#Moriah Trust Limited

[tracknews1]

AGAIN: Ecobank Faces $285,006 Scandal as Firm Petitions EFCC

Ecobank Nigeria Plc is at the center of a $285,006 scandal following allegations of fraudulent and illegal transactions involving the domiciliary account of Moriah Trust Limited. The company and its representative, David Nwedu, have filed a petition with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), urging an investigation and prosecution of those involved. The petition, titled “Criminal…

[livelovesimallways]

"Such A Thing"......🎵

(previous)

Nearly Two Hours Later......

"So, I believe we've covered everything. I know the interview portion was long, but I promise you'll see it was well worth it. You two will easily be matched. Financial stability aside, you guys are well educated, highly successful, and very personable. Now with that being said, is there anything about open adoption that you're not fully comfortable with? I noticed you tensed up when discussing the contact options for birth mothers as your child grows." *looks at Moses* "It's completely normal to be weary. Most people aren't initially excited about that, but realize over time how important it can be."

"I definitely understand the benefits. I just know that things don't always work out as planned. What if the birth mother decides limited contact is too hard? What if she wants more time? What if our child doesn't want her to be involved anymore?"

"I'm actually glad you mentioned that. You're absolutely right. Everything you asked, and then some, has happened. Parenting isn't easy and adoption piles on more. That's why, if anything does arise, we have the counselors, therapists and mediators to help navigate as needed. Also, keep in mind that you will be the legal parents. Although we encourage visitation and contact, it's not legally binding. If it becomes a problem, you make the best decision for your child." *continues looking at Moses* "I think you would benefit from talking to our head counselor. She was a birth mother with a closed adoption and had to go through reconnecting with her son as an adult. That process wasn't easy for the both of them but thankfully they're in a much better place. While you're doing that, I'll answer any questions you have, Leah."

"Sounds good to me." *scrolls through her notes*

"Alright, Moses you wait here for a sec. Let me tell her you're coming."

A Few Minutes Later......

"I'm sorry but it really is a conflict of interest. I don't feel right talking to him. Why can't you have someone else do it?"

"Because you're the HEAD of this department! We're not lawyers Moriah...There is no conflict of interest. Just keep your mouth shut about your friend. Trust me, he's not going to ask about finding her. He barely thinks contact should be allowed for a kid. Why do you think I'm sending him to talk to you? We all need this win, so please don't fuck it up. Plus, I feel for his wife. She tried IVF, but her eggs are bad. You know I had my own issues with that. If you came to me earlier, I would have suggested someone else do this. Just pretend you don't know his birth mother and take it from there."

To Be Continued...…..

[trustfallwithgod]

Day 9: Be Still and Know, He is God

Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take

Paths that look like shadows of death

discipleship is a journey of faith. over and over we have experienced that God does in fact come through, even though the path He leads us on is often not the one we would have chosen. In fact, it is often the path we would have avoided. Learning to trust God’s promises can feel a lot like a trust fall. But when we do, we experience God’s unmistakable, unexplainable peace.

We want peace. But too often, we look for it in the wrong places. Is this not familiar:

If I can just __________, I’ll have peace.

If I only had __________, I’d be OK.

Peace isn’t found in obtaining a position or more possessions. Peace isn’t always found in the absence of conflict. Psalm 112 describes the person who trusts God as unperturbed, ever blessed, unfazed by rumor and gossip, and relaxed among their enemies.

The purpose of a trust fall isn’t to test a person’s trust, but to build trust. In the same way, these things God is doing in our lives isn’t to test our faith (He knows exactly where our faith is at). The purpose of this is to grow our faith and ultimately move us towards the place He wants us to be.

The ultimate trust fall

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.” Genesis 22:1,2

God had spent years telling Abraham to get ready; that he would become a father of a great nation. God called Abraham to leave the place where he was settled and go to an unknown land. He had a relationship that was very close with Abraham and even called him a friend (2 Chronicles 20:7). So it must have been unsettling for Abraham to realize that after the fulfillment of God’s promise, after trusting for years and years, God would take the one thing away He had promised to Abraham.

Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much

“Father?” “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied. “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

Isaac had surmised that something was off. God didn’t give Abraham any answers. Which father would give his children stones if they had asked for bread, here it was that Abraham was about to give his son up. Probably conflicted, he obeyed - this time was no different than any other. When we are tested beyond our ability to comprehend, we are called to trust anyway.

Real, lasting peace only comes from trusting God’s promises. The prophet Isaiah recognized this: “[God] will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you” (Isaiah 26:3). Our hearts can remain steadfast because God’s promises remain steadfast. That place is the point where we can’t even take a step without looking up to our father, who is holding our hand, for assurance that the path we’re on is the one He has for us. I know He’s going to catch us, and that He’s taking us to something greater.

whoever is reading this, you might be lost or hurting or disappointed but I’m inviting to be a part of this adventure with the Lord. God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we ask or think. Don’t place limits on the Creator, seek Him in prayer and allow Him to download His vision and plans for you. If He is building that level of trust between you and Him, then it stands to reason that His plans for you are mighty and great indeed and it would not work if you were not properly equipped.

[deaconwords]

The Father of Faith

Our reading from Genesis is heartbreaking. One can feel the sense of loss Abraham must have experienced when told by God to turn away from Hagar and Ishmael, to send them out into the harsh desert with nothing more than some bread and a skin of water. After all, Ishmael was Abraham’s son and Hagar the woman through whom he was born. It was unnatural to turn away from them, yet Abraham, the Father of Faith, listened to and followed the command of God’s voice. I think Abraham died a little that day.

We hear in today’s gospel lesson:

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Father Abraham is worthy. He denies his own son in order to follow the command of God. We know too, from another passage that Abraham’s faith wasn’t limited to his dealings with Ishmael. No, he would also offer his other son, Isaac, upon an altar on Mount Moriah as instructed by God.

In our epistle reading this morning we hear;

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

Baptized into death so that we can be raised into newness of life.

Newness of life. How often does a newness of life come to us only after we have loosened our grip upon that which we cling to more than God?

God’s ongoing creation of the universe involves new divisions, new complexities. And with each new division we must let go of the familiar, to which we cling, and die a little so we can participate with God in God’s newness of life. Abraham exemplifies this.

Cathe has been teaching me to access more and more things on my cell phone. We were in Chicago last weekend to see a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. And Cathe had purchased our tickets ahead of time and through an app on my phone I could access my ticket and store it in my virtual wallet. I’d really rather have a paper ticket that I can tuck into my physical wallet in my back pocket, next to dollar bills which I pull out whenever I have to buy stuff. I’m resistant to newness of life. But I’m slowly, begrudgingly, letting go of the old ways. It’s hard and a little sad. It’s a “dying to” of the way things had been and an acceptance of a new way.

That is what Christ keeps calling us to, a new way, a newness of life. And each time we say yes to Christ we are saying no to our worldly ways, we are dying a little in order to be open to the new.

And we mustn’t lose heart. We must have the faith of Abraham in believing that even those whom we love and no longer see because our ways have parted, they too have journeyed or are journeying toward their newness of life. God asked Abraham to let go of Ishmael and Hagar. In effect, asking Abraham to trust that God had them, that God would even make of Ishmael a Great Nation. Abraham let go and God made Ishmael the father of the great religion of Islam.

Because he is the Father of Faith, Abraham is the father of, not one, but three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At each turn he said yes to God and simultaneously no to the world. Through him his descendants have grown to be as numerous as grains of sand on the seashore.

Lord, help us to listen and follow you even as our ancestor Abraham has done and make us ever mindful of the daily opportunities we have to say yes to Christ. Amen.

—Offered at St. George’s Episcopal Church 6-25-2023

[parispr1]

When you feel like giving up, remember —

You are an ocean of unrealized potential. You cannot imagine how deep and how wide your capacity really is unless it’s been tested, until you’ve been moved beyond where you thought your limits were, and have had to redefine them.

In this, you find new energy. You find a better rhythm. You rediscover everything you believed you had lost. Our life force can never truly escape us, but it can be withheld until our bodies feel safe enough to begin again. Give yourself the time you need to regulate to your new normal, let yourself witness with each passing day that it is once again safe to exhale, to step outside your comfort zone, to trust in the unknown.

Slowly, you will learn to take hold of that wild spirit within you once again, and this time, you will be more focused, and more intentional. You will be more discerning about who and what you allow into your life, into your headspace. You will move forward with more mindfulness. You will begin to see that when your energy is leaking out into a thousand different directions, you cannot fully invest in your own potential. You will begin to see that it was never about whether or not you were capable of becoming what you most desire, but that you were simply distracted, unknowingly surrounded by those who infused a sense of disbelief so deeply into your subconscious mind, self-limiting beliefs became the parameters in which you thought you had to experience this world.

You will begin to decide what really matters to you, what you actually want to experience while you are alive, and gently, and lovingly, release the rest in time ~Brianna Wiest

Alle Reaktionen:

37Christos Kotzias, Moriah Ama Hope und 35 weitere Personen

[ywhiterain]

Jack in the Box/Moriah

I’ve been sitting in the season fourteen finale. As always, my interpretation of SPN views the big plot points as a metaphor for intense/toxic/abusive family dynamics.  Reading the finale as God coming around and fucking up things for the lulz.... okay, yeah. I get that. But the bigger point is about the unification of the two big SPN families - Winchesters+God and the Archangels.

Cut because this is TL:DR even for me lol.

In a happier story, Jack would have been the starting point to unify these two families. And, to a certain extent, he did. Jack tied Castiel more deeply to the Sam/Mary/Dean family unit. The best of times were the five of them together. Gabriel didn’t get to bond with Jack much, but he chose to side with the Winchester and rejected Lucifer’s pity party.

And, make no mistake, Lucifer’s, er, ‘redemption arc’ was never really about him becoming a better person. It was nice for the world that he wasn’t actively trying to end it, but he spent all of his time whining about how God just scapegoated him. Yeah, he did. But Lucifer made a lot of choices that hurt a lot of people. He ended up being the beginning of Jack’s eventual downfall.

In the start, Jack was bright and brimming with life. Like any baby, he was brimming with potential. Anything was possible. Literally, in his case. But no baby comes into the world without baggage. Jack’s father was a problem, but the real start of his tragedy was that his first day alive ended with his father’s funeral.

This brings us to Sam. His feelings for Jack have always been multifaceted and complicated. He wanted to use Jack to save his mom, he saw himself in Jack and wanted to help him grow up to be a good person, and the shadow of Lucifer always lingered between them. But, here’s the thing, when Jack was dying, Sam stayed by his side the entire time. Dean walked away, Cas followed.

Sam took his first death the hardest. The thing that brought him to his knees was the fact his stupid ax broke so he couldn’t put together a proper wake for him. Sam’s the one who figured out how to save Jack. His mourning of Mary is tied with Jack, not only because Jack accidently killed her, but because the relationship he was building with Mary was, in part, ABOUT Jack. 

Sam wanted a unique relationship with his mother. He wanted to know her as a person and have what he’d been missing his entire life. The one he got to build, however briefly, was tied to Jack. She was proud of the man, the father, that Sam had become. To Jack. Who mimics Castiel in instinct and Dean though effort, but whose destiny and heart are as similar to Sam’s.

The only thing that Jack wanted was to be a good person. To use his powers to to help people.. To prove to everyone (and himself) that the source of his power wasn’t a defining aspect of who he was. It’s not to different than season two Sam keeping a list of everyone he was able to save as proof that maybe he wasn’t destined to be evil.

