Hope

Coach John Wooden, who piloted the UCLA Bruin basketball team to so many championships, is 98 this year. He eats at the same restaurant every day, writes his deceased wife a letter every month on the date of their anniversary, and keeps in touch with his many friends and admirers. Wooden stopped driving last year, and has had some health problems, but since he had two more years before his license expired, he recently decided he would live to 100.

Many of us drive I-26 through Johnson City on a daily basis to shop, to work, to play. As we pass by the old downtown section, the skyline of Johnson City is in plain view. Perhaps the most distinguishable building in that part of town is unique because of its height and art-deco trim along the roof.

Kindness and forgiveness and tenderheartedness. These are not our society’s virtues. Together they create a pattern for the perfect doormat. Left to our own devises perhaps that is precisely what such characteristics would weave.

“Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

In Jesus’ culture, a day began at night. As the first day began with darkness, and God spoke light into it, so our days begin with God’s spirit hovering over our lives as the details blur with the lengthening shadows of evening.

After an eventful Sabbath, the first day rose as the sun set. Mark frames our view through the doorposts of Peter and Andrew’s house. Rather than serving as a barricade against the undulating chaos of broken people gathering outside, the door opened to a new creation. The depressed, the anxious, the traumatized, the disturbed received their wits and grasped reality like they never had, or had long forgotten. The over medicated and uninsured extended their hands and receive health. God’s life poured irresistibly through his Son. Even the forces of evil could not refrain from declaring the good news. But Jesus silenced them. It is better to believe because of God’s good works than the devil’s word. Wholeness should speak louder than the last screech of a broken spirit.