Shalom Quotes

And Carolina will be cheering on the beautiful daughter of Magda and Shalom Singer, the new Lady America Singer!

Faith is a day-to-day lifestyle and experience of Jesus Christ. That's what we are experiencing at Shalom, when we plant in faith - even in the dust - and trust in him for the miracles of his love.

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

Amazing that, amidst such beauty, He would decide to even look at me, let alone call me to join Him in a quest for shalom. This journey will not fail. It cannot fail when He is the leader.

...the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope.

Inner stillness is the key to outer strength.

We reject the lies of inequality, we affirm the Spirit, we forgive radically, we advocate for love and demonstrate it by folding laundry, and we live these Kingdom ways of shalom prophetically in the world.

When we look at the whole scope of this story line, we see clearly that Christianity is not only about getting one’s individual sins forgiven so we can go to heaven. That is an important means of God’s salvation, but not the final end or purpose of it. The purpose of Jesus’s coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it. It is not just to bring personal forgiveness and peace, but also justice and shalom to the world. God created both the body and soul, and the resurrection of Jesus shows that he is going to redeem both body and soul. The work of the Spirit of God is not only to save souls but also to care and cultivate the face of the earth, the material world.

Shalom is what love looks like in the flesh. The embodiment of love in the context of a broken creation, shalom is a hint at what was, what should be, and what will one day be again. Where sin disintegrates and isolates, shalom brings together and restores. Where fear and shame throw up walls and put on masks, shalom breaks down barriers and frees us from the pretense of our false selves.

Me. I can’t be shaken because I’m God’s. I like the idea of Him shaking the world to see what’s left standing, and all that remains is shalom.

In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight--a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.

Shalom, therefore, does not eschew or diminish the role of the other or the reality of a suffering world. Instead, it embraces the suffering other as an instrumental aspect of well-being. Shalom requires lament.

I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.

Nature" is another name for the miracles that are so commonplace in our lives that we take for granted and have grown used to seeing them.

Christ comes, and his very coming demonstrates that God's favor rests on us, and that peace, peace, peace is available to us all. Shalom. Everything we need to live whole lives, to live wholly, to live holy.

The followers of Jesus will begin to demonstrate a new set of horizons for human life to their neighbors and even to their enemies—the horizons of shalom, the horizons of true humanity living in dependence on God.

Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing - that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living.

Being in relationship with Jesus, "God, The One and Only", is the single cure for hatred ...the only guarantee of salam or shalom!

Tragedy always moves our story forward in a way shalom could never accomplish.

19. THE WALL OF DICTIONARIES BETWEEN MY MOTHER AND THE WORLD GETS TALLER EVERY YEAR Sometimes pages of the dictionaries come loose and gather at her feet, shallon, shalop, shallot, shallow, shalom, sham, shaman, shamble, like the petals of an immense flower. When I was little, I thought that the pages on the floor were words she would never be able to use again, and I tried to tape them back in where they belonged, out of fear that one day she would be left silent.

This is a Lucent PBX with Audix voice mail, right? I used this kind at all of my old jobs, so I'm pretty familiar with them." Completely ignoring me, Pat continues to demonstrate every single one of the phone's features, half of which she describes incorrectly. I don't bother taking notes because I've used this system a thousand times. I have no need to transcribe an erroneous refresher course. "Hey, you should be writing this down." Like I said, I've used this system extensively and--" WRITE IT DOWN," Pat growls. "If you screw up the phone, Jerry's gonna be on my ass." No problem." I'm slowly learning to choose my battles and figure this isn't the hill I want to die on. I pull a portfolio out of my briefcase and begin to take notes. When the phone rings and Jerry isn't there to answer, you pick it up and hold it to your mouth like this. You say, 'Hello, Jerry Jenkins' office.'" I write: When phone rings, place receiver next to your word hole and not your hoo-hoo or other bodily aperature, and say, "Shalom.

Aligning with yourself, then another and you both aligning yourselves together further in harmony will summon source energy in ways you couldn’t imagine.

To be a full lover is to become a healer to yourself and then help another heal their self.

