Abundant Living

Some people see all the gospel in Isaiah’s cry:  “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.”  But is that really what the gospel is about, “to comfort the distressed”?  If that is what the gospel is all about it never undertakes that role very regularly, at least it hasn’t in my journey.  The gospel seems to be equally concerned about and even more focused on “distressing the comfortable.”  

It is interesting to me that Jesus never seemed concerned about the way out.  To him it seems it was the way through that mattered.  In this sense he was unlike us.  Our big issues are the problems of living, but with Jesus, it was always the problem of life.  It was and is LIFE (the challenge, the bewilderment, the anxiety of it all) that the gospel addresses, and the gospel addresses it by increasing it. 

Sigmund Freud called religion an “irrational delusion;” man’s assumption that he is somehow invulnerable, immortal, and backed up by being saved for heaven by the Almighty.  But I must ask:  Where in the Bible is that?  For when I read the Bible I see nothing like that at all.  What I see is vulnerable, mortal, and distressed human beings backed up in a corner, always facing impossible odds, always attempting to be more fully human than they are, always distressed with the problem of life—but never wanting to find a way out of LIFE—but rather always attempting to find a meaningful way through LIFE.  It is called “abundant living.”  This “living” is always more stressful than it is comfortable.

Iris bloom, #5...