work in the person and event of Jesus Christ. Only "is at work" would be the more accurate way of putting it because......his work goes on still, of course, and at one and the same time the biblical past not only illumines the present but becomes itself part of that present, part of our own individual pasts. Until you can read the story of Adam and Eve, of Abraham and Sarah, of David and Bathsheba, as your own story, Muilenburg (one of Frederick's teachers) said, you have not really understood it. The Bible, as he presented it, is a book finally about ourselves, our own apostasies, our own battles and blessings........"

It is a love story!
A story of God's pursuit of us,
of me,
of you!
We are a people
broken,
flawed,
hardhearted,
searching,
yearning,
desiring,
tender,
hurting,
confused,
as well as,
compassionate,
giving,
loving (as best as we can)
creative,
as Brennan Manning says, "A glorious ruin."

God continues to pursue.
I am thankful!

Blessings!