A WING AND A PRAYER "You Can't Always Get What You Want"

Most of us, most of the time, expect things to be fair. And our sense of fairness assumes a predictable and fundamental relationship between behavior and outcome. ...radical equality offends us because most of us believe, somewhere deep down, that we deserve what we have, that we've done something right to be as blessed as we are. - p. 19

We love it when things are going right, and we somehow think that we've earned the gifts that God has given us; we are somehow rewarded. But the problem with the reward mentality is that when we embrace it , we somehow have to also embrace the punishment mentality. This means that in moments that things aren't going our way then we are likely to ask ourselves why God is punishing us, and what part of our life is not being lived out the way that God expects it to be lived out. You'll hear this kind of punishment/reward theology pronounced from many pulpits and on many televangelist programs each and every week.

Our own Nicene Creed seems to point us toward the same reading: that Jesus will come again "...to judge the living and the dead." Judgement and evaluation are not the same as punishment and reward. For us to assume that somehow a life lived in purity will be rewarded while a life lived in doubt and sin will be punished is forcing God respond to judgement in a very human response. But God is bigger than the Creed, and certainly wiser and kinder than humanity.

++Katherine invites us to see what it means to have enough, to see ourselves as living abundantly, not just because we do indeed have much, but also because we are indeed blessed. The gift of God's grace in our eternal salvation is not something that any can earn, it is an abundance of love shared with all of us from the Cross. The abundance in our life comes from the abundance of our faith, and we are called as Christians to preach this abundance to everyone. EVERYONE!

We are not to judge, to burden others with either reward or punishment. We are to preach the love of Christ crucified, died, and resurrected. Anything less is to deny the abundance that has been, is, and will always be given to us.