Love Always Leaves Room for the Other to Decide

If we want isolation, despair, and the right to be our own god, God graciously grants us that option. If we insist on using our God-given power and strength to make the world in our own image, God allows us that freedom; we have the kind of license to do that. if we want nothing to do with light, hope, love, grace & peace, God respects that desire on our part, and we are given a life free from any of those realities. the ore we want nothing to do with all God is, the more distance and space are created, if we want nothing to do with love, we are given a reality free from love.

If, however, we crave light, we're drawn to truth, we're desperate for grace, we've come to the end of our plots & schemes and we want someone else's path, God gave us what we want.
If we have this sense  that we've wandered far from home, and we want to return, God is there, standing in the driveway, arms open, ready to invite us in.
If we thirst for shalom,and we long for the peace that transcends all understanding, God doesn't just give, they're poured out on us, lavished, heaped, until we're overwhelmed. It's like a feast where the food and wine do not run out.

These desires can start with the planting of an infinitesimally small seed deep in our heart, or a yearning for a better, or a gnawing sense that we're missing out, or an awareness that beyond the routine and grind of life there's something more, or the quiet hunch that this isn't all there is. It often has its birth in the most unexpected ways, arising out of our need for something we know we do not have, for someone we know we are not.

And to that, that impulse, craving, yearning longing, desire - God say yes. Yes, there is water for that thirst, food for that hunger, light for that darkness, relief for that burden. If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. that's ho love works, It can't be forces, manipulated, or coerced. it always leaves room for the other to decide.

God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins.

Rob Bell, [Love Wins]

Graffiti Kl (XXVII)

Graffiti KL (XXVI)

Jelatek riverbank

Reading The Bible

When we read the Bible, then, we need to learn to pay attention to the understandings of reality which permeate the text. Unless we do this, we may fail to discern what is in fact present to the text & to the church. For the believing community is always confronted by the text as summoning it to make a new decision about perspective.
Thus one main reason why we read scripture is so that we may not settle easily for any other notion of life, forgetting who we are and the understanding of life that we have confessed and embraced. Informed by the Bible, we are invited to live in faithful response to this faithful covenant partner. Such a possibility is not guaranteed by Scripture study, but it is peculiar to our faith tradition and provides us with a context for living quite different from the reigning alternatives. In other words, one of the most important gifts the Bible can give us is the frame of reference for our lives. Given that frame of reference, we are still left with major decisions to make about our world, our freedom, and our responsibility. But scripture reading can provide us with resources & images enabling us to understand, embrace and respond to life in terms of the vitality of being in history with a covenantal partner who speaks newness in a world which always seems fatigued & exhausted.
(Walter Brueggemann, The Bible Makes Sense)

Graffiti KL (XXV) - KUL Sign Festival 2012

God and Our Choices

The universe where we are living, and of which we form a tiny particle, is the distance put by love between God & God. We are a point in this distance. Space, time & the mechanism that governs matter are the distance. Everything that we call evil is only this mechanism.
God has provided that when his grace penetrates to the very center of a man and from there illuminates all his being, he is able to walk on the water without violating any of the laws of nature. When, however, a man turns away from God, he simply give himself up to the law of gravity. Then he thinks that he can decide & choose, but he is only a thing, a stone that falls.
If we examine human society and souls closely and with attention, we see that wherever the virtue of supernatural light is absent, everything is obedient to mechanical law as blind and as exact as the law of gravitation. To know this is profitably & necessary. Those whom we call criminals are only tiles blown off a roof by the wind & falling at random. Their only fault is the initial choice by which they become such tiles.
Simone Weil [Waiting for God]