"Mark Buchanan"の名言

Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks.

In the winter of the heart...we experience a wide gap between what we know of God and what we taste and see of God. Our theology says one thing - God is loving, faithful, righteous, bestowing wonders. But our experience says another - that he's aloof, angry, capricious, dealing bruises. And we feel deeply alone; even when we're with others, we're estranged from them. Sadness is a room we can't find the door out of. And worst of all, we feel the encroachment of death. Everything looks dead. We feel dead. Sometimes we wish we were dead. But Christ, the Man for All Seasons, meets us even here, in the depth of our wintertime. He waits with us. He prunes us. He breaks our self-dependency and deepens our God-dependency. He brings us into a fresh encounter with the God who raises the dead. And always, the Man for All Seasons leads us out of winter.

Springtime brings the consolation of hope. It gives the assurance that death has lost its sting. There is beauty in this hope and this assurance. There is beauty in the woman whose chemo-induced baldness, unswaddled, shines like a pearl, in the man whose palsy makes him shimmy like a Spanish dancer. There is beauty in their defiance and their acceptance. There is beauty in their standing in the hope that death can't steal or destroy.

The trees frothed with leaf and blossom. The ground softened to mud, then thickened with an embroidery of flowers. Birds whirled and swooped and sang, and colts and calves tottered or gamboled in farmyards. The back of winter finally broke, and warmth and color came rushing in. And hope. Always, hope.