He imagined the scene at the gates of heaven to be not unlike that at the finish line of a long and grueling marathon: everyone high-fiving, hugging, collapsing, elated that it’s over, yes, it’s finally over, pouring cups of water over one another’s heads and saying, Holy shit, dude, that was fucking brutal. I am never doing that again.

We're in the presence of a good story when the flaw that shatters shalom is also the doorway to redemption... Whether it be our own flaw or the sin of others, God uses the raw material of sin to create the edifice of his redeemed glory. The point cannot be overemphasized: your plight is also your redemption. The Bible assumes that its stories are also our story... We are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Their stories are a paradigm of our own. Each of us is called, redeemed, and exiled - again and again.

Justice in a fallen world is not equality of outcome but equal treatment under a fair law.

Hiding from genocide inside a Jew's attic, thought Kugel, is like hiding from a lion inside a gazelle.

Reweaving shalom means to sacrificially thread, lace, and press your time, goods, power, and resources into the lives and needs of others.

A society concerned with shalom will care for the most marginalized among them. God has a special concern for the poor and needy, because how we treat them reveals our hearts, regardless of the rhetoric we employ to make ourselves sound just.

When a woman allows a man to enter her he is either giving or taking vital energy. A man can only share vital energy if he possesses it. A man’s vitality lies in his inner work and reservation of his semen emissions, which contains vital energy, life force. Avoiding overly frequent ejaculations is key. Building your storehouse of vital energy takes maturity and discipline.

The shattering [of shalom] moves us from a place of shalom to a place that is harsh and unrelenting. The shattering brings us a keen awareness that we are alone and in danger. We are on our own.

This isn't how it should be, God. Thousands of graves marking thousands of lives--so much focus on death. Did the gravediggers spend their lives just serving the dead? How many Numbers ticked away for the sake of carving headstones no one would read? As I stare at this scene, I decide I don't want a headstone when I die. I don't even want to be buried. I want to disappear--save that chunk of earth for people to live on. This land I stand on is worthless now. No one can build a house here. No one can plant gardens or start a new village. Is that what the people buried beneath me would have wanted? Earth wasn't intended to hold only dead bodies. I stand. God, I need to live.

The Hebrew word for this perfect, harmonious interdependence among all parts of creation is called shalom. We translate it as “peace,” but the English word is basically negative, referring to the absence of trouble or hostility. The Hebrew word means much more than that. It means absolute wholeness—full, harmonious, joyful, flourishing life.

Looking for you was like looking for the day before yesterday

And now, dear Lord, I acknowledge afresh that You are the God of all peace, my Jehovah-Shalom. My job is to receive. you give me Your peace. My job is to take it. You lead me to Your still waters. My role is to follow. You extend Your hand. My role is to take hold. My I enjoy Your presence and the tranquility of the still waters where You pour out your promise of peace. Amen.

What we see in these passages is God meeting people, tribes, and cultures right where they are and drawing and inviting and calling them forward, into greater and greater shalom and respect and rights and peace and dignity and equality. It's as if human history were progressing along a trajectory, an arc, a continuum; and sacred history is the capturing and recording of those moments when people became aware that they were being called and drawn and pulled forward by the divine force and power and energy that gives life to everything.

the thing she loved most about being Jewish was that you could step into a synagogue anywhere on earth and feel like you’d come home. India, Brazil, New Zealand, even Mars—if you could rely on Shalom, Spacemen!, the homemade comic book that had been the highlight of Simon’s third-grade Hebrew school experience.

Vans are the vehicles of murderers. Serial Killers. Rapists. Thieves. Nothing good ever happens in a van. Police should be allowed to arrest van drivers without cause. The van is the cause, asshole.

Shalom is the medicine I’d prescribe for Jerusalem—a deep, God-breathed indwelling of peace and prosperity and blessing. An end to the unrest and a sense of wholeness is what the Holy City needs. It’s what the Middle East needs. It’s what I need.

Technology does make possible advance toward shalom; progress in mastery of the world can bring shalom nearer. But the limits of technology must also be acknowledged; technology is entirely incapable of bringing about shalom between ourselves and God, and it is only scarcely capable of bringing about the love of self and neighbour.

Think of (the Kingdom) like the sun. As it peeks through on a cloudy day, we do not say the sun has grown. We say, 'The sun has broken through.' Our view of the sun has changed, or obstacles to the sun have been removed, but we have not changed the sun.

