Devotional for friends // Devocional para as amigas

Mount Olympus  Why Jesus and not anyone else?   Imagine you in the woods, looking around and seeing all types of life. Animals, plants, waterfalls, the sound of nature. And you rationalize, wouldn’t it be better if someone very thoughtful and loving had created all of this for me? If there could be a person who could create such magnificent beauty and give it to me, what would I call this gesture? I would be tempted to call it love.   Now, imagine you were living more than 3000 years ago when every person around you had what they called a god. But all of those gods, you knew exactly where they came from, what were their strengths and weaknesses. But none of them could create anything exactly. Everything was already there, created. And you wish you could learn the mysteries of all nature, and people, and love. You knew some gods were cool, others not so much. You knew some could be very vindictive, others very demanding. And you always had to do so much to please them and ...

Just because I like crows and I praise God when I see them. Só porque eu gosto de corvos e louvo a Deus quando os vejo. The foreknowledge of God (by Saint Thomas Aquinas)   In God, there is another perfection. He foresees with prudence all future things, good or bad. Before they happen, He knows them and sees the good of the evil that will result from them.  God foresaw the fall of the angel Lucifer and that of the first man. He permitted temptation; He knew in advance all the evil that would result from it for the human race, and also all the good – that is to say, the Incarnation of the Son of God, by which man receives a glory even greater than that which he had before the Fall.   Our own foresight   Let us also foresee all our doings, our words, our desires, our works, and let us consider the good and the evil that may result for us from them, as well as the scandal or edification that others will receive from them. Likewise, let us ponder beforehand the temptati...

LENT/ QUARESMA The church I grew up in didn't teach Lent. Lent "belonged" to another church, to another tradition. I think most people who don’t observe Lent don’t know what it means. I didn’t.   When I was a kid, I used to hear about this season. But people used to say that people from this other tradition would observe Lent because of what they did during the previous days before Ash Wednesday. In Brazil, we have a party called Carnaval, a non-Christian-like party.   So, I didn’t really care about Lent until I arrived here in the U.S. The churches I have been part of do observe Lent. I was a little resistant about it at the beginning, but not anymore.   They teach Lent as a season of preparation for Easter. All Christians observe Easter, and the Jews call it Passover. The Jews remember the exodus from Egypt. God’s deliverance from slavery. The crossing of the Red Sea. This part of the story is very important to understand why Christians have Easter.    God, af...

The 2 Samuel 9 and 10 are about David’s kindness toward others. One person received his kindness humbly, knowing that wasn’t expected from that king in particular. Saul was the first king of Israel and did not obey the word of the LORD. Therefore, the kingdom was taken away from him and his lineage. God announced to Saul that he was going to give the kingdom to someone else. Being David. Because David was not a descendant of Saul, once he started reigning, it was expected that the new king, non-descendant of the former, would kill all the former king’s descendants so no one would stand in the line of succession. Bu David did not do that. Instead, he chose to show kindness toward the last person from Saul’s house.  Saul’s grandson accepted David’s kindness. And we have a beautiful story about grace.  Chapter 10, however, tells a different story. A story of a man who didn’t accept David’s kindness because that was what he was. A person who suspected everyone around him. He ...

There is a chapter in the Bible that horrifies me every time I read it. I don’t even like to think about it. Strangely, I have been thinking about it since I read it: Judges chapter 19. I am not going to quote it.  Why am I telling you this? First, I think this chapter of the Bible is intended to do exactly this: horrify us. We are supposed to become indignant, appalled, and sad—very sad.  What happened in that chapter is the result of their choices, not one man’s choice, but Israel’s choices. They had chosen to betray their God. They turned their backs to God. So, did God punish them? No. God did not. God just let them be. “Israel had no king, and they did what was right in their own eyes.” They had decided they had no king. Not that a king would make much difference (we’ll see in the next books of the Bible).  They rejected God as their King. They had forgotten about the Law.  As we read this book, we see that every time they remember God, and ask for help, Go...