Trust that one day there will be an end to the madness we are witnessing

A human calling to approach the divine.

On Ash Wednesday this week we entered, once again, the Church season of Lent, traditionally a season of prayer, fasting and alms giving. These can all be very good and helpful in re-balancing aspects of our life that may have become unbalanced in some way, but I think this season, and today’s Gospel description of Jesus’ time in the wilderness may point to a more profound challenge, or opportunity.

We sell ourselves and God short if our goal is transformation.

Faith is not a list of commands; it is an invitation to exercise our imagination so that in the dust of which we are made the possibilities of heaven are discovered and lived out.

The good road is yours to walk

The church is where, at its best, we are given the strength to be honest before God and before one another. I – like you, I suspect - live with a deep sense of my own inadequacy to, and failures in, the tasks set before me, set before us.

God’s generosity, joy, mercy and new life, exceeds all limit, reason and expectation; it fills every need, and offers life to all.

Prayer can take us to a place of stillness and openness, a place of grace.

Threat and promise – Matthew lays out the great themes of his gospel from the start

To speak of Jesus as both God and human need not involve a juggling act: keeping both his divinity and his humanity in the air, without confusing the two. His divinity is not to be contrasted to his humanity; rather his humanity, our humanity, is restored and fulfilled by the his obedience to the divine, enabling that divine presence and action we glimpse as central to his life.

Paradoxes reveal a depth to what we might dismiss as shallow; they are the entry into a deeper searching.