Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or
distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in
all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am
convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything
else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:35, 37-39
The Sunday after the terrorist attacks twelve years ago
today, my church posted in the entryway notes and art children’s had produced
in response. One of the most moving showed the Risen Christ over the Twin
Towers as they were attacked.
We were struggling to grasp the fact that so many people had
spent literally years planning and preparing
to do such evil to people they didn’t know. Yet this drawing proclaimed that
their murderous hatred could not separate us from Christ. Christ was there. His
face was seen in those who laid down their lives for others, countless others
who worked tirelessly searching through the wreckage and the untold numbers who
sheltered and fed them, not for days but for weeks.
Only rarely did vengeful hatred find a voice to
remind us that, while nothing outside us can separate us from the love of
Christ, we can separate ourselves when we let anger, no matter how seemingly
justifiable, take root within us. John’s first letter, 4:16, reminds us, “God
is love, and those who abide in God abide in God, and God abides in them.”
Memories of those who offered themselves for others remind us that it is
through letting Christ’s love empower us that we are “more than conquerors.”
God's peace,
Katie
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