Notes in the margins

"I will restore their fortunes, both the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters, and the fortunes of Samaria and her daughter, and I will restore your own fortunes in their midst, that you may bear your disgrace and be ashamed of all that you have done, becoming a consolation to them...Was not your sister Sodom a byword in your mouth in the day of your pride, before your wickedness was uncovered?...And the name of the city from that time on shall be, The LORD is there." ~ Ezekiel 16:53-54, 56; 48:35b

In the margin: How is it possible to have so much wrath and yet so much promise, the coexistence of hope and commitment with annihilating judgement? This is the inconceivable divine...

My hope lies not in governments, principalities, physical realities, proximity to those I love, temporal comforts, freedoms, Constitutions, even God-given relationships. It rests solely in Him and the promise that the next world is to be my focus and my aim, the source of my joy and my salvation. I fear what God is doing in this country; I fear - in that awe-struck sense, shrinking from the unknown, shrinking from the human realities of pain and tears - what He may be doing in my own life in these next months. I don't want to see our country laid to waste; I don't want to see my bones laid bare by illness. But neither would destroy the hope that I have in Him.

"For this vision of truth God has been working for ages and ages. For this simple condition, this apex of life, upon which a man wonders like a child that he cannot make other men see as he sees, the whole labour of God's science, history, poetry - truth upon truth in lovely vision, in torturing law, never lying, never repenting; and for this will the patience of God labour while there is yet a human soul whose eyes have not been opened, whose child-heart has not yet been born in him. For this one condition of humanity, this simple beholding, has all the outthinking of God flowed in forms innumerable and changeful from the foundation of the world; and for this, too, has the divine destruction been going forth; that his life might be our life, that in us, too, might dwell that same consuming fire which is essential love."
~ George MacDonald, The Consuming Fire