Jack, when killing Michael, declares himself a Winchester. In saving the world (worlds, really, because Michael would tear though every universe until Chuck finally showed his face), in saving his family, Jack doomed his soul.

Later, Jack wanted Mary to go away. He was just a kid yelling a caretaker to leave him alone. Typical, normal behavior any child sometimes experiences. But the curse of Jack’s powers is that are taken to literal extremes. He kills Mary. He forces a world without lying to come into being.

The emotional crux of the finale was Dean, who wanted to kill Jack; Cas who wanted to save him, and Sam who was torn. Cas and Dean have no doubts about what the right thing, they don’t waver on what they want emotionally. Sam is angry at Jack, but he thinks Jack deserves to be saved.

Dean tells Sam to prey to Jack. To be as sincere as possible. All Puppy Dog Eyes, All The Time. And here’s how the scene is framed: two adults tricking a child who trusts them to be locked up in a box for eternity. Whatever Jack’s crimes, the camera is asking us to sympathize with Jack’s pain. Sam is pained the entire time and when Jack looks to him for reassurance - Sam giving him the okay is one of his worst moments.

Jack in his box declares he doesn’t like it. Like a child with a limited vocabulary. He screams for Sam and Dean, but has to break himself out.  

Chuck comes back, all but eating popcorn.

Dean plans to kill Jack. The bright side: the magical gun that he’d use would kill him, too. So he’d leave Sam alone, with his brother and his kid both dead. Dean does the ugly dirty deeds, but forces Sam to live with the fallout. Like the end of season two.

To Dean’s credit, when Jack falls to his knees and agrees to die (mirroring Sam when Dean traded his life in a ploy with Death), he wavers. He realized Mary wouldn’t want Dean to kill Jack. Her revival at Jack’s expense might have actually been unforgivable. Mary’s last actions alive was reaching out to a troubled Jack, a boy she loved. Her death was an accident and blame and punishment won’t fix what happened, much less address the underlining reasons why it happened, Jack lost his soul saving the people (he took down Michael, who spent most of the season terrorizing Dean specifically). 

The fractured remains of our main family might have survived. But then Chuck kills Jack

Toxic and abusive family dynamics killed a child. Every adults around Jack played their part in his downfall and death. It feels like the most fitting end for his character. A baby can sometimes bring a families together, but they can’t fix what’s broken. They, more often than not, become victimized by the broken family dynamic.

But that’s not the only way to look at Jack’s story. He did get to live. He loved and was loved. He spent his brief life trying to make the world a better place. He saved the world. And he’s going to come back.

Children born in broken families aren’t a cautionary tale. They are people, filled with potential. A kid can’t fix a family, that kid can make the world better. Families that are broken, twisted, toxic, abusive - they still produce people whose stories and are as varied as any other type of person.

In this case, a better god.

[verobatto]

War decision/Heart decision

The break-up of TFW

Supernatural 14x19 "Jack in the box" meta/spoiler alert

Hello my dear Fandom. How are you?? I'm here with the second meta from this episode, you can read the first part here. I hope you enjoy this it took me a little of investigation and stuffs...

Ok... Things are getting wild and... Idk what they are doing people, really... I will just present to you the evidence as always with a little spec that I think I'm not the one thinking about it... Is just a painful equation with the clues we have till now. Ok. Let's start this trip...

Castiel is in a Holy Mission

Castiel, being an angel of the Lord, keeps his mission and his promises, as i talked in my first meta. To ANY COST. I want you to keep that in mind. Ok? Sobbing...

Castiel's mission is his promise to Kelly, so from the beginning, he marks the limit. He won't hurt Jack. He will help him and guide him.

But he asks for help to Heaven, and there's Dumah. Dumah is behaving weird, but not so. Beacuse she is on charge now, and the power of being the chief, corrupts. But Castiel didn't know about her intentions first.

And what was Dumah looking for? She wanted to find the Nephilim and control him, control his powers... By using a very manipulative speech, as AUMichael and Lucifer did. But she was successful. Beacuse she smartly used Sam and Dean's names with him. And the innocent child fell for it.

And then, she used him to PURIFY EARTH, by killing innocents... But pay attention to the three heaven punishments they mentioned in this episode...

Lot's wife became a pillar of salt. (Gen. 19:26)

Lot and his wife lived next to Abraham lands, but Lot hated Sodoma because they were sinners and bad people. Then one day an angel of the Lord ask Lot to take his family with them and to run and to don't look behind because God was about to burn Sodoma and Gomorra because he was tired of them. So Lot did as the angel said, they run away, but his wife disobeyed and look behind, and immediately became a pillar of salt. The lesson here: God saves the obedient and punishes the disobedient.

The man who received this punishment was writing about how Church lies. So against the Church Holy mission.

Core and his family eaten by the earth. (Num. 16:31)

Gore and his family rebelled against God and Moises, so God talked with Moises asking him to take the rest of the people and stay away from Core's tend. He did as God said, and immediately the land broke and devoured Core, and his family, and the tend with all their things.

The lesson: Those who don't listen to God will be hardly punished.

In this case was a woman who said miracles are lies.

King Herodes is eaten by worms (Hech. 12:23)

An angel of the Lord released Peter from jail, and king Herodes ordered to kill the guards. The people was not agreed, and because he was playing to be God taking those decisions, an angel hurt him and the worms ate him.

The lesson: Those who trying to play God by deciding who dies and who lives, receive the Heaven punishment.

Here the man who dies at the hospital was the good shepherd who lead the sheep's that we're stoñwn buenas Jack. And you can see in that scene being the priest, a pic about Jesus as the good shepherd.

Everytime it was an angel of the Lord who execute the Holy Mission, and this time who will receive the punishment by Castiel's hands??

Dean is suffering and taking hard decisions

Making use of his First Born duties and with the whole mess that he is feeling inside, Dean talked about his mom in front of that hunters. And he used jokes in his speech... Trying to say goodbye with a smile. But he is struggling inside with the pain. Jokes are a defense mechanism of avoidance too... But he says GOODBYE MOM anyway.

After this we had a violent entrance coming from AUBobby, who killed a monster in the middle of them with an axe... Remember what the axe represented? I talked about that in this post.

So the axe represents the JUDGMENT AND THE ANGER. So accurate with the following events in this episode and I guess it will be in the nest episode too, related with Dean's actions...

Sam asked Dean to stay with them to talk about Mary and Jack, and he didn't want to. He is avoiding again the pain of talk about his mom, about Jack.

Gif set credit @shirtlesssammy

But Sam and CAS knows Dean very well...they know he acts like this, trying to push his emotions very down inside of him. Even so, Castiel tried... Look at the angel's sad face full of pain and feeling guilt... Yes... Because they didn't talk yet about it. But Sam asked him to leave his brother because he needed time... So... He just makes that question ... And Dean answered in avoidance again.

And after this we had Dean crying alone in the woods... Handling with his own pain.

Then, Sam asked him how he felt... (Like Castiel asked him before) and he answered with another question not related to his feelings at all, but with Sam researching... Avoidance again.

Sam trying to comfort him with the speech that he must being repeating to himself to feel better about Mary's death. "She is in a better place", but Dean is furious "Angels are dicks." Same vibes from season 7 when he was talking with Kevin in the basement about angels... He was disappointed there with Castiel. But this time we had a parallel in this same episode with the man who didn't believe in angels and Heaven. And we know what happened there...

Then... Dean takes the war decision, the hard decision, and convinces Sammy to follow him. He build the speech Sammy has to use with Jack. He is asking Sam to lie. Sam isn't at all convinced but he goes his brother's directions anyway.

When Jack answered Sammy's prayers, using the word FAMILY, the one who gives the speech is the first born again, Dean. He contains his pain and anger when he had Jack in front of him. And he fullfil the plan.

He is hunting Jack... Because he is feeling the boy become a monster, and as I wrote in my first meta, he had told Jack in season 13 he will kill him if it was necessary.

This is a train of bad decisions... And we don't know where it leads... But... We had a lot of clues talking about "silver steak through the heart" as my friend @emblue-sparks and I had repeated a million of times since 14x06 Optimism when it first was mentioned... They repeated the same way to kill in 14x16, and in 14x17 we had this...

Gif credit @agusvedder

So... Is this foreshadowing the end??? Who will stop the sacrifice in the Moriah mountain in the morning at episode when Dean will try to kill Jack? Who will be the Heaven executor in Holly Mission??? I don't even want to think it...

And this...

Pic credit @weirddorkylittlediana remember Dean was walking in 14x17 surrended by this kind of yellow signs? And we related it with Sammy asking Dean to stop... Well... There's so many ways to finish this season I'm so scared...

Sam trying to do right but...

Sam is handling with pain as he can...

Gif credit @ohsamulet

Sammy is talking to himself here too. He knows his mom is happy with his dad in Heaven and that's a good way to let her go.

But after this Dean came with the plan and Sam just couldn't handle it. It was too much for him. First his mom, and now deceive Jack to lock him in the Mal'ak box for ever. A horrible eternity alone... The thing that made him lose it that time with his brother, now... He is listening again that horrible plan. He knows Jack is dangerous now, but he doesn't now the person who is making him doing those bad things.

And he is a dad too. He had raised that child so he can't believe how things are happening now. He is like frozen. Not thinking too much about it... Following his brother lead...

And he prays to Jack... And when he had Jack in front of him, innocently talking about "the accident", not having a reasonable view about that, he knows Jack is clueless, as always. And he can't talk... So Dean spoke for him. Dean said the words he was expecting from him to say it. And he followed his lead again. For Sammy should be like living again another nightmare... Not being able to wake up from the previous one.

And Jack entered inside the box. And now he felt the worst thing on Earth because that's not how Sam Winchester acts. He always find ANOTHER WAY. He is the one who KEEPS FIGHTING AND INVESTIGATING. Why not this time? Maybe because the pain of loosing his mother is overwhelming to him, and he can't think about another thing. He said I CAN'T STOP THINLING ABOUT MOM. So that's the thing. HE CAN'T THINK NOW ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE.

But when Castiel arrives... He breaks that nightmare and brought back Sam to reality.

As he did in 14x15...

Castiel looked at Sam searching for that Sam he knew. And he founded him. He was regretful and in pain.

How he will act in the next episode? Gah... Idk...

Jack and the mirrors

Jack is still alone, but he doesn't wanted to be anymore. He is regretful and he wants Mary back, right there, with him. He misses his family, and in the middle of that, Lucifer appears again. Trying to make him feel the same that AUMichael did with Dean and the Empty with Castiel...

Gif credit @deans-top-13-zepp-traxx

Yes, but Jack said DEAN MAKES MISTAKES TOO. Dean is his role model. He trust him.

The encounter between Jack and Dumah was particularly similar to Jack's encounter with Lucifer and AUMichael too. The manipulative speech, using Sam and Dean as an excuse, and the name of his mother, made him choose to follow her lead. And he committed horrendous crimes under Dumah twisted guidance.

The next step was to take control over Heaven .. as a new God...

Pic credit @empty-cass

We knew who had being sit in that throne before... One of them was Lucifer and maybe Godstiel too, so the parallel is very blantant. Any angelical being had twisted intentions. All of them except one...

Gif credit @faramaiofnerdwoodforest

And this happened in 13x19...