A denouement is not a complete or fully resolved ending but a satisfying closure to a story. [in French translates 'an untying, a relaxing of a knot of complexity'] Denouement is the rest that comes when all the disparate plot lines of a story, gnarled and taut, have been untied and an order has come about that brings a new moment of shalom.

He took the diary from Mother's hand and turned it over. The heartbreaking something, he read, of a tragic whatever.

Maybe when I'd dead, he thought. Maybe when I'm dead I'll get some goddamned sleep.

Shalom is understood to mean peace, but peace is only one part of the word’s real meaning. The root shalem means completeness.

Shalom is not a utopian destination; it is a constant journey.

Jesus, properly understood as shalom, coming into the world from the shalom community of the Trinity, is the intention of God’s once-and-for-all mission. That is, the mission of birthing and restoring shalom to the world is in Christ, by Christ, and for the honor of Christ.

We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.

You never see a lion crucifyng another lion. You never see a bear just randomly murdering salmon for anything besides food; bears don't form armies, invade rivers, tear the heads off male salmon, rape the female salmon, and enslave their salmon children. It is finished, to Kugel, sounded a hell of a lot like Fuck all of you motherfuckers.

The Kugels, Kugel hated to admit, might just have to, in the event of genocide, rely on the kindness of strangers. Mother used to say: I can name six million people who relied on the kindness of strangers.

The system that God has given us is a holistic system. This is why the Torah is concerned with how we treat others, what we eat, how we behave, and how we produce, keep and share our wealth. The word shalom reminds us that we cannot live in peace until we completely take care of all other aspects of our lives.

His intelligence only exacerbated the guilt Kugel felt for bringing him into the world. It was one thing to have condemned a child to life, that was criminal enough, but life was a sentence more easily served by fools.

the fuller story of the New Testament is that God’s people have been resurrected as the body of Christ. Just as Jesus is the embodiment of the shalom that God intends for creation, the church’s role in the drama of Creation is likewise to be the embodiment of God’s shalom, albeit in a form that hasn’t yet been fully realized.

It couldn't be an all-bad world, could it, not with birds who warble and call? Maybe that was the secret - to find the few things that made life just a fraction better, and to focus on those. Bird warbles. Peach fuzz. Puppies barking as if they're full grown dogs. Nothing great, certainly nothing to justify the rest of it, but enough to keep you going.

How can I find a way out when I do not know how to begin to resist?

There is hurt in this world. There is pain. Hoping there won't be only makes it worse.

I kind of like it up here, Kugel said. It's got a certain fatalistic charm, a certain je ne sais fucked.

When you enter any relationship with doubt that doubt will be reflected back to you. You must trust yourself completely to attract another that can be trusted.

Every sexual encounter is a partnership and agreement to exchange energies and information. The energies and information sent from ourselves to another depend on our level of inner work.

Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff, professor of philosophical theology at Yale University, writes, “The state of shalom is the state of flourishing in all dimensions of one’s existence: in one’s relation to God, in one’s relation to one’s fellow human beings, in one’s relation to nature, and in one’s relation to oneself. Evidently justice has something to do with the fact that God’s love for each and every one of God’s human creatures takes the form of God desiring the shalom of each and every one.”1

So we work for better political and economic systems, knowing that sin precludes any earthly utopia now, but rejoicing in the assurance that the kingdom of shalom that the Messiah has already begun will one day prevail, and the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord.

What a world, thought Kugel; whoever you were, wherever you were, whatever time of the day or night, you could open your back door and call out I know you're out there motherfucker, and nine times out of ten you'd be right.

Shalom is the Hebrew word for “peace.” For rhythm. For everything lining up exactly how it was meant to line up. Shalom is happening in those moments when you are at the dinner table for hours with good friends, good food, and good wine. Shalom is when you hear or see something and can’t quite explain it, but you know it’s calling and stirring something deep inside of you. Shalom is a sunset, that sense of exhaustion yet satisfaction from a hard day’s work, creating art that is bigger than itself. Shalom is enemies being reconciled by love. Shalom is when you are dancing to the rhythm of God’s voice.

