The Acacia Community

As a part of our Thursday night journey through Mark Scandrette’s Soul Graffiti, we will bring a different voice to the table each Wednesday to reflect on this weeks reading.  This week we are covering the intro to Part 2 as well as Chapter 5. (pgs. 73-90)  These reviews will also post in the WEEKLY SOUL tab.  See you Thursday @ 7…

Darkness and Light: The Scandal of Eternity

by Mike Sexton

“Each day and each moment we are choosing a path toward life or death. All of our choices matter and function cumulatively to express faith or doubt in the goodness of our Maker”

That’s a pretty substantial statement.

As I read through this chapter, it pulled me back to Colossians 1:20 where it talks about Christ reconciling all things on heaven – and on earth – to himself. If that’s true, if Christ came to restore all things, to bring everything back into harmony, to settle those things unsettled, then it would seem to indicate that things in the world, at that time at least, were off-kilter. They were out of sync… they were supposed to be a different way.

Move forward into our world, into our time, and there seem to be many aspects that appear to be out of alignment with the way things are supposed to be. At a more individual or personal level, there are pieces of our lives that throw us out of balance and prevent us from living in a settled way. Within this chapter Scandrette perhaps prods at our response to those things unsettled by exploring how we view and how we respond to a Creator who is engaged in the world today and a God who is inherently good.

In our lives, within the faith, and within the world, there are just areas where we miss. We think reconciliation and harmony with God are achieved at a later time in another place. There can be such a futuristic perspective and yearning for a reconciled eternity that lies ahead of us, that we avoid and disengage from our responsibility to deal with the here and now. We allow thirsty lives around us to go unaltered, un-impacted and unloved – sometimes including our own. Scandrette sees a different perspective and states it well on page 85 where he says “Rather than simply waiting to be liberated to another time or place, we are being invited to collaborate in the healing and redemption of our world.”

We are invited to participate in this reconciliation of life awry (again, including our own) by a Creator who is good, who can be trusted, and who encounters us and embraces us continually. Scandrette points out though that each day we are faced with the choice of deciding whether or not we think God is good and if He can be trusted that He has our best interests in mind. He parallels this active and continual choice to a relationship within a marriage where the decision to marry is supported and repeatedly confirmed by a “persistent series of choices in the same direction.”

Each day we’re choosing whether we believe Christ’s intention to reconcile and bring life as it should be in ourselves and those around us; or, conversely, do we not believe that that is his good intention and accept the depletion of life that follows – again, both in ourselves and in those around us.