So... Jack doesn't have bad intentions... He is just like Castiel sitting there... And he has his mother essence inside of him...

And now amazingly making angels from people... That was weird Supernatural... But well... Good way to restore Heaven. Who wants to be an angel??

Another mirror was Jack inside the box... Afraid of being lonely calling desperately for his dad's... Dean mirror in 14x12 when he had that horrible nightmare...

And Lucifer strikes again... And this time because Jack was so afraid and he felt alone in that darkness... He listened him. And he released himself from that prison ...

I saw him talking in that Cemetery with Castiel, it looked like a cozy conversation between a dad and a son... And I liked it... Let's see what happen...

To conclude:

TFW members are right night in different pages. Mary's death is the central cause of the pain and bad choices.

Jack is innocent an manipulable... Very dangerous in wrong guidance, because he has not soul, so he just uses logic resolutions for problems.

Castiel is doing his own path by trying to find another way, and keeping his promise to Kelly.

Dean is angry and mourning his mom, trying to handle the pain, but stuck in his feelings, making bad choices.

I hope Sammy to wake up and to try to bring back his brother.

The end is near and I just can't stop thinking we are going to suffer horribly. Thanks a lot writers... Don't worry... I didn't need my heart anyway...

C-u later my friends!! 💕💕

Tagging @metafest @gneisscastiel @mrsaquaman187 @magnificent-winged-beast @emblue-sparks @agusvedder @weirddorkylittlediana @michyribeiro @castiellover20 @whyjm @koshisekisen @legendary-destiel @a-bit-of-influence @thatwitchydestielfan @misha-moose-dean-burger-lover @lykanyouko @evvvissticante @cheerstofandomfamily @drsilverfish @savannadarkbaby @angelneedshunter @trickster-archangel @dea-stiel @mybonsai1976 @hippyatheart80 @anarchiana

Buenos Aires April 19th 2019 2:57 AM

[dailyaudiobible]

01/09/2019 DAB Transcript

Genesis 20:1-22:24, Matthew 7:15-29, Psalms 9:1-12, Proverbs 2:16-22

Today is the 9th day of January. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it is a joy to be here with you today and taking the next step forward. And I think we’re far enough into our new year to kind of begin to understand that there’s a rhythm and to begin to understand that the Bible isn't this static old-fashioned book that is irrelevant, that there's a bunch…a bunch of things that it is willing to speak directly and truthfully into our lives. And if we will and heed it that it will change the way that we live our lives. And, so, welcome back for the next day forward. And that will lead us back into the New International Version, which is what we’re reading from this week and back into the book of Genesis chapter 20, 21, and 22 today.

Commentary:

Okay. So, you know, we encountered a pretty harrowing story yesterday with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and we talked about that and the way that we subtly move toward judgment, even judgment of God and how that that can estrange us in our journey that we’re taking through the Scriptures yesterday. And, so, today, we kind of encounter another one of those types of stories where God tells Abraham to take is a promised son Isaac to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him. And we’re not gonna get into all of that because that story will unfold very, very clearly over some time, other than to just point out God and Abraham had entered into a covenant with each other and covenantal language is something that we will, you know, we will encounter quite a bit. So, we understand that the two of them joined together in covenant, which meant that nothing was off-limits from the other. So, when God tells Abraham to go and take his only son, and He’s very specific about this with Isaac, Abraham is in covenant he cannot withhold anything. And, so, he does. Of course, his trust and faith is in God and Isaac is the son of promise, so Abraham can simply say, “I must follow God even though I don't know how this is gonna work out, but I do know that my son is a son of promise and through my son many generations will come. This is what God told me. In fact, he marched me outside and had me look up the night sky and try to count the stars. So, there's this promise and I need understand what's going on, but I do trust the one I'm in covenant with.” We know how that story worked out but what we may not have paid attention to is the thread of redemption that begins to show itself at all kinds of points in the Bible and this is one of them because Abraham did not withhold his son from God and God didn't take the sacrifice of a human being, instead He sent his own son, His own only son. Now if you’ve been a believer for a long time, then you know, you can connect those dots pretty easy. If this your first trip through the Bible and encountering the stories of the Bible, this one is one that kind of touches a lot of things and will become more and more apparent as we move forward because Isaac is going to have a son of his own, a couple of sons of his own, and they’re gonna change the whole story, but let's…let's go back into the book of Matthew.

Jesus is saying some very important and very forthright, like, non-ambiguous things that we should pay attention to, “judge not, lest you be judged.” That was yesterday. And again, like if you’ve been a believer for a long time you’ve probably encountered the stories of Jesus before. And, so, it's really easy to just encapsulate them into their story form and not really listen to the words Jesus is teaching. What Jesus is saying is revolutionary and when he said it in the first century it was fundamentally revolutionary. We’re used to hearing the words of Jesus now, so it's not quite like…has that kind of impact unless we slow down and listen to what He’s saying. So, let's just examine what He said today. “Many will say to me on that day”, Jesus says, and He's talking about Judgment Day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons, and in your name perform many miracles? Then I will tell them plainly. I never knew you. Away from me, you evil doers.” Okay. So, this is another big deal on our faith journey because we can spend our whole lives trying to get our beliefs correct and our theology airtight and waterproof. We can think that every day that we learn more about God or learn something else about Jesus, then we are drawing closer and closer to Him when Jesus is saying, “there's going to be people who call on the Lord and prophesied in His name and have even cast out demons in His name, and even performed miracles in His name, and He will still say, I didn't know you.” So, what have to realize is that all of our flurry of activity that keeps us busy, that keeps us thinking that we’re drawing closer to God, all the stuff that we might do around our faith that's great, it's just not the point. What Jesus says He will say to those people is, “I never knew you”, which must mean that the point is that we can know Him and not only know about Him and that is a pretty big distinction because if you zoom out and apply these principles to any relationship in your life you would have to say that knowing about somebody is not the same as knowing them. And that should prick us a little bit because when we think of our spirituality and our faith journey, you know, then it's centered around acquiring knowledge most of the time, trying to dial it in, know what to believe, know the spells and incantations, know the potions. Like, I know that's not literal, I'm just saying, like, that's what we boil it down to. If I can say the right mantras, If I can pray the right prayer in the right order doing the right things with the right attitude then God will do something for me, like, just give me the recipe, show me how the recipe works, what I can add and what I cannot add and how to make this whole thing work, just somebody tell me how to do this. Relationships do not work that way. You can read every marriage book that has ever been published…well…you probably couldn't because there's too many that have been published to read in a lifetime, but you could read, I don’t know, the 20 most popular books ever written on marriage and still not know how to be married because it is a relationship and that happens in the spoken and in the unspoken and that does not happen based on the rules. Like, if you're living a rules-based marriage, then you're probably not very happy in it. When you are in a life-giving relationship the rules become apparent and you obey them. Like, I'm not going to commit adultery because I will not break the heart of the one that I love. I'm not going there because of what it would do to the person that I have given my heart to. And you obey the rules because you are in love. Jesus speaking in the first century is speaking to a people that have taken the law, and I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself...ahead of ourselves…because we haven't gotten to the law yet, but these people had taken the law and made their relationship with God all about obeying the rules, which bypasses the idea of a relationship other than just a relationship by proxy because you are behaving a certain way. Jesus is saying to that mindset, you can do all of the right things in it and still not know me. And, so, once again, and I mean, we’re not quite, you know, only just a little over a week into this journey so you can still jump off this boat and swim back to shore probably but it won't be long before we’re so far in the deep that these things that come along and you have to sit with them and really begin to examine your faith and understand what it's made of and where it's headed because my story and the story of thousands and thousands of people that I have spoken to over these last 13 years doing this is one of confusion about faith. Like, how do I know when I'm doing…like how do I know that I'm doing the right thing and believing the right thing? And, so, we’ll redouble our efforts to get the knowledge. And man, that's my story, that is even how I'm wired, to acquire knowledge to truly understand what it is that I'm talking about, but I have found that even if we could know everything there is to know about God that is still not the same thing as being in a relationship with God because I can know everything there is to know about my wife and not be in a relationship with her. And we human beings are wired to be relational people. So, it's like already baked into our DNA, we know when we’re in a relationship and we know when that relationship is life-giving and we also are aware when we are in a bad relationship and it is life taking. So, we know this intuitively, we’re made for relationship. It’s just the ways we try to relate to God are by acquiring knowledge about Him and that's only part of the story. Actually being together in a relationship is what we’re invited into. So, there's some things to think about and examine. Like, what is the status of your relationship, because maybe the state of your life mimics the state of your relationship with God.

Prayer:

And, so, Holy Spirit come, we invite You into that question and we’re again thankful. I mean, yes, yes, with Your word You are pressing into us, You are You are pushing us back. Like, we came into this boldly thinking we may have had much more figured out than we do and You're using Your word to kind of push us back and humble us and we’re now beginning to feel the truth flow into us and ask the right questions of us and of our faith. And this is the beginning place, this is the place where wisdom begins to be planted and flourish and the fruit of the spirit begins to be cultivated within. So, we invite You Holy Spirit to show us. What's our relationship like? Are we unhealthy with You? What needs to change? What needs to go? What needs to stay? What needs to be moved around? You can answer these questions because You have promise to lead us into all truth, You have promised us that there is a narrow path that leads to life. And, yes, few find it but we want to be one of those people. So, we’re humbling ourselves before You and saying there is no question that is off-limits, You can press in on us in any way that You want to. We are hungering and thirsting for Your righteousness, we are hungering and thirsting to live in this world as we were intended, and we don’t want this confusion and this stress and this anxiety that You're telling us that we don't have to have. You told us yesterday, we don’t have to worry about anything, we don’t have to worry about tomorrow, it’ll take care of itself. And, so, we want to live in that place, but we won’t be able to live in that place with a bunch of knowledge, we’ll only be able to live in a place walking with You in deep intertwined relationship. So, come Holy Spirit. We pray into these questions and may their answers be honest, and may they be life changing. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, and of course, its where you find out what's going on around here.

One thing that I’ll mention today that's been mentioned in the past is the Daily Audio Bible shop. There are resources in the Daily Audio Bible shop that we've assembled specifically for this journey, the journey through the year and through the Bible. And, so, you can check those out and there are also other resources, other writings and stuff. What we were just talking about in terms of a relationship with God, there's a longer conversation about that contained in a book that I've written called “Reframe” and you can get that anywhere, but you can also get it in the Daily Audio Bible Shop and that really is an exploration of what we are talking about when we say we’re in a relationship with God. What does that even mean? One of the things any relationship means is that you know the other person, which is what Jesus is saying. I'll tell them plainly, I never knew you. Like, you did all this stuff in my name, but I didn't know you. So, relationships are knowing and being known. And, so, we go into a conversation that’s much more lengthy then we can do just in one sitting here. And, so, if that peeks your interest you can check out that resource, it’s called “Reframe, from the God we've made to God with us.” And that's in the Daily Audio Bible Shop as well as bunch of other resources. So, check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link on the homepage and I thank you profoundly and deeply, humbly for your partnership. What we've done we've done together as I've said so many times. And so, as long as we do this together we’ll continue marching forward. And, so, thank you for your partnership. There’s a link on the homepage. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Morning beautiful family, this is Pastor Gene a from Bradenton Florida. I love you guys very much. We had a wonderful, wonderful season of prayer and evangelism and reaching out to others that culminated with our 20 years later wedding celebration. The enemy opposed us every step of the way, but I can say victoriously that the gospel went forth and that many people that did not know the Lord __ bless the __ with the gospel over and over again through our wedding and that was my plan. But I’m really calling to say thank you one more time to Brian, Jill and the whole Hardin family for their love and their efforts to shepherd us. I love you guys very much. I also want to say hi to those of us who are coming back to listen and particularly welcome those that are listening for the first time. Guys, my name is Pastor Gene, I’m Gene McIntyre, I live in Bradenton Florida. I started listening to the DAB, last November it was 5 years, when I was in a very dark place. I’ve had a lifelong struggle of anxiety and depression. And although I’m a woman of faith and I pray, God has chosen not to heal me at this point, but I was going through a very, very severe depression and I was in a very dark place and I looked for a Bible that I could listen to, instead the Lord give me a Bible that I could listen to, a wonderful pastor in Brian Hardin, and a wonderful family of faith in the community of the DAB. So, I, like Brian has said over and over again, I’m not the same person that I was last year and I’m definitely not the same person I was five years ago. So, if you just started listening or if you came back, my encouragement for you is to stick with, stick to the Lord, stick to his word, stick to this community, you will never be the same. I love you family. Have a great 2019, Pastor Gene from Bradenton Florida.

