Good morning (or evening, depending on when you read this) on a beautiful October day! We are lucky to have some beautiful clear days after all of that rain. Savor the gift—because it is a gift—and also keep in prayer all of the people in Florida as Milton hits, and those still recovering from flooding in North Carolina. It’s a weather version of our time of prayer each Sunday: we celebrate and give thanks for the gifts, and we raise our concerns to God as well.
I’ve been reading a book on grief, evidently a classic: A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss, by Jerry Sitter. The title worried me—it sounded entirely too “look for the bright side,” but it was recommended by someone I trust, so I decided to read it. Sitter is a professor of theology who lost people from three generations of his family in a single car accident: his mother, his wife, and one of their daughters. He knows viscerally what real loss is, then, and he still carries the pain of the loss with him—he doesn’t minimize any of that. His book is an exploration of what it means—to him—to be a person of faith and hope who also grieves a painful reality.
Sitter writes of being in this “between” or “both”: “We are already redeemed through his [Jesus’] work on the cross and in the resurrection, and we are in the process of being redeemed by the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work in our lives. Both are true—the being and the becoming, the position and the process, the already and the not yet.” This is very like our conversation on Sunday: we also spoke about this reality—the already and the not yet—when we talked about the gift of sustenance for the journey.
So we Christians know something about being between, or being both: being already saved, and yet still on a sometimes very difficult journey to the Father’s kingdom.
