Getting Heaven out of Your Soul

 

We continue to dwell on the words Paul wrote to Corinth, a church that was in the middle of a conflict.   It was a fierce and ferocious family fight.  Imagine a moment where people were bickering, belittling, boasting, and blaming.  Imagine people who wanted to rate and rank everything and everyone.  Imagine people who made The Real Housewives arguments look tame and lame in comparison.  Imagine the moments in your family when someone said something that hurt and harmed you.  Imagine the moments with friends when you could hear the sound of a rip and rupture as the friendship ended.  That is what and who Paul wrote to (not a wedding couple).  Paul still writes to ~ you and me and we today who still resemble this fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flock overload of our brains in response to the world today.  As we explored in the wilderness with Jesus yesterday, we are having a devil of a time.  So breathe and be.  Breathe and remember that humans have both the capacity to care and conflict.  Breathe and know that something in our mental hardwiring can have a short that sets ablaze all the normalcy we thought was stable and now feels like sinking sand.  Hold the headlines in your heartline and read these words from 1 Corinthians 13:

 

 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.  If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.  We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

 

Was there a word that leaped from the page/screen into your soul today?  Was there a sentence that your shy soul exclaimed, “Tell me more”.  Meditate, ruminate, and dance with these words, letting them weave their wisdom in living God’s realm today.  Into the invitation of faith to not just get our souls into heaven, but get heaven out of our souls into the world.  So let the love of God feed and fuel your life this new year, this first month of 2026, and especially this day.  Amen.