Hey everyone, this is Kristy from Kentucky, I’m back. I want to thank each and every one of you who have prayed for me over these past several years. Those of you who have heard me before know that 17 was extremely hard year, I lost both my mama and my daddy that year, my mom in May and my daddy in October and it has just been extremely difficult for me. I have a brother and I loved him so very much and I lost him in 2005 and he was my only sibling…so…and I have no children. So, this has been a very hard hard transition for me. I praise God to have an amazing husband who is just by me and who has loved me and has been patient with me through these past couple years and I just want to thank each and every one of you for praying for me. You have lifted my heart and my hands in a time when I could barely walk. And, so, I praise God for carrying me through these years and I praise Him for each of you who have meant so very much to me. And, so, anyway I wanted to call and tell you that I love each of you. Happy new year. And by prayer for 2019 is to be able to continue the ministry that my mom started and to find that sense of humor that my daddy had and gave to me. And, so, I’m praying to come back strong in 2019. Alright everyone, I love each and every one of you and I pray that each of you are having a most blessed and lovely day. Take care.

Hi daily Audio Bible family this is Will from beautiful Bozeman Montana. Happy new year, it is January 3rd and God is good, He is so good. Woo!!! I’ll tell you what, I’m just excited to go through this journey with you. I ended 2018 pretty good…pretty good. You know, walking along with the DAB family, know that each and every one of you are in my prayers and I’m just looking forward to what God is going to do to each of us, especially the challenge to maintain. It’s been so good, I’ve been so challenged, I promise you that, but I love the Lord so much and I just thank the Lord for you all DAB family. My prayers go out to you, may you all have a prosperous 2019. Brian and Jill, God bless you, thank you again for this ministry. Love you DAB family. Father, we love You and we praise You in Jesus name.

Hi DAB family, this is Viola from Maryland I hope you’re all doing well. Brian and Jill, God bless you. I’m also excited. I’m looking forward to what God has in store for you guys __. And Ben, well done with your present, well done. Rohkim, my sister, I am so sorry to hear about the loss of your husband. I pray that God will wrap His arms around you all, that God will touch you, God will fill you, the word of God says that God is close to the brokenhearted. And, so, I pray that God will be close to you, He will provide for you, He will be the husband and the father in that family, in the name of Jesus. My sister, I’ll be praying for you. God bless you. I’m also praying for all those who are struggling in their marriages that __. __ what I have for your brothers and sisters. I pray that God will help you, able to be kindhearted to one another, to be tender, and loving to each other, that you will be quick to forgive one another in the name of Jesus and that you will make allowance for each of your faults. You know, there is nothing that God cannot do, even marriages that are failing, that people are separated, the Lord can bring you together. And, so, my prayer for your marriages is that the Lord, the son of righteousness, who is Jesus, __ healing, healing in His __ over those marriages in the name of Jesus. So, do not lose hope, it is not over when it’s over. And even when it’s over God is still working. God bless you all and I’d love to shout out to all my friends and the sisters that I’ve made in this ministry and even all the brothers that ping me on Facebook. God bless you all. This is Viola.

[pamphletstoinspire]

MARY THE CHURCH AT THE SOURCE - PART 9

WRITTEN BY: JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER AND HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

________

IV

THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH

“Whoever would boast, let him boast in the Lord.” Whoever would offer best wishes and congratulations, let him likewise do it in the Lord. He is the one who through his shepherds distributes his gifts to the Church as he wills. And, even in the Church’s hands, these gifts remain, thanks be to God, his. If they were ours, we would be crushed by the feeling of our impotence. He has called us and has built us up on the foundation of Peter, who denied him, and of Paul, who persecuted him, so that—amid tears and with contrite hearts, without which there is no priestly office—we may speak and act openly and in the joy of the Holy Spirit,

We are only stewards, and we are doubly dispossessed: for the sake of the Lord who sends us and for the sake of the Church to which he sends us and which we love because she is his bride. On this feast how could we not speak of this object of our love? Is it not the most delightful subject? The Church. Not, however, in her failure, her scandals, her inner conflicts, in the water that goes up to her neck. Rather, the Church insofar as she is proof against all this, in the unsurpassable breadth on account of which we hail her as the Catholica.

Our topic, then, is the catholicity of the church. The catholicity of the Church will always remain a paradox and, for very many people, a scandal. How could an entity that is as limited, even more, as fallible, as this empirical Church claim for herself a universality that does not leave out anything human or divine? How could she claim a universality of living truth, of true life?

The non-believer will object that universality could consist only in the sum of all of humanity’s genuine experiences, of all its cultures and historical epochs, whereas the Catholic Church is only an infinitesimal fraction of that sum! The believer will object that, if anyone, it would be the God-man who could lay claim to universality, since he cannot be convicted of any sin, the fullness of Godhead dwells bodily in him, and he recapitulates everything in heaven and on earth. Not, however, the Church, which blasphemes if she tries to identify herself with her Lord.

We may draw a twofold, a priori conclusion from what we have just said. A church that claims to be catholic would have to have a very special relationship to the universal experience of humanity and a very special relationship to the God-man. Only on the basis of this twofold relationship (whose possibility we do not yet see) could she legitimately be called the Catholica, and not a Christian sect.

We will briefly survey the first relation, which will by its inner logic bring us to a more thorough discussion of the second.

Anthropological Catholicity

Biblical faith is one: from Abraham to Jesus and Paul. There are not two ways of believing. Abraham is the archetype that Israel set as a seal over its history: departure from one’s own world, blind trust in the God who promises tremendous things but shows nothing of them, worse still, who starts things off, who gives the son of the promise, and then demands the gift back on Moriah. God so outweighs any other considerations that he can demand, not only faith, but blind faith, faith that does not waver if God seems to contradict himself openly. Later on, an entire people journeying through the wilderness will be trained in this kind of trust. And the desert journey continues even after the taking of the land, even in the exile and beyond: again and again the prophets train Israel in this letting go, this refusal to grasp, this trust and hope.

Jesus brings nothing other than this faith, but he does so as the “author and finisher of faith” who embodies it in person. He himself is pure trust that goes so far as the night of abandonment by the Father, without assurance, no longer understanding, in absolute preference of another’s will. What he does and lets be done he imparts with plenary authority. His preaching is nothing but training in this fundamental act, which he both demands from man and coaxes from him at the same time. “I believe, help my unbelief.” He entices man to make the leap and stretches out a hand to strengthen him for it. And so we realize: In him we can make the leap, he himself is the leap, from man to God—and, therefore, first from God to man. “In Deo meo transiliam murum” [in my God I will leap over the wall] (2 Sam 22:30). “Nihil cepimus; in verbo tuo autem laxabo rete” [we have caught nothing, but at your word I will lower the net] (Lk 5:5). The disciples do not really realize this until after the Resurrection. God himself stretched forth his hand to Jesus, indeed, Jesus himself is God’s hand stretched out to man.

When Paul lives henceforth “en Christo” and preaches accordingly, he is proclaiming, not some strange new doctrine, but, as he himself knows, the very consummation of Abraham’s faith in Jesus the Christ. He, Jesus, is, in fact two things: the Word of God and its fulfillment, hence, the new and eternal covenant between God and man.

Now this fulfillment is two things at once: first, it is the fulfillment of the fundamental act of the creature as such; second, it is the fulfillment of God’s promises.

The fundamental act of the creature is religio. Religio is the act of relating myself back to the Absolute, which I am not, winch I do not even know, and which above all I do not control, but to which I owe my being and which I prefer to everything that is not absolute. “Je préfere l’Absolu” [I prefer the absolute] (Claudel) is the origin of the wisdom of India, of China, ultimately, of the religion of every nation that has had the wisdom to understand that any defiance any questioning of God, who is always right, is sheer stupidity.

Religio is often clouded by magic, but even magic can have something touching about it, insofar as it expresses the surmise that, when man is in trouble, the Divinity cannot remain unmoved. Any world view that fails to go back to and unfold from, this fundamental act does not deserve to be called love of wisdom, philo-sophia. Biblical faith is not as one Christian sect believes, antithetical to this fundamental act of spiritual nature; rather, it is its unique fulfillment—though one awakened and empowered by God And because the Catholic Church acknowledges the rootedness of her faith in the catholicity of the religious mind, she has a prima facie claim to this title. But there is also a second element.

God does not so much lead Abraham back to the Alpha, the origin (re-ligio), as forward to the Omega, the future fulfillment. Israel is, today as always, the alternative to religio: hope in the God who is coming. This is the other side of mankind’s religious experience, and there is no third. Admittedly, a broad segment of contemporary Israel has given up the presence of divine guidance and has retained only prophetism, radical departure into the future, historical transcendence into Utopia.

Jesus Christ is called Alpha and Omega: he has not only bound us back to our lost beginning, the Father, but has also set us in motion toward his absolute future. He alone is the force that binds together the beginning and the end, the force that can reconcile in itself, as the higher third, the two divergent world views: past and future, Buddhism and Marxism. For only in him is God presence, and so he alone can be the way back to the origin and ahead toward the consummation. Buddha, in pure faith, prefers the lost, bygone origin to everything present, to all apparent being. Marx, in pure hope, prefers the absolute goal to everything present, to all that actually exists. Christ alone establishes absolute love. This love, looking out from the present being of the world, which is affirmed by God, embraces at one and the same time both the beginning and the end.

The catholicity of Christ’s message and of the Church he founded lies in this one-of-a-kind, absolutely inimitable synthesis. And this synthesis works only because the double leap—from man to God and from God to man—works. The angels ascend and descend above the Son of Man; heaven and earth are reconciled in the God-man. Believing in Christ, who was and who is to come, the Church not only secures the religio of the pagans, but also the Utopian hope of the Jews: the total, catholic horizon of human religious thought.

Christological Catholicity

But does this synthesis of the religious act automatically give the Church the right to call herself “catholic”? Is not the synthesis of Christ, Alpha and Omega, so unique that it rules out any participation in his catholicity a priori? Yet what is Christ; what is the New Covenant? Verbum Caro! We have moved beyond the old antithesis: “Omnis caro foenum. . . . Verbum autem Domini manet in aeternum” [all flesh is grass. . . . But the Word of the Lord abides for ever] (Is 42:6, 8), from the word that speaks at man to word-flesh. And so to faith-flesh. The flesh now has the word It is not the mind alone that makes every act of faith that prefers God and hopes in him, but the whole man, down to the foundation of matter.

