For A Lot Of People In Our

I Would Hope That Wherever I Go I Bring Good News - That's What That Word Means, Right? It Began With The First Followers Of Jesus Taking A Roman Military Propaganda Term And Co-opting It For Their Own Subversive Purposes, Insisting That The World Isn't Made Better Through Coercive Military Violence But Through Sacrificial Love. How Great Is That!? Unfortunately This Word Has Been Hijacked In Several Years For Other Purposes But No Worries, We're Taking It Back.

If This Understanding Of The Good News Of Jesus Prevailed Among Christians, The Belief That Jesus’s Message Is About How To Get Somewhere Else, You Could Possibly End Up With A World In Which Millions Of People Were Starving, Thirsty, And Poor; The Earth Was Being Exploited And Polluted; Disease And Despair Were Everywhere; And Christians Weren’t Known For Doing Much About It. If It Got Bad Enough, You Might Even Have People Rejecting Jesus Because Of How His Followers Lived. That Would Be Tragic.

Times Change. God Doesn’t, But Times Do. We Learn And Grow, And The World Around Us Shifts, And The Christian Faith Is Alive Only When It Is Listening, Morphing, Innovating, Letting Go Of Whatever Has Gotten In The Way Of Jesus And Embracing Whatever Will Help Us Be More And More The People God Wants Us To Be.

We Need A Childlike Trust That God Is Good... Ultimately We Are Ok. That Is A Simple, Beautiful Pure Thing That Can Be Complicated Ferociously By All Sorts Of Intellectual Categories.

Atoms Are A Relationship Of Energy. You Are A Relationship Of Energy Interacting With Another Person Who Is Another Complex Relationship Of Energy. We All Exchange More Than Words With Each Other. . . We Are Made Of The Same Substance As Rocks And Stars. .. We Are An Exotic Cocktail Living On This Planet. .. We Live In This Universe Which Is A Self-transcending Reality