How now....

.... shall we live?

It was last week while I was running that I began to think of how much time we spend talking about how to change the world, instead of moving towards a new world. As I sloshed through the left-over snow in the middle of a hazy Joplin day my thoughts ran faster than my feet could carry me. We who are Christians create such deep divides between the physical and spiritual needs of humans. Humans are not considered to be in two parts, being only spiritual or only physical. No, one cannot live without being both. Just as a body is incomplete without a soul, no human soul can ever be human without its body. So, how now then do we bring truth to those whose physical bodies ache and fail? And how now do we bring rest to those whose souls cry out from hunger pangs of spiritual starvation?

We take the hope of Jesus.
We move the hope by truth and faith. The truth may be a word, the truth may be food, the truth may be freedom.
When they do not hear our words we continue to aid their physical pain.
If they reject our material sacrifice, we press on in feeding their souls.
We feed their souls by prayer, by a rousing cry among the saints to Power.
When they stop their ears to our words, when they close their doors to our hands...
We live.
As we live lives of radical love and revolutionary contrast to a world of tragedy and oppression, we win.
When they tire, when they anger, when they rise against this life...
We die.
And in our death, we birth another generation of hope.
When we die, we prove that we were not slaves to life, nor slaves to death, but owned by something more.
When we die, we give life.
When we die, we live.
So, how now shall we live?


Simply as Christ.