I

There is no getting away from it: flesh means man and woman, spousal love, mother and child. Otherwise flesh is not really present. If we want to do justice to the incarnation [Fleischwerdung] of the Word of God, we have to be attentive to woman. The fundamental act can no longer be just faith in a word or hope in a promise. It now has to be love for the origin that descends in an act of love. It has to be consent of the whole man down to the deepest fibers of his flesh. If these fibers were not an echoing readiness, how could the Word become flesh? If it becomes flesh, it has to emerge from the deepest foundations of life. And this deepest depth has to receive the Word, not as an empty abyss in pure passivity, but with the active readiness with which a feminine womb receives the masculine seed.

The fundamental act—let us think back to it for a moment—was to prefer the Absolute. The Absolute is right no matter what; our part is to let it have its way (Zen!). Today there is a foolish controversy going on about the primacy of orthodoxy or orthopraxy. Which comes first, which is really decisive? The answer is easy: Neither of them. Neither doxy nor praxy, neither merely thinking something is true nor rushing headlong into action. In the beginning is God’s Word, who intends to become flesh. His is the praxis; my part is to let him have his way in me, to consent, to say Yes down to the deepest recesses of my flesh. True, this is an action, but it is an action that responds to what God does; true, it is faith, yet not in a proposition, but in God’s personal action in me. And if this Yes were not free, totally free, down to the unconscious layers of our being, it would not be human assent. But where could man get a Yes that was so free, without spot or wrinkle, without the slightest even unconscious restriction, if not as a gift from the hand of God?

But are we not talking about two different acts: God’s bestowal of this freedom (perhaps upon some pure passivity) and, then, our appropriation and active exercise of this freedom? Do these acts not differ in the way that Protestants, say, distinguish between justification and sanctification: in the former, God (in Christ) acts sovereignly on me, while in the latter his action (in the Holy Spirit) enters into me? Something like this two-step process may happen in the case of the sinner, but not in the case of the original Incarnation. In order to have his Word become flesh, God needs an a priori Yes that allows everything.

And it really is a someone who, with perfect creaturely freedom, becomes the womb and bride and Mother of the incarnating God. This someone’s fundamental act is neither a Buddhistic surrendered unfree self-being into the abyss of the absolute nor a Marxist self-endowment with freedom by which man becomes his own creator. Rather, it is the act of receiving from the God who gives himself unconditionally the gift of receiving him unconditionally.

The foundation of the Church’s catholicity is this fundamental act that takes place in the chamber of Nazareth—and in it alone. This catholicity is the unconditional openness of the ecce ancilla which, by giving God unlimited room beforehand, is the creaturely counterpart of God’s infinitely self giving love.

Those who think that the Church started later—with the vocation of the Twelve, for example, or with the bestowal of supreme authority on Peter—have already missed the heart of the matter. They can never go beyond an empirical or sociological reality that cannot be qualitatively different from the synagogue. Even the “infallibility” of office then hangs perilously in the air. It has nowhere else to put down roots than the fallibility of the human beings who exercise it.

Now, where does this bride “without spot or wrinkle” (Eph 5:27), this “pure virgin” who is to be betrothed to Christ (2 Cor 11:2) exist, if the universal, catholic Yes that we must expect her to give is not real somewhere, not simply an ideal, an approximation (like all our Yesses), or an eschatological hope (so that the Church would become genuinely catholic only in eternity)? How could the Catholica come into being anywhere if her inmost reality were not created at the very first instant of the New Covenant—as the Mother of the Child, the Mother who has to be a virgin in flesh and in spirit so that she can be the incarnate, catholic consent to the unconditional penetration of the divine Word into the flesh?

We can anticipate three conclusions from this.

1. The Marian or catholic fundamental act is so original that it is beyond contemplation and action. The Yes that founds the Church and all Christian existence in the Church is both prayer to God and cooperation with God’s engagement for man. Prayer in the Church should strive to give form to this Yes: as adoration, as thanks, as petition that works within and concretizes God’s gracious will, and at the same time as consent that goes along with everything that God is doing in the world, as readiness to be used, to be used up, in God’s work.

2. The Marian or catholic fundamental act is beyond childhood [Unmündigkeit] and adulthood [Mündigkeit]. At its origin it has to be childlike and dependent, since only the “childlike” are called blessed, whereas the mystery of the Father is concealed from the wise and the clever and the grownups. And precisely these children, who are overshadowed, not by their own spirit, but by the Holy Spirit, are the ones who are fruitful and adult in the Christian sense. They bear responsibility, but it is not theirs. It is God’s. They do not carry out a mission of their own, which must needs be limited, like a horse wearing blinders. No, they act within the unlimited, universal, catholic mission of Jesus Christ.

3. The Marian or catholic fundamental act is beyond understanding and not understanding. When you say Yes to God unconditionally, you have no idea how far this Yes is going to take you. Certainly farther than you can guess and calculate beforehand, certainly as far as participation in failure and derision, Cross and Godforsakenness—but just how far and in what form? At the same time, this Yes is the sole, nonnegotiable prerequisite of all Christian understanding, of all theology and ecclesial wisdom. You cannot understand a Lord in whom “all the promises of God find their Yes” (2 Cor 1:20) alongside of this Yes. Christian truth is esoteric in the sense that it can be discerned only from within, in being carried out in faith and action, not from outside, from a box seat in the theater. Nor by a partial identification (with the reservations that implies), but only out of a total, universal, and, therefore, catholic identification with God’s ways in the flesh.

II

The Catholic Church, whose qualitative foundation is laid in the house of Nazareth, takes on her outward, visible dimension in the course of the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ. Nazareth makes the idea of “becoming flesh” necessary for, and relevant to, the Church. A purely spiritual Church, an ideal Church, an invisible Church—all these are a priori uncatholic, because they do not take seriously the totality of man, who is both clay from below and breath breathed from above.

The distinctive substance of the New Testament came into being in Nazareth: enfleshed faith. And because a Church must come into being in order to guard Christ’s heritage and to guarantee his presence and relevance for all times, a nail, a stake, has to be driven into the flesh of the world’s history. It has to be palpably obvious, downright coarse, impossible to interpret away or to overlook. It has to be as painful as a nail of the Cross, handwriting on the wall warning all ages that God’s Word has become flesh, that it is not merely a word in individual consciences or merely paper you can purchase in a bookshop or merely an ethico-political plan of action that every generation is free to refashion to suit its needs. An awl in the flesh, an indelible reminder, a nail driven in so deeply that it can no longer be removed from the flesh of history Everything else can be hung on this nail. The nail is [ecclesiastical] office.

It would be so nice if we could dehistoricize the Gospel and put it on some humanistic common ground: “Christianity not Mysterious” (John Toland); “Christianity as Old as Creation” (Matthew Tindal); Christianity as an idealistic religion of reason (from Lessing to Hegel, from Strauß to Harnack). Unfortunately, we have learned two things since then: that we cannot detach Jesus from the culture of his time and its historical horizon—we have been warned against that, from Overbeck to Albert Schweitzer; and, simultaneously, that we know Jesus only through the testimonies of the primitive Church, that an abstraction from the records of the first Christians’ faith leads to a dark void. We know, in other words, that the game is up with idyllic, professorial, so-called “objective” portraits of Jesus.

But let us joyfully make the most of the (for scholarship sobering and depressing) insight that we cannot have Christ without his Church! That she alone preserves his legacy and his image, an image of which she, the bride, bears the imprint and which the Bridegroom’s Spirit has shaped out of her faith. The reciprocity of the Christ-Church relationship is as indissoluble as that of the relationship between mother and child.

Incarnate office is the ecclesial counterpart of Mary’s enfleshed Yes in the Church. Everything hangs, as if on a nail, on the election and empowerment of the Twelve, with Peter at their head. That this nail was hammered in by Jesus himself is beyond doubt. The Twelve, humiliated by betrayal, denial, and flight regroup in obedience after Easter, fill out their thinned ranks, and take over their assigned mission. Then the stupendous phenomenon of Paul appears on the scene, and his loving struggle with the Corinthian community establishes the archetype of a Church functioning according to the mind of Christ—in the divergence [Auseinandersetzung] and convergence [Ineinandersetzung] between office and community. Paul, who enters into an already formed tradition and explicitly hands it on—faith and morals—is certainly no innovator when it comes to exercising the authority of his office. The innovators are the Corinthian charismatics, and Paul calls them to order with all imaginable zeal, with his entire Christ-consecrated missionary existence.

The major Pauline letters have two foci: first, the order of redemption in Christ: the doctrine of justification and sanctification, above all in the Letter to the Galatians and the Letter to the Romans. Second, the order of the redeemed in the hierarchically [amtlich] constituted Church: the doctrine of the Church in the dramatic tension [Auseinandersetzung] between office and community, above all in First and Second Corinthians. The Reformers appropriated only the first half of Paulinism, whereas the Counter-Reformation unfortunately failed to exploit the full power of the second.

This second half is more dramatically relevant today than ever, yet there is nothing essential in contemporary assaults on the principle of hierarchical office, in the protests of the latest clerical and lay charismatics, that Paul’s ecclesiology (especially at the end of the Second Letter to the Corinthians) does not anticipate and correct. Paul orders and governs Church affairs, establishes ecclesiastical law, and lays down rules for the relationship between the strong and the weak. Above all, he shows that if the charismatic does not unceasingly transcend itself toward the Lord’s unity, it ceases to be catholic. And it is the function of the Church’s office to demand and enforce this transcendence. As a “ministry of Christ” [Dienstan Christus] in the Church, ecclesial office is the efficacious sign Christ himself has established to show that the body is alive only when it is governed and quickened from above itself, by the head.

The Church is a living body, and a body has a structure. Now, the Church’s structure is essentially her office, understood as a function for the sake of the organism. We totally miss the point when we disparage the structure of a living body with the term “institution”. The higher an organism is, the more developed and complex its organization. The rigid skeleton serves flexibility; the living flesh would be nothing but a shapeless mass without the body’s hard and tough parts.

The Church is primarily, not a sociological organization, but the living flesh of Christ that is fed by his Eucharist. It follows that the Church’s office and everything that goes with it—sacraments, tradition, the Bible, Church law and Church discipline, and so forth—is pneumatic. It goes without saying that in the New Testament pneuma is not the opposite of Incarnation; rather, it is its cause and, from another point of view, its enduring effect. The Christian should reflect for a moment: Are there any Christian goods he does not owe, directly or indirectly, to what he perhaps contemptuously dismisses as “institution” or the “establishment”? The real saints were all aware of this debt, and it is characteristic of them that they always remained in the organism of the Church, drew their life from her and added new organic tissue to her.

The objection that the Church structure depicted in Paul’s letters cannot serve as a model for the postapostolic period because later officeholders no longer possess the fullness of apostolic authority does not hold water. If this were the case, then a vital portion of the New Testament canon would have no more than antiquarian value for us. Paul makes a point of calling, not only himself, but also his collaborators and successors “servants of Christ”, “co-workers of God”, and he demands (in Corinth, no less) the very same reverent reception, the very same obedience for them as he does for himself Moreover, there is scarcely any interval of time between the pastoral letters, where we see these successors actively exercising their office, and the marvelous Letter of Clement, where Rome wields this same office with strength and delicate modesty by Rome in relation to Corinth.

