3 January 2005

We start a series featuring "In the End-the Beginning" by Jurgen Moltmann.



"There is a magic in every beginning", wrote Hermann Hesse. What does this mean, if we think about the beginning of every human life? In order to grasp this more clearly, let us look at the biblical concept of promise. A divine promise is the promise of future which God is going to bring about. When God promises something he is bound to keep his promise, for his own sake and for the sake of his glory. His whole being is faithfulness. That is why we human beings can trust him and can believe what he promises.



At least we must realize that promise within our faith story has to do with "future which God is going to bring about." This is not about what I want to see take place. I am called to trust in what God promises. There is a whole book filled with how God goes about bringing the promises that point to the way of the future into the events of the day. Many times though, it is much easier for me, and I take it for you also, to trust what we each may have planned for ourselves and others in our lives. But when we venture to say we are God's people, we are letting go of the plans we can so precisely make and we are boldly invited to set out into God's future. Sometimes we use the word vision to lay out such a planned journey. But again, it is the vision of God's future that we learn from the one who stretches it out before us. The magic (if that's one way we choose to call it) of a beginning is that we cannot know its full content. Absolutely anything can step into the pathway we walk and therefore we cannot predict how the promise will unfold. When God promises to be with us -Emmanuel- that sounds great...but what in the world will that mean for us by the end of this day or the next week or as I am about to decide between this or that "life" decision. There is always something strange, challenging, and...hopeful in hearing that God is and will being bringing something about in our lives.



Connection: Hang on and be ready for a how today may be an ordinary day but within its many turns and straight-aways, we may find something divine in the air and it blow across our faces turning our lives into something more than we could expect.



Wind of Life, you pull us forward into your future. Sometimes we pull away and run as fast as we can in another direction and sometime we are swept up into your presence and find our lives changing again. Refresh us again so that we will be ready to walk in your ways. Amen.