The Sky is Falling by Jill Carattini

Take approximately 5 minutes to read this shortened version of yesterday's 'A Slice of Infinity'. Post comments to the blog for spiritual collaboration. Please email your prayer requests too.

Parable of Talents

Slice of Infinity Snippets:
Chicken Little is afraid. The sky is falling and she needs to tell the king. She dashes off as fast as she can, running into friends along the way with whom she shares her fear. “The sky is falling!” she yells, and her worried friends join the race to find the king.

The well-known misadventures of Chicken Little and her friends tell a tale of fear and its infectious grasp. ...It seems like we have been hearing it a lot this year...

Focusing on our fears, ever-reacting to our worries, and accepting this culture of fear as a given, not only affects our subsequent reasoning, living, and faithfulness, our fears in fact become us. Our fears tell us how to spend our money, raise our children, vote in an election, and participate in (or isolate ourselves from) society. We become no different than Chicken Little or the slave in Jesus’s parable who withdrew in fear of his master and buried his talent in the sand...

Yet the harsh rebuke of this slave in the parable of the talents makes it clear that safe-living is not an option, nor an ultimate value, in the kingdom of God. So is there a distinctively Christian alternative to the atmosphere of fear that is so pervasive and contagious? The parable of the talent asks us to see the power and control we allow to masquerade as security and so convince ourselves that we are living wisely, even morally upright, when we are really living in fear. These fears move us to withdraw from the very kingdom Jesus calls us to join and join with him in announcing. Instead of moving further up and farther into the kingdom he proclaimed among us, we dig for our souls a place in the outer darkness.

There is indeed an alternative, but it is neither safe nor easy. It involves laying down our fears to follow Christ with faith’s daring; it involves opening our lives to a world that scares us, and rejecting the anxiety of a world convinced the sky is falling. The Christian alternative to a culture of fear is a kingdom of hospitality and abundance, vulnerability and generosity, love and self-sacrifice--the very kingdom Christ shaped with his living and dying, and invites us to do the same.

“Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Our Father by Jill Carattini

Take approximately 5 minutes to read this shortened version of yesterday's 'A Slice of Infinity'. Post comments to the blog for spiritual collaboration. Please email your prayer requests too.

There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am.
John 14:2-3

...such is the startling, radical message of Christ. There is a Father who knows you by name, in whose house you are invited to be who you are, to live and work and play as God created you. There is a Father who waits, who longs to gather his children together and take them into his arms. Some will be transformed, some will be broken, some will refuse to be gathered. But God offers us a place, positioned within the greater offer of adoption. He is our Father whose name is hallowed and whose kingdom we seek, whom we know through the Son and worship as children. His name is Abba.

Comments: In his new book titled, "The Shack", William P. Young depicts God as saying, "And let's say that I know it will take you forty-seven situations and events before you will actually hear me-that is, before you will hear clearly enough to agree with me adn change. So when you don't hear me the first time, I'm not frustrated or disappointed. I'm thrilled. Only forty-six more times to go. And that first time will be a building block to construct a bridge of healing that one day-that today-you will walk across." Ch 13 ppg187

The Cross of the Moment by Jill Carattini

Take about 5 minutes to read this snippets version of The previous day's 'A Slice of Infinity'. Follow up by reading TODAY'S SLICE and forward any comments on your faith journey.

Afterward Jesus returned to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish holy days. Inside the city, near the Sheep Gate, was the pool of Bethesda, with five covered porches. Crowds of sick people—blind, lame, or paralyzed—lay on the porches. One of the men lying there had been sick for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him and knew he had been ill for a long time, he asked him, “Would you like to get well?”

“I can’t, sir,” the sick man said, “for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.”

Jesus told him, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!” (John 5:1-8)

A Slice of Infinity Snippets:
Where Christ asks “Do you want to be well?” it is possible he may also be asking, Do you prefer your pain to the possibility of change? Do you want more to see the miracle accomplished your way then to see it accomplished at all? Indeed, do you really want the thing you say you long for? His questions gently pierce the heart of the human condition we all share, bidding us to receive the very thing we ask from the only one capable of giving it.

Where we seek meaning, are we willing to be changed by that meaning? Where we seek help, are we willing to receive instruction? Where we seek healing, are we willing to be transformed? Where we seek true community, are we willing to relinquish autonomy? Where we seek understanding, are we wiling to climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die?

To every cry of every heart, Christ calls out, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). The question he asks as we walk forward is “Do you really want to be well?”

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