Of course, the successors do not have the apostles’ Church-founding functions and the special powers belonging to them. Nor do they need them, for the structure has already been established and must only be kept alive. In the same way, the founder of an order receives special powers along with his unique mission. Yet this does not mean that abbots or other superiors will not succeed him.

Hierarchical office serves the charismatic dimension. It exists in order to awaken and foster personal and social life as well as to prune it for the sake of growth, indeed, to demand sacrifices from it, just like the vinedresser: “Every branch of mine that . . . bear[s] fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (Jn 15:2). Paul does this expressly when he calls for difficult sacrifices on the part of the so-called “strong”; they are not only to put up benevolently with the weak; they must set aside their own judgment when the welfare of the whole—to which these weak believers also belong—is at stake: “We who are strong ought. . . not to please ourselves. . . . For Christ did not please himself, but, as it is written, ‘the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.’ For whatever was written in former days was written for our [the strong’s] instruction” (Rom 15:14; emphasis added). And Paul is ready to face anyone, especially self-assured charismatics, with weapons that are powerful, not in an earthly sense, but genuinely (in other words, pneumatically) so. He will wield these weapons to destroy pseudo-theological “arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:5). He does so, though, in virtue of the “authority which the Lord has given me for building up and not for tearing down” (2 Cor 13:10). For when Paul takes “every thought captive” in order to lead it “to obey Christ”, he redirects a theology gone astray in a fancied freedom back to the Yes of perfect faith. This Yes gives the only true Christian freedom: incarnate pliancy to the incarnating Word of God.

Precisely at this point the catholicity of office comes into view. Hierarchical office is a permanently estabhshed principle in the Church whose essential function consists in preventing the inevitable particularity of a charism or an association of charisms from becoming self-enclosed. Indeed, office compels openness to something indefinitely greater than the charismatic club. It thus has the formal dimensions of the Marian Yes: everything, really everything, that God wills—however much it may transcend my horizon.

Once again let us draw three conclusions from what has been said. These will guide us along the way of further reflection.

1. Hierarchical office is, as has been said, the nail driven into history upon which the Church hangs. It is the guarantee of the Church’s fleshliness. As such, office is the ever new presence of the origin through all ages. It is more than a memory of the origin; it is its immediate presentation. More than a memoria, it is a real praesentia. It is this as pure service, as a self-effacement for the sake of one’s function, which is the necessary condition of acting and speaking with the authority of Christ. Just as Christ himself became the slave of God and of all men in order to act and speak in the authority of the Father, so too it is the task of hierarchical office to represent the unity of the head within the structure of the organism. Not to be this unity, but to embody it efficaciously in virtue of the will of the Founder. Now, without the unifying Petrine office, this representation would remain historically abstract and disincarnate. Solovyev understood this point perfectly. Individual groups and particular churches (each one with or without a leader) must come together in a common spirit.

One might make a virtue of ecumenical necessity and say that the point of convergence is Christ, who is enthroned above the whole history of the Church and her pluralism. Nevertheless, this would still leave the point of unity unincarnate within history, here and now, and the great words of institution in Matthew (16:18), Luke (22:32), and John (20:3-10; 21:1-19) would, needless to say, be unfulfilled. But another thing would remain unfulfilled as well: the sole historical guarantee that the necessary pluralism of theological schools, pastoral practices, and Spirit-kindled charisms can genuinely be integrated in a concrete unity and be understood as members of the one Lord. The office that is centrally unified in the pope is thus the guarantee and the decisive test that the unpredictable plurality of manifestations of Christian life is the fullness of a universal, Catholic unity.

2. Hierarchical office is, as was said, authority as pure service, hence, as an enduring sign that points away from itself to the Lord. It disappears, thus letting the Lord appear. For this reason, it is extremely misleading to call the priest alter Christus, for there is only one. In his sacramental and pastoral activity, the priest leaves the doing and the saying to the one Christ; but he has power to do precisely that. And even teaching, preaching, and the formulating of dogmas are always a pointer, a fragmentary explanation. Never a mastery of the full truth that is Christ. But precisely for this reason they can be an authentic guarding of the deposit of faith against usurpers who use theology to rationalize Christ’s living truth, as if they could master it like some philosophical system. What the Magisterium guards is, not a hoard of formulas, but the mystery to which all formulas can only point. On the other hand, it would not be the office it was instituted and founded to be if all it could do was point and were not, at crucial critical moments, a reliable, “infallible” marker in the fog.

3. Insofar as ministerial office is a representation that points to something else, it has to take its own bearings by what it points to. But it points both to Christ (and the triune God who appears in him) and to Christ’s immaculate bride, the pure vessel of the Holy Spirit: the Church that is integrally holy in Mary.

Peter and Mary are not identical. Thus, before Peter enters upon his office, he must be humiliated by the Lord in a way he will never forget, so that he will not mistake himself for the wrong person. So, too, Peter and all official ministers must always listen to the Spirit working and creating in the Marian Church and must also obey this Spirit, who speaks out of the saints and the authentic charismatics.

At the end of the fourth Gospel, even after Peter’s solemn installation in office, there remains a diastasis between him and the disciple whom Jesus loved, whose destiny is an un-revealable mystery that rests in the Lord’s hands alone. The Gospel of love ends with a great tribute to the Petrine office, but it subordinates this office to the service of a love that it,’ the office, can never fully oversee.

The duality of Mary and Peter, of the subjective holiness of the heart and the objective holiness of the structure, maintains the distance between body and head in the catholicity of the Church. And so in the empirical Church there are two critical organs: the office, which examines and criticizes the charisms to test their catholicity, and the sanctity that in the pure spirit of the Gospel, of Mary’s Yes, can and must criticize office.

~

We saw (in the first part) that there was an anthropological catholicity in the Church’s faith. The fundamental act of the New Testament—hoping, loving faith—retrieved in a unique synthesis all the basic religious attitudes possible to humanity: “binding oneself back” to the origin in self-surrender and the forward-driving quest for a promised future fulfillment. In the second part we saw a deeper, christological catholicity in the Church’s fife. In this context we also saw that the Marian-Petrine Church, by her pure readiness to receive and her pure representative service can genuinely become the fullness of him who fills all in all (Eph 1:23).

However, the two principles of the Church’s catholicity interpenetrate and complement each other. After all, the Marian “handmaid” lives a life of pure service and thus has the same fundamental gestalt as the Petrine office. In the same way, office is to be a pure pointer to the Lord, just like Mary’s whole existence. Both services are supernaturally fruitful. And Christ’s Cross-oriented life is the inner form of both, albeit only by the grace of the Resurrection. But one thing, at least, should be clear: Mariology and the doctrine of office are not side chapels of Catholic dogmatics; rather, they are central, integrating aspects of ecclesial catholicity.

Seen from the outside, the Church is a society of individual persons having the same or similar belief who submit themselves to certain sociological requirements and rules of the game. Seen from the inside, the Church is the communio sanctorum. This communion is based on the Eucharist, which makes the Church one body and one spirit, even as the Eucharist is based on the trinitarian communio and circumincessio of the Divine Persons in the one nature. This ultimate ground of the Church’s being enfolds—without jeopardizing or sublating the person—the pure juxtaposition of individuals characteristic of peoples or states. It thus enables instead an osmosis of destinies and activities, which become more catholic and universal the closer they are to the destiny of Christ. The whole body is thus ultimately drawn to follow the destiny of the head. And in this body there is nothing abstract, no “principles”, “structures”, “institutions”, that lead an ideal, destinyless existence outside of the persons in whom they are realized.

Mary is the principle of all Yes-saying, of all fruitful obedience as a person, and as such she is the Mother whose heart is pierced by a sword, who cries out in travail between heaven and earth. She really stands at the foot of the Cross—where she is joined to the Petrine Church through John.

Peter receives office after his bitter tears and is afterward (the bitterness remains) honored with crucifixion. He is allowed to suffer a reverse image of his master’s death. Precisely for this reason office attracts abuse like a magnet, so much so that it becomes a sewer for every man: “peripsema heos arti” (1 Cor 4:13). The hate, not only of the world, but also of the charismatics in the Church, pursues it; just as the slogan in Corinth was once “freedom from Paul” [Los von Paul], so always, and once again today, it is “freedom from Rome” [Los von Rom]. “The death of Jesus in our body”. And this absolutely in substitution: “So death is at work in us, but life in you” (2 Cor 4:10-12).

The principle of office is always incarnate in the officeholders: in them life inclines toward death and ruin, but without the gates of hell being able to overcome it. Paul’s ship founders, and yet all are brought safely to land on planks. It is good that office is spat upon today, that Judas is betraying it again in every possible way, and that many ostensibly faithful people flee the specter of the “establishment”. The more recognizably the head full of blood and wounds shines through the face of office, the more inwardly genuine official existence will be and the more credible it will again become for its time.

The Church can understand herself only in her Lord. There is no self-understanding of the Church. Mary understands herself in her child. Paul understands himself en Christo. However, today’s world seeks its self-understanding by giving itself its own meaning.’ The Church will never be able to do that. She will always let the Lord give her her own meaning and will penetrate it ever more deeply in a humble love that says Yes to service: “Respexit humilitatem ancillae suae” [he has regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden].

________

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

I. “Mein Wort kehrt nicht erfolglos zu mir zurück!” Homily preached at the opening liturgy of the spring plenum of the German Bishops’ Conference in Stapelfeld, Germany, March 6, 1979. In Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Maria: Kirche im Ursprung (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1980), 7-14. First publication of the pieces in this volume in the appendix to German Bishops’ Conference, ed., Maria, die Mutter des Herrn (Bonn); vol. 18 in the series Pastoral Letters of the German Bishops.

II. “Erwägungen zur Stellung von Mariologie und Marienfrömmigkeit”, ibid., 15-40.

III. “Die Zeichen der Frau: Versuch einer Hinführung zur Enzyklika ‘Redemptoris Mater’ von Papst Johannes Paul II”, in Maria: Gottes Ja zum Menschen (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1987), 105-28.

IV. “ ‘Du bist voll der Gnade’: Elemente biblischer Marienfrömmigkeit”, in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Peter Henrici, ed. Credo: Bin theologisches Lesebuch (Cologne: Communio, 1992), 103-16.

V. “Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine. . .”, The text was written to open the Marian congress held on the seven-hundredth-year anniversary of the Holy House of Loreto, 1995.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

I. “Maria in der kirchlichen Lehre und Frömmigkeit”, in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Maria: Kirche im Ursprung (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1980), 64-79.

II. “Die marianische Prägung der Kirche”, in Wolfgang Beinert, ed., Maria heute ehren: Eine theologisch-pastorale Handreichung (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 1977), 263-79.

III. “Empfangen durch den heiligen Geist, geboren von der Jungfrau Maria”, in Wilhelm Sandfuchs, ed., Ichglaube: Vierzehn Betrachtungen zum Apostolischen Glaubensbekenntnis (Würzburg: Echter Verlag), 39-49. Also in Brückenbau im Glauben: Vierzehn Betrachtungen zum Apostolischen Glaubensbekenntnis (Leipzig: St. Benno Verlag, 1981), 44-45.

