This in response to Ted Gossard over on the Jesus community.
The Kingdom of Heaven is like a journal that a man kept for many months and set down on the trunk of his car to help his father bring in firewood.
The journal was filled with his poems, notes, thoughts, stories, letters from his children, artwork they had drawn together, pictures they had scribbled on notecards taped lovingly next to scribbled lists of words that rhyme. But he forgot to go back to the garage after carrying the wood. And instead his wife drove to the bank.
So he searched and searched, retracing her route, finding scattered pieces of paper that he recognized as ones he’d intended to tape down later. But no journal.
Then late in the afternoon, a strange voice on the phone calling the man by name. “I found your notebook,” and the man immediately left his house to get the journal, rejoicing all the way.
The Kingdom of this world is like the same man losing the same journal in the same way.
Only there is no phone call.
It is trash day, and some well meaning person, civic minded and helpful, sees the journal in the gutter. It takes little effort to bend over, pick up the journal, and toss it in a nearby trashcan. The trashmen never know what wonders they steal away.
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Reminds me of something I just put in my book, based on a Toni Morrison character who says, “She gather me. She pick up all my pieces and give them back to me in the right order.” That’s how I see God, and the Kingdom. That’s what the first journal experience here seems like. So different from the world, that scatters us, to the wind, or the trash, or the darkness of a sealed can.
Hello Mark,
Thanks for taking the time to write words of encouragement on L.L’s blog that was very kind of you.
I wish I could express myself like you guys!
Have a great Xmas Mark.
Kind Regards
Martin
L.L. I love Toni Morrison! Especially The Song of Solomon. That must have the best ending of any book I’ve ever read. (Exaggeration for emphasis.)
Sometimes God doesn’t gather me up in the way that I want him to. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t protect me. I just get confused about what it means to be blessed and comforted. I keep expecting God to bless me with the stuff that the Jones’s have.
I have to constantly remind myself that I am blessed to serve, not to receive.
Martin, you are very good at expressing yourself. Thanks for the comment and God bless.
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