Breath Prayer and Words for the Day: I will keep my eyes and heart open to signs of God's coming.
The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas has an interesting variation of Jesus saying in Luke, "The kingdom of God is among you." In Thomas the disciples ask, "When will the new world come?" Jesus answers, "What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it." In another place Thomas quotes Jesus saying, "The kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it." Why don't we see it?
I believe it is because we look at the surface of things and don't take time to look into the depths. Our media is expert at that. That's one of the reasons people refer to much of it as "infotainment." The surface can be glitzy or bloody but if that is all you see, you don't really know what's going on.
I was at a restaurant the other night and overheard the woman at the table next to me talking about the poor. "They're just lazy!" she declared. "We shouldn't support welfare for these people. "I would go right out and get another job if I were laid off!" I wondered how long she could maintain that attitude, if she worked at Crossroads Community Services a while, and heard desperate middle class people talk about spending months and months looking for work, until their exhausted bank accounts forced them to come to us for food.
All of us are really good at seeing the bad. That's one reason why Jesus tells us not to judge others. Often people do the wrong thing for the right reason, but we don't bother asking what they were trying to do. Instead of looking at the bad, at the easy answer, at the surface, we need to open our eyes to the depth of people to see the goodness and the love inside.
Even in the midst of this terrible economy there are glimpses of the kingdom all around us, like the FirstChurch volunteers distributing food and clothing at Crossroads, building homes with Habitat for Humanity, assisting sick children and adults at Methodist Hospital, working with Kairos prison ministries, working with Dallas Ramps to ease the way of the handicapped, working with 1stEcoTeam to put inexpensive flourescent lights in the homes of people on fixed incomes -- I could go on and on. But looking even farther into our world we see people winning their freedom through non-violent means, nations working together to solve economic problems, people speaking out against greed and indifference. Researcher Steven Pinker even tells us that in spite of our high tech weaponry and easily available guns there is actually a smaller proportion of the population dying from violence today than there has ever been in human history.
The important thing is to keep our eyes open to what God is doing in our world. Every act of kindness, every gesture of love, every gift of joy, each act of creativity, all are seeds of the kingdom if we will only recognize them. They may be mustard seeds, seemly tiny and insignificant, but we have the promise that God will grow them into a tree of light, life and love sheltering all in its branches. Stop. Look. The kingdom is all around you.
