Saving the world

I have this idea that all of our lives we are responding to our calling by either running away from it or running towards it.  I think that we are really doing both at the same time in different areas of our lives.  God has called us to something that involves saving the world.  Maybe not saving the entire world through one person, but collectively being a part of the saving Kingdom that does save the world.  Their are casualties though.  There are the hurt, the hungry, the poor.  There are the victims of crimes, bad parents, and abuse.  There are the victims of our own racism and classicism and nationalism that cause us to think for some moments that God must be asleep at the wheel.  In these moments when I see these things, this evidence of our collective fallen-ness, I wonder where God is.

I think that God is in me, working to bring His kingdom of peace and love and redemption and sharing and hope through me.  I want to believe it, and I want to know it.  But most of all I want to see it.  I really wish I could see it every day through the institutions that we say belong to God...places like churches and even places like hospitals and corporations with God's name on them, or in their mission statements.

I don't think that God's work is confined to those very infinite and small places.  I think that His work and His movement and His power is at work in all the people of this world.  I think that His hands are at work inside of each and every human being, because we all know and contemplate and suspect that there is something more to this life than the reality in front of us.  There are more than the atoms that make up our existence.  There is an awareness of the other, the more, the incredible that is both in us and through us and bigger than the collective US.  Thank God, there is more than just us.  There is the God in us.  I don't know what redemption and resurrection always looks like, but I know it when I see it, when I see one of us doing something wonderful for someone else.  Expand all these moments throughout all of creation, and you will start to see something more wonderful and more incredible that you can imagine.  Realize that these moments are taking place all across the world and in some way are connected and caused by the same wonderful force.  You will start to see the Other.  You will start to see God.  And this is only a start.