Social psychologist Brené Brown summarizes this tendency in explaining our inability to engage in a conversation on race: “You cannot have that conversation without shame, because you cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.”16 True reconciliation, justice and shalom require a remembering of suffering, an unearthing of a shameful history and a willingness to enter into lament. Lament calls for an authentic encounter with the truth and challenges privilege, because privilege would hide the truth that creates discomfort.

What was true of an ancient community of Christian believers struggling with a powerful and appealing philosophy is also true for Christians in a postmodern context. Arguments that deconstruct the regimes of truth at work in the late modern culture of global capitalism are indispensable. So also is a deeper understanding of the counterideological force of the biblical tradition. But such arguments are no guarantee that the biblical metanarrative will not be co-opted for ideological purposes of violent exclusion, nor do arguments prove the truth of the gospel. Only the nonideological, embracing, forgiving and shalom-filled life of a dynamic Christian community formed by the story of Jesus will prove the gospel to be true and render the idolatrous alternatives fundamentally implausible.

The most empowering thing one can do is give themselves permission to fully love themselves. Often we experience relationships that are toxic and we block ourselves off from love in all directions including within. The most important thing to remember is your relationship with your being is crucial for yourself and all other relationships.

Peace of God. The name of God referenced in verse 7 is Shalom, which means wholeness, well-being, and contentment. When you place the little, two-letter word “of” in front of God, it signifies a different kind of peace – God’s peace. Not a peace because everything is good. A peace that exists despite the fact that things may not be good or perfect.

Here's the problem: when every sin is seen as the same, we are less likely to fight any sins at all. Why should I stop sleeping with my girlfriend when there will still be lust in my heart? Why pursue holiness when even one sin in my life means I'm Osama bin Hitler in God's eyes? Again, it seems humble to act as if no sin is worse than another, but we lose the impetus for striving and the ability to hold each other accountable when we tumble down the slip-n-slide of moral equivalence. All of a sudden the elder who battles the temptation to take a second look at the racy section of the Lands End catalog shouldn't dare exercise church discipline ont he young man fornicating with reckless abandon. When we can no longer see the different gradations among sins and sinners and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we've cheapened God's goodness.

Just move the train, for fuck's sake, she's not getting any deader.

Remember your grandfather's last words, Jonah would tell his children: Life is nothing more than a little why.

We must unite the energies within to have a (w)holistic relationship with ourselves which gives us the capability to have a complete relationship with others.

Stop expecting more from us than we can possibly provide, and you'll stop being so disappointed.

I moved a pillow aside... preferring the joyful company of the delusional to the miserable company of the sane.

Expecting hell, we're ill prepared for heaven.

Kugel set off, the wind in what would have been, some years ago, his hair.

Once properly aligned with your mate everything will happen naturally. If you are alive and breathing, you are very capable of experiencing cosmic connectivity with explosive intimacy.

Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lover, and it separates us from Him and brings death as it wars against His will.

Preparing for partnership is a process the male must want to go through. Sometimes there are life experiences that can trigger the desire to transcend his lower nature into a higher existence.

The next sound you hear in the Garden of Eden is the heaving, lurching, ear-splitting shatter of shalom, of God’s peace, screeching violently out of phase with the pitch-perfect rhythm and harmony of His original creation. Outright rebellion had been declared against the King of glory. And suddenly, these experiences we know all too well now ourselves—guilt, regret, panic, disbelief, nervousness, blame, self-hatred, hypocrisy—all came shuddering through Adam and Eve’s bloodstreams for the first time in their lives. Like ice water. And both of them ran. And hid. And hoped to God they’d somehow gotten away with it.

You must take care to know once you enter her you are merging worlds. You are reaffirming a sacred agreement of eternal connectivity. Her energy centers will be connected with yours. Your intentions must be the purest to maintain this kind of cosmic sacred connection. You will be connected on every level seen and unseen. You both will become witness to the universe at play. The cosmic etheric dance of devotion. Two existences intermingle creating a third existence of oneness with tantric overtones and harmonics.

