Why Love His Church: Love what your friend loves.
Some of what I learn, is to be better informed when talking with people who carry different gifts—like apostolic people. I like being informed about what makes them tick, and what categories they are thinking in. I have my own pet projects and topics, but I also like learning other’s.  Church planting, for instance is not one of my native topics, yet I love learning about it, as I have so many friends involved in it. It goes back to loving what Jesus loves—which is really my interest in the church. I love what My Friend loves. That’s part of being in union with Him. I don’t have choice to not love His Church.  When you love what God loves, you will find yourself interested in His Church. And you don’t wait until she is perfect before you love her. As Willard said, we have to form in the imperfect communities given to us. We are to love what He loves..not just “the lost” but His Church as well, regardless of her shadows.
To speak into something or about something you must love it. This is true if you are speaking about the church, races, or other genders etc…otherwise people speak in bitterness and hatred and lose perspective. I don’t think you can really speak into something if you don’t love it, and your authority to actually change it is to the degree or measure of that love.
It is just as you can only prophecy to the degree that you yourself have formed that part of Christ in you!
“We can only speak into another to the degree we love them.  The other and God have to enter the same gaze. The measure of love towards them, is the level of our helpfulness to others. Skills alone don’t transform us or them, though they are formed from love over time. Love does.” anonymous monk.
Everything you are is known and hidden in Him. So you are free to be. Free to live as yourself now and forever. Our real life is safe to become in Him, that’s one of His whispered secrets about us. (the whispering monk)
///
Purim!!!
  Celebrating Purim in our own way this weekend with our many friends around the world. Drinking a little extra wine and costuming, celebrating existence, just celebrating being human in this case with all the Purim craziness of San Fran, not to mention my saint Patrick’s day party (this city always wears a costume and looks for a reason to celebrate—wait we do this all the time! Today a Jewish father with a great cartooned royal hat let us cross the road and spoke a blessing our way. I love it when people exchange blessings freely between cultures! Makes us better people. As, we are all just people trying to be people, as one old friend used to say. But celebrating this people group continued existence really does help us all.
 Anyways, thankful that the Jews, and the human family, have survived despite ourselves, and stomping our feet wherever we go this week, that this is so—doing the dance of the human family’s continuing existence! Always makes me just glad to be alive! That we have done more than survive, we are still fruitful as people, is a miracle given the amount of suffering in the world! Of course, I love any holiday which gives me an excuse to celebrate, wear costumes and dance daily. Celebration reminds us that we are still apart of the sacred story.
Of course I was born on a Christian party holiday coming up this week, celebrating the saint Patrick, my favorite saint, so I lean towards celebration, poetry of life, and try to see each day of life as a gift, or as Heschel said: “See each day in the light of God, bring people and God into the same thought daily. The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments!”
“People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state–it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle…. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.” Source: The Wisdom of Heschel
Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
The degree to which one is sensitive to other people’s suffering, to other (people’s) humanity, is the index of one’s own humanity
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be?
The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster. To pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question.
“No Religion is an Island”, p. 264