Intersect

God of all things graceful and gracious, use me to technicolor the day and paint reality with oversaturated love. Erase our monotone filters and paint us the pigment of Jesus. He refused to see a dingy world of dust and decay, instead revealing God’s multicolor kin-dom of unconditional love. Give us the Divine imagination of infinite creative being. So inspired, we will colorize the world with the hues of hope and tolerance. We pray in your kaleidoscopic image, amen.

As we head into the Thanksgiving holiday, many of our tables overflowing with more delectable dishes than we could consume in a lifetime, I’d like to present, well, some food for thought. We waste a staggering amount of the planet’s natural resources, especially food. Countries like the U.S. and Great Britain carelessly discard nearly 50% of  all our food  ( World Economic Forum ). The numbers are even  worse  in industrialized Asia. Around the world, people are starving to death for absolutely no reason. Some voices loudly proclaim that the Earth is depleted of her natural resources, so there simply isn’t enough to go around. This is a lie. There is no scarcity of resources. There is a disheartening scarcity of compassion and community. One would think an easy solution would be to move food from the places with an overabundance to those without, but the realities of the global food chain make this impossible. Global food production and distribution is directly ...

Eleven-year-old Hope flew down the brownstone stairs and bounced outside, the formidable wooden front doors slamming closed behind her like the resounding retort of a canon. The crashing of the doors echoed off the graffiti-and-ivy covered walls of her little Roosevelt Park neighborhood. A few tourists ducked. Locals didn’t flinch. They were used to this many-times-daily occurrence, the thunder of a closing door that meant Hope was on her way. She took the weight of her name very seriously. “It isn’t a coincidence, you know—my name, Mom,” Hope once remarked. “Of course it isn’t, sweetheart! We named you after your great-grandmother.” Hope smiled, but her mom didn’t understand. Hope was more than just a name, a deterministic label like “rock” or “puddle.” Hope wasn’t just her name . It was her   calling . Hope had a duty, and she knew that from the first moment she realized she could know anything. Cheerily, Hope said, “Good morning, Mrs. Ferguson,” as she raced past her next-d...

Saints and Sinners  by Claudio Delgado. http://cubanartbeat.com/product/claudia-delgado-23-5-x-31-5-painting-on-canvas-7/ In practically any dictionary of  The Bible,  a saint is defined as someone “distinct because of their relationship with God.” In the ancient Jewish tradition (in Psalms 31.23 and 148.14, e.g.) the word “saint,” like so many ancient Hebrew words, has more than one meaning. For Jesus’ ancestors, a saint was someone who had an intimate, covenantal relationship with God and was also specially chosen for and dedicated to God’s service. People were considered saints during their lifetimes—the way most of us found Mother Theresa a saint during hers. In our era, we tend to think of saints as these perfect, flawless, selfless characters, just like Jesus. But that imagery is, while not wrong, at least incomplete. Jesus  never refers to himself as perfect. He never even refers to himself as God. Jesus is always “the son of man” (Mark 2.28, Mark 14,6...