Moses had come to know God as Jehovah-shalom, the God of all peace. This is the deepest need of the human heart—to be at peace with God and with oneself. The proof that his heart was at peace was that it was filled with praise…not necessarily for what God had done, but for who God is. He was living out the chief end of man—-to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Psalm 29:11 says, “The Lord gives strength to his people; the Lord blesses his people with peace.

He could pull this off. He was sure of it. It would have been one thing to protect Anne Frank from the Nazis; he was pretty sure he couldn't have managed that. But protecting his family from Anne Frank? How difficult could that be?

Oh no he does not! He does NOT read James Freaking Patterson. Our salvation - our provider…we must be out of our minds. I happen to find Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful. You what? Did you just say you find James Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful? Jesus Christ open your eyes! Are you so desperate to believe that you're defending James Patterson?!

...his hope was that she would finish her damn book quietly and just leave; that one morning he would awaken and go up to the attic, and Anne Frank would be gone, and he could go on with his life, Anne-free. One hundred percent Frankless. Now with Less Genocide.

Every man is capable of assisting their partner in the cosmic sexual experience. We can also help facilitate cosmic orgasmic alignment. By being 100% present in the moment, we will activate and trigger a new level of sexuality and orgasm for ourselves and our partner.

What’s the harm in forgetting? What does remembering do? Kugel had read that the war in the Balkans was referred to as the War of the Grandmothers; that after 50 years of peace, it was the grandmothers who reminded their offspring to hate each other, the grandmothers who reminded them of past atrocities, of indignities long gone. Never forget! shouted the grandmothers. So their grandchildren remembered, and their grandchildren died.

Every Jew was the last Jew; Tevye the Terminal, every single one. Yet, Kugel couldn't help but observe, in all that time - no last Jew. There had been a last Assyrian. There had been a last Ammonite. There had been a last Babylonian, a last Mesopotamian, a last of the Mohicans. But no last Jew.

Who we allow within us sexually is very important and goes far beyond just the physical layer of our existence. Every sexual encounter is a partnership and agreement to exchange energies and information. The energies and information sent from ourselves to another depend on our level of inner work.

I'm down here, trying to live, trying to deal with the real world, while you're hiding, bitching, fucking everyone's shit up but your own, so shut up, just shut the fuck up. Thirty-two million copies, thirty-two million copies, that's what you got for your pain. What do I get for mine? What does anyone get for theirs? Nothing, not a fucking thing, they get another goddamned day of it and another goddamned day of it after that, so just shut up, will you? Will you just shut up?

The Church acts as a sort of embassy for the government of the King. It is an outpost of the Kingdom of God surrounded by the kingdom of darkness. Just as an embassy is meant to showcase the life of a nation to the surrounding people, so the Church is meant to manifest the life of the Kingdom of God to the people around it.

Are you a Genesis 1 Christian or a Genesis 3 Christian? Do you start your story with shalom or with sin? Shalom is the Hebrew word for “peace.” For rhythm. For everything lining up exactly how it was meant to line up. Shalom is happening in those moments when you are at the dinner table for hours with good friends, good food, and good wine. Shalom is when you hear or see something and can’t quite explain it, but you know it’s calling and stirring something deep inside of you. Shalom is a sunset, that sense of exhaustion yet satisfaction from a hard day’s work, creating art that is bigger than itself. Shalom is enemies being reconciled by love.

We need to realize that any individual, and generally it is someone that we call a boyfriend or girlfriend, lover, mate, husband, wife, friend, consort, or anyone that is getting us to learn more about ourselves, to see aspects of ourselves that we don’t typically like to see or want to see, is, in fact, our actual soul mate.

Christians recognize that all social organizations exist as parodies of eschatological hope. And so it is that the city is a poor imitation of heavenly community;13 the modern state, a deformed version of the ecclesia;14 the market, a distortion of consummation; modern entertainment, a caricature of joy; schooling, a misrepresentation of true formation; liberalism, a crass simulacrum of freedom; and the sovereignty we accord to the self, a parody of God himself. As these institutions and ideals become ends in themselves, they become the objects of idolatry. The shalom of God—which is to say, the presence of God himself—is the antithesis to all such imitations.

