Blog – Page 28 – Joel Bidderman

Trust, Part Four: of transcendence and immanence

Manning wrote in Ruthless Trust (2000):...We can no more catch a hurricane in a shrimp net or Niagara Falls in a coffee cup then we can grasp the infinity of God's reality. A one-sided focus on his Otherness reduces the Holy One to a cosmic observer, a distant outsider disengaged from the yaw and pitch of human struggle.Immanence is not the opposite of transcendence but its correlative, immanence and transcendence are two sides of the same coin, two facets of the same divine reality. Transcendence means that God cannot be confined to the world, that he is never this rather than that, here rather than there. Immanence, on the other hand, means that God is wholly involved with us, [...]

2014-08-18T22:34:45+00:00By Joel|Manning, trust|

Trust, Part Three: the waiting factor

I know that I'm in the middle of a series on "trust," but since the topic is pretty much synonymous, I decided to include this bit on "waiting." I wrote the following article for a prayer site that I've been developing:Waiting is something synonymous with being human, and something that has been a muse for my creativity for some time now. I actually wrote a song entitled “Waiting” that is on my CD Depravity, Grace and Reckless Abandon. The lyrics go:This road is dustyAnd it’s getting to my eyesSo that I can’t see where I’m goingOr even the time But I’ll trust in YouThough it feels hurtin’ to meAnd though I can’t see Job, Abraham and SarahWe could [...]

2014-08-18T22:34:45+00:00By Joel|discipleship, prayer, trust, Waiting|

Trust, Part Two: the scars remain

The love of God is not a pastry - it is a meal. Or for that matter, perhaps it is the protein that makes up the food. While fame, money, self-reliance, or the many other things that we fill our lives with, may keep us going, they may substitute but cannot replace the building block for a healthy life. Sometimes western Christianity has a tendency to cast the vibe that the love of God is a garnish to an 'American Dream,' when it is so much more. Journeying beyond calorie induced metaphors, I sense more and more that the love of God is the very air that fills our lungs. Every moment is grace. Frederick Buechner [...]

2014-08-18T22:34:45+00:00By Joel|Abandonment, Manning, trust|

Trust, Part One: the lesson we keep learning until we die

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives- the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections- that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift [...]

2014-08-18T22:34:45+00:00By Joel|Abandonment, Manning, prayer, trust|