IV. “Das Katholische an der Kirche”. Lecture given on September 13, 1972, for the Vocations Week of the Archdiocese of Cologne and on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the episcopacy of former Archbishop Josef Cardinal Frings and of the tenth anniversary of the episcopacy of Joseph Cardinal Höffner and Auxiliary Bishop Augustinus Frotz, edited by the Archdiocesan Press Office; Kölner Beitrage, 10. (Cologne: Wienend Verlag, 1972), 19 pages.

________

THE END

[bdscuatui]

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Zellmer, 435 đường Florence, 382.000 đô la.Alex Vilkhovoy, người được ủy thác và AJ Capital Realty tin tưởng vào Christopher R. Blais và Jessica Blais, 6 Austin Circle, $ 239.900.Angeline C. Chereski và Angeline C. McWilliams đến Caitlin S. S. Martin, 104 Dunphy Drive, $ 253.000.Mark Esposito và Rachel Currie-Rubin đến Victoria Elson và Timmon Wallis, 137 Barrett St., 373.000 đô la.Daniel Breen và Anna G. Breen cho Rowan Lupton và Nicole Perez, 8 Dunphy Drive, 243.300 đô la.Stephanie J. Arvai đến Peter M. Levy và Madeleine Maguire, 68 Ridgewood sân thượng, 530.000 đô la.Richard J. Rubin và Colleen C. Currie cho Rachel J. Currie-Rubin và Mark J. Esposito, 203 State St., $ 415.000.James H. Wood III, đến David Rodriguez-Solas, 28 Graves Ave., $ 290.000.Sân phía bắcFannie Mae, bởi luật sư, Hiệp hội thế chấp quốc gia liên bang, bởi luật sư, và luật sư của Continental Real Services Services Inc., đến Gabriela Constantin, 754 Mount Hermon Station Road, 89.900 đô la.trái camAR Sandri Inc., đến Gary Barnett, 235 Hayden St., 50.000 đô la.Scott Savoy cho Michael D. Allen-Larhette và Kelly M.Melanson, 112 Cheney St., 175.000 đô la.PalmerJill Ann Laganas, Dean Alden McKee và Dawn Aileen McKee đến Kimberly E. Clarke và Theodore F. Clarke Jr., 42-44 South St., $ 156.000.Judy Bergdoll đến Jonathan E. Towne, 2142 Palmer Road, $ 247.500.Melissa K. O hèConnell cho Roger Parker, 12-16 Commercial St., $ 159.900.Roger W. Barnes cho Donald J. Potter và Brenda C. Potter, 198 Emery St., $ 320.000.Nam HadleyDavid A. Langone đến Kevin Haczyneki, 266 North Main St., 350.000 đô la.Bernice B. Strong to John Devlin và Barbra Devlin, 3 Strong Farm Estates, 3 Strong Farm Lane, 385.000 USD.Mario Valdebenito Rodas đến Ximena Vicuna Cubillos cho George E. Como, ủy thác và George E. Como Irrevocable Trust, 185 Pine Grove Drive, 233.000 đô la.Premier Home Builders Inc., đến Stephen P. Malanaphy Jr., và Christine M.Talamini, 62 Old Lyman Road, $ 359,900.SouthamptonElizabeth E. Lempke và David R. Lempke cho Daniel R. Breen và Anna G. Breen, 1 Birchwood Drive, $ 435.000.NamwickAnne S. Miller đến Mark F. Jerusik, Nancy A. Jerusik, Johnathan E. Jerusik và Abigayle S. Jerusik, 59 Miller Road, 295.000 USD.Laura I. Ferrentino và Laura I. Ronghi đến Robert E. Matthews III và Arielle Matthews, 94 Bungalow St., 200.000 USD.Marcia J. Pickard cho Richard S. Lempke và Angela Lempke, 18 đường Matthews, $ 265.000.Robert Hart và Lorraine Hart đến Adam Hart và Katie Ann Hart, 6 Cây thông Knoll, 350.000 đô la.Vanessa Filiault đến Wade R. Modestow, 75 South Loomis St., 210.000 đô la.SpringfieldA Plus Enterprises Inc., đến Allison M. Hanna và Brendan M. Hanna, 1730 Parker St., 200.500 đô la.Cơ quan Tài chính Nhà ở Massachusetts cho Gabriel Ortiz Jr., 29-31 Ralph St., $ 163.000.Amber C. Haywood và Eduardo Henrique Haywood (JR & O) đến Cynthia M Vives, 820 Roosevelt Ave ,. 146.300 đô la.Anthony Bourget đến Damaris Lopez-Robles, 17 Clantoy St., 165.000 đô la.Ngân hàng Mỹ đến Daniel T. Beauregard, 61 Bellwood Road, 146.000 đô la.Ngân hàng New York Mellon, ủy thác và Cwabs Inc. Chứng nhận tài sản được cấp lại 2005-9, ủy thác cho Travis Orszulak, 42 ​​Peach St., 97.500 đô la.Ngân hàng New York Mellon, ủy thác và Cwabs Inc Chứng nhận tài sản sê-ri 2007-2, ủy thác của Michael Gardner, 9-11 Cloran St., $ 170.000.Blueline Management LLC, đến Matthew Byrnes và Samantha Deland, 336 Newhouse St., $ 203.000.Brendan M. Guidi đến Keith D. Anderson, 37 Crest St., 90.000 đô la.Bretta Construction LLC, đến Ruben Luna Rivera, 208 Gilbert Ave., $ 269.900.Buong Van Le đến Dinessa Figueroa, 245 Allen St., $ 170.000.Constance E. Allen và Robert Gould cho John Thomas Leydon, 22 Mary St., $ 149.000.Darrly O. Pollard, Bonita Oliver, Maria M. Cruz, đại diện, và Norman Wilson Oliver, bất động sản, đến Yveline M. Hulse và Clarence L. Hulse, 377 St James Ave., 164.900 đô la.Quận Capital LLC, đến Janet L. Franklin, 71 Peach St., $ 174.999.Djuan Barklow đến David Pujols, Bianca Pujols và Denisse Martinez, 170 Walnut St., 158.000 USD.Donald C. Bechard và Judith A. Bechard cho Karen O hèConnor, 185 Lower Beverly Hills, 180.000 đô la.Dulce Maria Garcia Vasquez và Dulce Maria Garcia đến Tyrie J. Pearson, 46 Parkside St., 153.000 USD.Emerald City Cho thuê LLC, đến Nicholas Benoit và Jaclyn Benoit, 23 Fairway Drive, $ 190.000.Emtay Inc., đến JJJ17 LLC, 29-31 Knox St., $ 110.000.Erik P. Ducharme đến Kevin P. Russell, 473 Nassau Drive, Đơn vị 473, $ 147.000.Georgina Roy đến Nelson Cruz-Resto, 162 Packard Ave., 177.000 USD.Glen D. Horrigan, Robin M. Horrigan và Robin M. Kimble đến Sandra K. Henry, 100 Eleanor Road, 150.000 đô la.Helder Nunes đến On The Mark LLC, 42-44 Virginia St., $ 120.000.Hồng Xuân Hang tới Vòng Hai LLC, 69 Crystal Ave., 83.500 đô la.John Martin đến Nydia Burgos, 191 Shawmut St., $ 162.000.Leo A. Duclos và Kimberly A. Duclos đến Janusz Lecko, 82 Jardine St., 55.000 đô la.Luis A. Diaz và Maritsa Rivera Diaz đến Aimee K. Lessard, 126 Fair Oak Road, $ 183,900.Mandi Chater, đại diện, đến Corey Gengenbach và Leslie Gengenbach, 82 Yorktown St., Đơn vị 82, $ 95.000.Marc V. Costanzi và Christine A. Costanzi đến Opus Durum LLC, Vòng tròn Breckwood 128-130, $ 185.000.Matthew J. Spence, Elizabeth R. Tetreault và Elizabeth R. Spence đến Châu Á Kenney, 623 Parker St., $ 170.000.Meg Realty LLC, đến Elizabeth Benitez Garcia, 50-52 Vermont St., $ 200.000.Michal S. Czerwinski và Damian S. Cieszkowski cho Claire Carter, 62 Washburn St., $ 259.000.Modesto Delgado đến Hector L. Marte, 45-47 Florence St., $ 175.000.Richard D. Baez và Dianilyz Baez đến Marzena K. Sochacka-Medina, 12 Danaher Circle, $ 181.000.Robert F. Connery đến Denise A. Mason, 151 Porter Lake Drive, Đơn vị 151, $ 98.000.Ruby Realty LLC, đến Juan Santana, 200 El Paso St., $ 100.000.Ruby Realty LLC, đến Manfred Karori và James Ndungu, 42 Emily St., 70.000 USD.Ryan J. McDowell cho Addison R. Brewer và Hannah A. Brewer, 380 Tinkham Road, $ 252.300.Sheila M. Grassetti, Sheila V. Grassetti, Daniel R. McDonald và Donna V. Nolan đến Lucky 13 Homes LLC, 49 Caseland St., 184.900 USD.Simone S. Carvalho đến Edward Perez, 202 đường Pasco, $ 186.000.Stephen Lonergan đến Kinda Leona Boyle, Parkway 120 S, $ 192.500.Stephen M. Nareau và Paula Nareau đến Madison L. Taylor và Austin W. Taylor, 1274 Berkshire Ave., $ 217.000.Timothy E. Cupp và Lindsey Cupp đến Patrick R. Inglesby, 754 Morgan Road, $ 245.000.Tommy Espinal đến Carolyn Morera và Harry Colon-Morera, 477 Wilbraham Road, 155.000 USD.Yarlene Sanchez đến Matthew Thomas Moylan và Pamela Vazquez Quezada, 36 Burns Ave., 220.000 USD.Xứ WalesCrystal L. Ryan và Crystal L. Pearlman cho David Michael Vanwagoner, 4 đường Monson, $ 171,796.JTL Construction LLC, đến Thomas Trafford, 2 đường Monson, $ 177.000.đồJNB bất động sản đầu tư Inc., đến Lizbeth DeJesus và Lizbeth De Jesus, 35-37 High St., $ 197.000.Tây SpringfieldThiên thần R. Villar và Ruth Villar cho Mark D. Hunter và Nancy Villar-Hunter, 615 Rogers Ave., $ 173.000.Christopher A. Nyman, Ashley L. Nyman và Ashley L. Armstrong cho Amina Asvandiyeva, 62 Paulson Drive, 240.000 đô la.Fannie Mae và Hiệp hội thế chấp quốc gia liên bang, đến Cig4 LLC, 243 Circle Drive, $ 145.000.Glenn M. Spadoni, đại diện, và Melissa Claire Spadoni, bất động sản, cho Henry F. Spadoni III, và Marnie Spadoni, 137 Squassick Road, 300.000 đô la.Ronald E. Lohnes đến Charles C. Cooley III, và Marci M. Cooley, 60 Neptune Ave., $ 208.000.Shannon Kumiega đến Jessica Diaz Campbell, 15 North St., $ 235.000.WestfieldBrent M. Chalmer đến Dominic Kirchner II, ủy thác và Eagle Crest Realty Trust, ủy thác của 158 Bates Road, 105.000 đô la.Jason D. Desclos và Evelyn Desclos cho Jorge G. Paredes Bermejo, 98 George St., 270.000 đô la.Lori L. LaPlante, Chester L. LaPlante và Chester Leo LaPlante đến Devon B. Hicks và Cassandra M. Hicks, 13 Montgomery St., 175.000 USD.Mahlon G. Cashman cho Paul W. Fisher và Susan M. Fisher, 482 Shaker Road, 343.000 đô la.Mary Ann Tatro đến Kyle A. Murphy, 43 Darby Drive, 205.000 đô la.Tăng A. Nash đến Craig B. Schacher, 26 Holland Ave., $ 260.000.Ruby Realty LLC, đến Luke Paull, 54 Beverly Drive, $ 169,900.Scott P. Martell cho Christopher A. Hunter và Chiara L. Bassett, 3 đường mỏ đá cũ, $ 195.000.WilbrahamDaniel T. Corthell và Tara G. Corthell cho Zachary Hudson Keaton, 8 Bruuer Ave., 304.000 đô la.Derek J. Chandonnet và Jamie E. Chandonnet đến Aidan Patrick Butler và Jamie Lynn Butler, 11 Woodland Dell Road, 410.000 USD.Joanne Ollis Robinson đến Michael J. Duquette và Nicole A. Duquette, 39 đường Bennett, 227.000 đô la.[ad_2] Nguồn