Cosmic sexuality is remembering that we are more than these bodies and by coming into alignment with this deeper truth, we tune into our greater cosmic existence. Tuning into our greater cosmic existence, we are now coming into greater alignment with source. As we achieve this level of alignment, we can transcend the physical base levels of sexuality and enter into the higher aspects of sexuality itself.

Not long ago I was watching the film A Story Worth Living with my sons. The film concludes with everyone enjoying a lovely Colorado evening at twilight. The characters sit in a circle around a fire. The discussion is about wholeness and the soul’s longing for a time of complete restoration and what that might be like. “That nothing is between me and any other person—no misunderstanding” was how one character described this wholeness. Another added, “That everything I have lost will be returned.” Nods of approval and expressions of affirmation filled in the space. Then another spoke: “That nothing is lost and that there are no more good-byes.” This is shalom. This is what we were made for. It is how life is supposed to be for us. This is humanity in its glory, but it waits. It cannot be while we live fallen. And perhaps it cannot fully be realized until the Savior’s return—but we can have so much more right now than we might realize.

I encourage you to tend to the garden of your own heart. Plant seeds of love. Let light through. Till the soil in the dark and cut the weeds. Water yourself with kindness and compassion. By healing within, you stop attracting relationships that are unhealthy for you. Love yourself repeatedly until it becomes ritual; if you love yourself first, everything is possible. The cosmic orgasm is possible. I am speaking to everyone, not only singles; it’s easy to forget these steps when you’re in a relationship or partnership.

the Reformed Christian has never believed that America is a Christian nation and that, accordingly, our social institutions and formations, though blemished here and there, are fundamentally in accord with God's will. But neither has she agreed with those Christians who hold that our social institutions and formations are fundamentally corrupt and that the duty of the Christian is to withdraw. Normative discrimination is what she has always regarded as the appropriate stance, coupled with the attempt, once the discrimination has been made, to change what is wrong when that proves possible, to keep discontent alive when change proves not possible, and always to be grateful for what is good. In short, to act redemptively. While praying the prayer, "Thy kingdom come," to join God's cause of struggling against all that resists and falls short of God's will and longing for creation, thus to acknowledge the rightful, and ultimately effective, rule of Jesus Christ over every square inch of creation.

Does God get what God wants? That’s a good question. An interesting question. And it’s an important question that has given us much to discuss. But there’s a better question. One that we actually can answer. One that takes all of the speculation about the future, which no one has been to and returned with hard empirical evidence, and brings it back to one absolute we can depend on in the midst of all of this which turns out to be another question. It’s not, “Does God get what God wants?” but “Do we get what we want?” and the answer to that is a resounding, affirming, sure and certain yes. Yes, we get what we want, God is that loving. If we want isolation, despair, and the right to be our own god, God graciously grants us that option. If we insist on using our God-given power and strength to make the world in our own image, God allows us that freedom and we have that kind of license to do that. If we want nothing to do with light, love, hope, grace, and peace God respects that desire on our part and we are given a life free from any of those realities. The more we want nothing to do with what God is, the more distance and space is created. If we want nothing to do with love, we are given a reality free from love. If, however, we crave light, we’re drawn to truth, we’re desperate for grace, we’ve come to the end of our plots and schemes and we want someone else’s path, God gives us what we want. If we have this sense that we have wandered far from home and we want to return, God is there standing in the driveway arms open, ready to invite us in. If we thirst for Shalom and we long for the peace that transcends all understanding, God doesn’t just give, they are poured out on us lavishly, heaped until we are overwhelmed. It’s like a feast where the food and wine do not run out. These desires can start with the planting of an infinitesimally small seed in our heart, or a yearning for life to be better, or a gnawing sense that we are missing out, or an awareness that beyond the routine and grind of life there is something more, or the quiet hunch that this isn’t all there is. It often has it’s birth in the most unexpected ways, arising out of our need for something we know we do not have, for someone we know we are not. And to that, that impulse, craving, yearning, longing, desire God says, “Yes!”. Yes there is water for that thirst, food for that hunger, light for that darkness, relief for that burden. If we want hell, if we want heaven then they are ours. that’s how love works, it can’t be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says, “yes”, we can have what we want because love wins.

