What Shall We Say to these Things?

    I’ve heard the complaints. I’ve heard the insults.

    But who or what could separate us from unyielding, atoning love? Should fascist tyrants and their daily spiraling, bellicose declarations? Should an ever-increasing fiscal anxiety? The accumulated weight of vulgarity and abuse of loudmouths in the public square? Internment camps at the border? Unchecked militant police aggression? Reoccurring outbreaks of measles and the flu?

    We’ve heard it, though sometimes it’s difficult to recall. We’ve read it, though sometimes it’s difficult to believe it’s true. For his sake we are maligned, scorned, depleted. Evicted, eviscerated, excoriated. We are accounted as sacrificial collateral damage.

    How do we go on? Persist? Resist? Why bother? But we do – because he loves.

    Not death – nor those who would gleefully promote it in public view.
    Not the long, long grind and struggle of daily life.
    Not spiritual forces beyond our ken.
    Not corrupted governments beyond our control.
    Not our sordid history.
    Not our malignant trajectory.

    Not our exceptionalist glory. Not our tragic failures. None of it. If we would love, none of it could wrench us from the greater love that precedes and sustains our love.

Romans 8:35-39