Following are excerpts from a letter from the Tuscumbia (AL) church of Christ thanking Christians for contributions given to support Ukrainian Christians.

One of the questions throughout human history has been, “If God is really good and really all-powerful, why do bad things happen to good people?” Why do the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer? Perhaps God isn’t actually good. Maybe he isn’t all-powerful. Or maybe he’s too far away, and doesn’t concern himself with human suffering.

After not that many years of abuse, my knees finally started giving out. I could feel it with every step I took. Something was seriously wrong, and walking only made it worse. I was walking wrong, I was sitting wrong, I was standing wrong. What I needed was to relearn how to walk, because clearly that was the problem.

The imagination is a powerful tool, for good or for ill. What innovation is not the result of a spark of the imagination? If that’s the case, then all of creation is the result of the imagination of our creator! And to think—he has given us that same ability!

I wonder how many of the problems we are facing right now stem from our unwillingness to be a part of creation. Creation is messy. It is cold. It is brutal. It is warm. It is compassionate. It is messy. To survive we have to kill and eat, a brutal act. But by surviving we are able to bring new life into creation, a compassionate act. The storm destroys, but also waters the earth. 

‘Foolish ones,’ replies Jesus. ‘How slow of heart you are to believe all that the creator God has said! Did you never hear that he created the world wisely? And that he has now acted within his world to create a truly human people? And that from within this people he came to live as a truly human person? And that in his own death he dealt with evil once and for all? And that he is even now at work, by his own spirit, to create a new human family in which repentance and forgiveness of sins are the order of the day, and so to challenge and overturn the rule of war, sex, money, and power?’ And, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, and now also the evangelists and apostles of the New Testament, he interprets to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

“People aren’t convinced that we have better answers than the world.” Dr. Harold Redd is an African-American minister in Memphis. He’s kind of the African-American minister in Memphis. He’s been involved in leading churches for decades in a city that has a lot of history on the race-relations front, and he says that, as far as racial issues goes, “people aren’t convinced that we have better answers than the world.”

Delightfully, Easter is one of the more historically credible events in the Gospels. We can quibble over the details, but the broad fact of the resurrection is pretty sure. Something has to explain why the early followers of Jesus continued to follow him after he was brutally crucified. The best explanation? He didn’t stay dead, but was resurrected.

Peace is often thought of as an internal state of being. You feel peace settle over you like a warm blanket. Your spirit is a still, deep pool. You are not anxious, or fearful, or unsettled. You are at peace. This is a good peace. A meaningful peace. It’s also more of a philosophical peace, sought after by the epicureans and stoics through removing attachments in life. I would guess it’s a similar idea to some eastern religions as well (hence the inner peace sought by the Jedi in Star Wars).

have mercy oh God with unfailing love

with great compassion blot out my transgression

against you alone, have i surely sinned

truly you are right, in your accusation

Finally, in Galatians 5:1-15, Paul addresses the issue confronting his readers, circumcision, the cutting off the foreskin of a male Jew. While offensive to our senses, it is understandable that Paul refers to cutting three times in this passage. In verse 7 he speaks of those cut in on his readers with persuasions to be circumcised. In verse 4 Paul said that those who are circumcised as the essential mark of salvation and being God’s people are cut off from Christ. Shockingly, Paul ends this section by wishing that those agitators who were into cutting would cut themselves (verse 12). What are we to make of text and its argument about freedom in Christ versus submitting to a yoke of slavery?

William Coperthwaite wrote A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity as a text on how society could be better. He takes an aspect of life at a time, exploring where society has taken an unhealthy path, and what could be done to rectify it. It’s not a Christian book, but at times I’ve been struck by how Christian it unwittingly is.

Time and again recently I’ve heard someone talk about “the big 10” (meaning the 10 commandments) and how they’re “still as relevant to us today as they used to be, even though we’ve been freed from the law.” As I am still unable to read minds, I’m not sure exactly what they mean, but since they tend to be American I’m a little suspicious. Do we still think the 10 commandments ought to be followed? All 10? 

I don’t make the rules; I just live by them. It’s not my fault owners, managers, administrators, and others like them make more than laborers. The higher up in an organization you go, the more responsibility you have and the more money you make. When you’re overseeing other people, you earn more money than they do. When you oversee a lot of people, you make a lot more than they do. It’s just the way things work.

A woodworker has many tools she can use—saws, chisels, planes, etc.—but it’s important for the tools to be sharp. Unfortunately, sharpening is a little complicated. Take a hand plane blade—the cutting edge needs set to roughly 25 degrees; the edge needs to be straight or with a slight curve, so that the corners of the blade don’t dig in and mar what you’re flattening; the bevel needs to be reasonably flat—if it’s too rounded the cutting edge won’t contact the wood and it won’t cut.

Sometimes it’s difficult to know what God is doing. So you have these wonderful dreams, dreams where you’re finally on top of the world, and you tell others these dreams, and it causes them to turn against you. “We’re going to bow to you? Only ever in your dreams, cause it ain’t happening in real life ever!” I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t really mean anything. Maybe it’s just a fancy. 

I am not wired for contentment. I have always gauged myself against others who are “more” than me, longing to achieve the greatness they have already attained. We tend to be this way as a society. We look at other people and want what they have. We equate progress and growth with success. Maintaining status is insufficient; losing status, unthinkable. We need more money, better food, more ease, a bigger car, on and on. This idea, this unwillingness to be content has infected all levels of our society.

The deeply unsatisfying message of Gal. 2.15-21 is that we cannot force ourselves to become righteous. We can’t optimize our life in just the right way to ensure we will be righteous. We can’t find or follow “8 simple rules for being righteous.” There’s no diet for it, no app for it, no surgery for it. 

We’ve established that the kingdom of God is the reign of God. The kingdom of God is where/when what God wants to happen actually does happen. Because God’s purposes are cosmic (new heavens and new earth), God has a will for creation as well as individual humans. Thus to say the kingdom of God is a reign, is to imply is is also a realm, a place. But where is this place?

When Saul experiences the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus, it poses a bit of a problem. The first problem is that Jesus was crucified as a messianic pretender, but he was actually the Messiah. Saul had strict views of what it took to be righteous in God’s sight. Jesus’ life looked like a rejection of many of those notions, but apparently Jesus knew what he was doing better than Saul did! After all, which one was at the right hand of God?