God could have done it all alone. But God chose not to. Jesus experiences the reality of human sin, because sin is fundamentally living without God. Jesus experiences the depth of suffering, because suffering is more than anything the condition of being without comfort.
- Previous Volumes!
- Find Out When Easter Sunday Is In Other Years.
- White Masks.
- .
- Placement Learning in Cancer & Palliative Care Nursing - E-Book: A guide for students in practice.
- !
- Last Kiss: Sex Day (UDig).
Jesus experiences the horror of death, because death is the word we give to being without all things—without breath, without connectedness, without consciousness, without a body. Jesus experiences the biggest alienation of all, the state of being without the Father, and thus being not-God—being, for this moment, without the with that is the essence of God. He has given so much—even despite our determination to be without him. And yet he has given beyond our imagination, because for the sake of our being with the Father he has, for this moment, lost his own being with the Father.
- Tables of Contents from our recent issues.
- Heart and Soul - The Emotional Autobiography of Melissa Bell, Alexandra Burkes Mother.
- !
- Rethinking Service;
- .
And the Father has longed so much to be with us that he has, for this moment, lost his being with the Son, which is the essence of his being. Here is the astonishing good news. At the central moment in history, Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, had to choose between being with the Father or being with us. And he chose us. At the same time the Father had to choose between letting the Son be with us or keeping the Son to himself.
And he chose to let the Son be with us. That is the choice on which our eternal destiny depends. That is the epicenter of the Christian faith and our very definition of love. God being with God. God being with us, being among us. Why Alleviating Mortality Heightens Isolation. So you have had my hypothesis—that our culture assumes the fundamental human problem is mortality.
When Was Easter Sunday in 2013?
And you have had my argument—that the fundamental human problem is not mortality; instead, it is isolation. It is not difficult to see how a philosophy based on overcoming mortality and a philosophy based on overcoming isolation can come into tension with one another. For sure, enhanced transportation, telecommunications, and information technology have made it possible to communicate in ever more extensive and complex ways. But they have also facilitated lifestyles where people are in touch with conversation partners on the other side of the planet, but not with next-door neighbors; where insurance lies in investments and pensions, rather than in friendships and extended families; and where face-to-face human interaction is ceasing to become the encounter of choice for a generation who are used to having plentiful alternative ways to make themselves known to one another.
The flipside of making ourselves more independent and self-sufficient is that we are simultaneously becoming more isolated and more alone. And this brings us to the crucial point. If you see the central quest of life as being to overcome isolation rather than to overcome mortality, your notion of service and of mission will change accordingly.
Service and mission that seek to overcome isolation do not look to technology to solve problems and reduce limitations. They do not assume that their own knowledge and skill are the crucial element required to change the game.
- [SOLVED] Deep Fryer Cook Book: All In One Deep Fryer Recipes Compilation [Newly Revised Book]?
- Alienation () - IMDb.
- Or Pick Another Year:.
Of course, if you are in the business of overcoming mortality, you are going to need plenty of knowledge and skill. But if you are in the business of overcoming isolation, then you begin to appreciate that concentrating on enhancing and promoting your own knowledge and skill may be as likely to be counterproductive as productive. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul cites one compelling metaphor for what Christ has done in bringing salvation. Paul is referring to the hostility between Jew and Gentile, but the point goes for any such degree of antagonism and alienation.
Indeed, the greater the degree of isolation or antagonism, the more profound the significance of overcoming it. Thus service and mission become recognizing those from whom one is alienated and antagonized and seeking and finding ways to be present to them. The approach that sees overcoming mortality as the goal tends to approach mission and service like this. We, as outsiders to social disadvantage, and thus not, in any significant way, part of the problem, nonetheless have expert eyes to see what the problem is and ready-made solutions at hand.