In any case, we should expect that in due time we will be moved into our eternal destiny of creative activity with Jesus and his friends and associates in the “many mansions” of “his Father’s house.” Thus, we should not think of ourselves as destined to be celestial bureaucrats, involved eternally in celestial “administrivia.” That would be only slightly better than being caught in an everlasting church service. No, we should think of our destiny as being absorbed in a tremendously creative team effort, with unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast plane of activity, with ever more comprehensive cycles of productivity and enjoyment. This is the “eye hath not seen, neither ear heard” that lies before us in the prophetic vision (Isa. 64:4). This Is Shalom When Saint Augustine comes to the very end of his book The City of God, he attempts to address the question of “how the saints shall be employed when they are clothed in immortal and spiritual bodies.”15 At first he confesses that he is “at a loss to understand the nature of that employment.” But then he settles upon the word peace to describe it, and develops the idea of peace by reference to the vision of God—utilizing, as we too have done, the rich passage from 1 Corinthians 13. Thus he speaks of our “employment” then as being “the beatific vision.” The eternal blessedness of the city of God is presented as a “perpetual Sabbath.” In words so beautiful that everyone should know them by heart, he says, “There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end. For what other end do we propose to ourselves than to attain to the kingdom of which there is no end?” And yet, for all their beauty and goodness, these words do not seem to me to capture the blessed condition of the restoration of all things—of the kingdom come in its utter fullness. Repose, yes. But not as quiescence, passivity, eternal fixity. It is, instead, peace as wholeness, as fullness of function, as the restful but unending creativity involved in a cosmoswide, cooperative pursuit of a created order that continuously approaches but never reaches the limitless goodness and greatness of the triune personality of God, its source. This, surely, is the word of Jesus when he says, “Those who overcome will be welcomed to sit with me on my throne, as I too overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. Those capable of hearing should listen to what the Spirit is saying to my people” (Rev. 3:21

Build houses and make yourselves at home. You are not camping. This is your home; make yourself at home. This may not be your favorite place, but it is a place. Dig foundations; construct a habitation; develop the best environment for living that you can. If all you do is sit around and pine for the time you get back to Jerusalem, your present lives will be squalid and empty. Your life right now is every bit as valuable as it was when you were in Jerusalem, and every bit as valuable as it will be when you get back to Jerusalem. Babylonian exile is not your choice, but it is what you are given. Build a Babylonian house and live in it as well as you are able. Put in gardens and eat what grows in the country. Enter into the rhythm of the seasons. Become a productive part of the economy of the place. You are not parasites. Don’t expect others to do it for you. Get your hands into the Babylonian soil. Become knowledgeable about the Babylonian irrigation system. Acquire skill in cultivating fruits and vegetables in this soil and climate. Get some Babylonian recipes and cook them. Marry and have children. These people among whom you are living are not beneath you, nor are they above you; they are your equals with whom you can engage in the most intimate and responsible of relationships. You cannot be the person God wants you to be if you keep yourself aloof from others. That which you have in common is far more significant than what separates you. They are God’s persons: your task as a person of faith is to develop trust and conversation, love and understanding. Make yourselves at home there and work for the country’s welfare. Pray for Babylon’s well-being. If things go well for Babylon, things will go well for you. Welfare: shalom. Shalom means wholeness, the dynamic, vibrating health of a society that pulses with divinely directed purpose and surges with life-transforming love. Seek the shalom and pray for it. Throw yourselves into the place in which you find yourselves, but not on its terms, on God’s terms. Pray. Search for that center in which God’s will is being worked out (which is what we do when we pray) and work from that center. Jeremiah’s letter is a rebuke and a challenge: “Quit sitting around feeling sorry for yourselves. The aim of the person of faith is not to be as comfortable as possible but to live as deeply and thoroughly as possible—to deal with the reality of life, discover truth, create beauty, act out love. You didn’t do it when you were in Jerusalem. Why don’t you try doing it here, in Babylon? Don’t listen to the lying prophets who make an irresponsible living by selling you false hopes. You are in Babylon for a long time. You better make the best of it. Don’t just get along, waiting for some miraculous intervention. Build houses, plant gardens, marry husbands, marry wives, have children, pray for the wholeness of Babylon, and do everything you can to develop that wholeness. The only place you have to be human is where you are right now. The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at this moment.