We will appear in the local context, deliver our solution, and then withdraw, quickly to resume our regular activities, which are not considered to have any material bearing, positive or negative, on the problem we have identified and resolved. If we have listened and learned from repeated interventions of this kind, we will have gathered that it is good to form relationships on the ground, good to involve local participants in some way, else local wisdom be neglected and local goodwill be needlessly undermined.
But the point is that this local participation is never more than a means to an end.
Latest Messages
The end is never in question. The end always comes in the form of overcoming the limitations of the local environment or skill base, and the provision of technology or the enhancement of the capacity to use it. Contrast this with the kind of mission and service that emerge from a conviction that the goal is to overcome isolation.
We are not exactly sure what the problem is, but we take for granted that we are a part of it. We do not assume that the solution is to make other people more like us by ensuring that they have what we have and live as we live. We assume that we have a deficiency, and that deficiency is due to the poverty or absence of our relationship with those who have important and invigorating things to share with us, if only we could open up channels to receive those things. We may well embark on projects that seek to alleviate distress or transfer resources or develop skills.
But the point of these projects is not to achieve a specific material goal: These programs are ladders that will fall away once the relationships are in place and genuine dialogue is happening. For leaders of colleges and universities, there is a curious irony in all of this. Such leaders do more to further the overcoming of isolation by the way they run their institutions and by the way their institutions foster healthy relationships among their members and staff than their institutions do by such service projects as they undertake. Because in all the haste to provide technology and enhance technique and alleviate the limitations of climate or scarcity or skill, mortality-motivated service can often underline and even enhance the kinds of social alienation that from the isolation perspective constitutes the problem in the first place.
I once was asked to do a bit of consultancy work for a college that was seeking to expand its student service programs. I talked to the board of the service initiative. We want to make a difference. Not all transformation is for the better, and a lot of people in the history of the world have made a difference, but not all of those differences have been beneficial ones.
The kind of service that board was talking about did not seem to be serving anyone but themselves. It did not seem to occur to them that they might be affirming and exacerbating the social divisions and inequalities that they found. I suggested that perhaps they would do better to focus on stopping taking away rather than trying to give something back.
What bothered me most about the whole conversation was that here were a bunch of thoughtful, successful people, but they did not seem to be going about giving something back with the same degree of thoughtfulness to which they had given the original taking away that had made them so successful in the first place. In conclusion, I want to return to The English Patient. In the story, Laszlo scarcely thinks twice before he sets off on his three-day journey to find help.
He has all sorts of adventures before he finally makes it back to the encampment and the ancient cave. And when he does, Katherine is very, very, very dead. And that is being with Katherine.
When Was Easter Sunday in ?
He is so concerned to solve the problem that he leaves her alone in her hour of greatest need. I wonder whether the real reason Laszlo went to Cairo was because he could not bear to watch Katherine die. It never occurs to any of us to think that this frenzy of programming and experiencing and sampling and trying out is madness. On the contrary, it is those that lag behind or stand outside our frenetic world that we regard as mad. Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. A Greek man, past his fifties, is driving an old-fashioned car across the border to Bulgaria to buy a child.
New Bulgarian Cinema - now. Venice Film Festival Share this Rating Title: Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Learn more More Like This. Edit Cast Cast overview: Edit Storyline A man Christos Stergioglou driving an old-fashioned car is crossing the border. Edit Details Official Sites: Add the first question.
Redeeming Stewardship Mar Drift Jan - Feb State of the Church Jan Campus Updates Jan Because God Came Near Dec Because God Breathed Nov Ordinary Heroes Jun - Jul Beyond Belief Feb - Mar The Evangelism Gap Aug - Nov Saved Aug - Sep Vivid Jul - Aug Grad Weekend May Follow Me May Tough Love Mar - Apr Choosing the Important Things Jan - Feb Dear Church Oct - Nov Apr - Nov Act 2 Sep Act 1 Aug Dawn of the Church Jun - Aug Take Heart Jun Easter Apr Following the Footsteps of Jesus Mar - Apr February Teaching Series Feb Off the Top Jan