[wesleyhill]

“Judgment Received”

a sermon from Romans 8, preached at the Cathedral Church of the Advent, Birmingham, Alabama on March 22, 2017

One of my favorite scenes from church history comes from the Baptist preacher John Bunyan, who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress. In his autobiography, titled Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Bunyan describes the moment when the truth of his justification in Christ “came home” to him, so to speak. Listen to how he puts it:

One day as I was passing into the field . . . this sentence fell upon my soul. Thy righteousness is in heaven. And methought, withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God's right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, he wants my righteousness, for that was just before him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, “The same yesterday, today and, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.

What Bunyan is narrating here is the third “step,” if you like, in Paul’s letter to the Romans. On Monday, I talked about the first step: God’s future judgment is announced or predicted. Yesterday I talked about the second step: God’s future judgment has already been enacted in the present through the sacrificial death of Christ. And today I want to talk about the third step: how God’s judgment is received, through the work of the Spirit of Christ, in our lives in the here and now. That’s what Bunyan is describing: how God’s judgment that was awaited in Israel’s hopes and was decisively enacted in the cross of Christ works its way into people’s hearts and lives and becomes existentially gripping, you might say; how the proclamation of the gospel becomes possession of the gospel. Bunyan is saying, I know God predicted his righteousness in the past, and he secured it through Jesus’ death in the first century, but now I feel that it’s become my own reality; its truth has finally landed in my heart and in my gut where I know that I know it. How does that third step happen, and what does it look like?

Very famously, at the beginning of the greatest chapter in Romans, chapter 8, Paul writes this: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” What Paul is describing here is not the prediction of judgment. He’s not even describing the achievement of judgment, which happened around AD 30 on a hill outside the walls of Jerusalem. What Paul is putting his finger on here is what the Reformed theologian John Murray talks about as the application of redemption: that moment when the accomplished verdict of God’s judgment becomes my own — when it’s taken into the soul and begins to transform the way we think and feel and live. This happens, Paul says, through the action of God’s Spirit: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (8:2). As he says in one of his other letters, “[O]ur message of the gospel [comes] to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction” (1 Thessalonians 1:5).

But let’s get a bit more concrete. What does it look like, in practice, in real life, when someone takes this verdict of God’s judgment — that God has decisively judged sin in Christ’s cross rather than judging and condemning sinners like us — what does it look like when someone receives and believes and begins to live out of that verdict? I want to focus with you this morning on three answers to that question.

The first thing Paul says it means is freedom from servile fear of God. Paul pictures our life before and outside of Christ as a life of slavery to sin, but, even more than that, as a life that involves paralyzing bondage to fear. We trembled before God as if he were our taskmaster. But in Christ, because God has freely given us Christ as the embodiment of God’s saving righteousness, we no longer have to cower in fear of God. Listen to how Paul puts it: “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (8:15-16). Paul’s point is that we are now able to burst into God’s throne room like a child who barges in on a closed-door executive meeting, confident that she can hop up onto the chief executive’s lap because he is her dad. That’s the kind of boldness and audacity — theological “cheek,” as Rowan Williams calls it; theological chutzpah — that we now have because of the divine judgment we have received. We aren’t slaves anymore; we’re sons and daughters. In Christ, as it says in Ephesians, “we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him” (3:12). Or as the writer to the Hebrews says it, in Eugene Peterson’s wonderful paraphrase, “So, friends, we can now—without hesitation—walk right up to God, into ‘the Holy Place’” (10:19).

This is the difference between an “if-then” relationship with God and a “because-therefore” relationship. In an “if-then” relationship, God’s kindness toward me is conditional on my good behavior. If I keep behaving like an obedient slave, doing everything exactly like I’m told, then God will like me. But the catch is that in that kind of relationship, I’m always on tenterhooks with God. I never know if today might be the day when I screw it all up and God sends me away and writes me out of his will. Things are very different in a “because-therefore” relationship. In this sort of relationship, God’s first word to me isn’t, “Do this and I’ll accept you.” It’s exactly the reverse: Because I’ve accepted you — because your salvation was secured before you were even born, when Christ became the enactment of God’s saving righteousness in his death on the cross — because you are my adopted child — because you have been buried with Christ in baptism and raised to new life with him — therefore you are now free to call God your Father and live out the new life of the Spirit by confident trust in God’s fatherly favor and goodness towards you. Joy and gratitude are now what fuel your life. Fear has been booted out. Boldness, confidence, “cheek” is now what you have before God.

The second thing it means for us to receive God’s favorable judgment is that we can now enjoy freedom from worry about our needs. When we lacked confidence about God’s favor toward us, when we cowered in fear of God our Judge and Master, we had no assurance that God was on our side. We had no confidence that he would meet our needs. We were huddled like the orphan Jane Eyre in her locked bedroom, fearful of going hungry, unsure of whether her mistress would lash out at her at any moment. But notice how Paul tries to counteract our fear. Towards the end of Romans 8, he says this: “[God] who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?” (v. 32). The formal name for this kind of logic is an a fortiori argument: If the “stronger” thing is true, then the “weaker” thing will certainly follow. If God has already done the hardest thing imaginable on our behalf — if God, like Abraham who trudged up Mount Moriah with his one and only dearly beloved son Isaac to offer him up as a sacrifice, if God has given the life of his own Son Jesus Christ for all of us — then there’s no question about God doing the easier things that we need. For us now to question whether God really cares about our needs, for us to doubt that God will supply all our needs, would be ridiculous. That would be like a child who’s just been given a vacation at Disney World questioning whether her parents are able to give her a sandwich for lunch: Of course they will! Do you really imagine your parents would invest all the effort and hassle and money required to get you to the Magic Kingdom and then withhold the ten-dollar meal you need to enjoy your afternoon?

Here’s how Paul puts it earlier in Romans:

God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. (5:8-9)

God gave up Christ to death on our behalf when we were at our absolute worst. Christ died for us when we were ungodly, when we were weak, when we were estranged from him and alienated from his love, when we were shaking our fists in his face. Having already done that, is there any way that God in Christ will fail to give us everything we need subsequently to endure our earthly pilgrimage until we see his final salvation? There’s no way!

The third thing our receiving God’s judgment means is that we now have a new freedom for others. As Paul continues to draw out implications of his arguments as his letter to the Romans unfolds, he begins to tease out how our confidence in our righteousness before God reshapes our whole way of being human with others in the fellowship of Christ’s body. Look, for example, at what he says about community in Romans 12: “[L]ove one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor” (v. 10). In Paul’s day and age, these commands would have sounded very countercultural. The whole Greco-Roman society that Paul’s churches swam in was a society of fierce hierarchies. It was a world where people savagely competed with one another for honor. Honor was a limited good: If you had more of it, then that meant less of it for me, and vice versa. And right into the middle of that competitive frenzy, Paul says, Once you realize that God’s righteousness is yours in Christ — once you’ve let the favorable judgment of God seep into your soul — then you can opt out of that rat race. Instead of competing with your neighbor to try to steal as much of his honor as you can for yourself, you can actually compete with him in giving honor. You can, in other words, love your neighbor with the very same love that led Christ to give up his life.

Listen to how Paul puts this in his letter to the Philippians:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

        who, though he was in the form of God,

                 did not regard equality with God

                 as something to be exploited,

        but emptied himself,

                 taking the form of a slave,

                 being born in human likeness.

        And being found in human form,

                 he humbled himself

                 and became obedient to the point of death—

                 even death on a cross. (2:3-8)

If God has delivered his judgment to us, if God has judged our sin in Christ and we have received his favorable verdict, “Not guilty,” then we are free in a way we’ve never been before to pour out our lives in love for one another. If God has accepted us and declared us righteous, we no longer have to go chasing after honor. If we have received God’s free justification in Christ, we no longer have to worry about securing our own identity or future or good name. And we no longer have to fear either God or any lack: We truly are liberated to give our selves away. We can imitate the Corinthians Christians who “begging [Paul] earnestly for the privilege of sharing in… ministry to the saints” (2 Corinthians 8:4).

I remember one night some years ago when I sat across the kitchen table from a very godly woman who was a member of my church. She had suffered a lot, from her own clinical depression as well as anxiety about her kids’ struggles. I was sitting with her because, for the first time in my life, I was going through a struggle that I couldn’t see my way out of. The future seemed completely bleak. Of all the things my friend said to me that night, the main one I remember is this. She said to me, “Wesley, God is for you.” God is for you. She was borrowing those words from Romans 8, of course: “God is for us,” Paul says in verse 31. And those words landed on me like they hadn’t in the past. I couldn’t quite believe they were true. Surely it would be more accurate to say that God was mildly frustrated with me? That God wanted to see me buck up and get my act together? That God was reserving judgment until he saw me put forth a decent effort? That God was happy I was around but was still waiting to see if I’d mature a bit? No, my friend told me. God was unreservedly, totally, completely for me in Christ. And that meant freedom: freedom from fear — fear of God and fear of others — and freedom from worry about my needs and, also, a new freedom to love. I felt like John Bunyan who wrote that when he received God’s judgment in Christ, “now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[marisol296630298-blog]

Management Articlesbd.com.

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[dailybiblelessons]

The Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Revised Common Lectionary Proper 8 Roman Catholic Proper 13

How to decide whether to read the complementary or semi-continuous lessons

Complementary Hebrew Scripture from the Latter Prophets: Jeremiah 28:5-9

Then the prophet Jeremiah spoke to the prophet Hananiah in the presence of the priests and all the people who were standing in the house of the Lord; and the prophet Jeremiah said, “Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord fulfill the words that you have prophesied, and bring back to this place from Babylon the vessels of the house of the Lord, and all the exiles. But listen now to this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people. The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.”

Semi-continuous Hebrew Scripture from the Torah: Genesis 22:1-14

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife.

So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together. When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.“

Complementary Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18

I will sing of your steadfast love, O Lord, forever;  with my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations. I declare that your steadfast love is established forever;  your faithfulness is as firm as the heavens.

You said, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one,  I have sworn to my servant David: ‘I will establish your descendants forever,  and build your throne for all generations.’”

Semi-continuous Psalm 13

How long, O Lord?  Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul,  and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Consider and answer me,  O Lord my God! Give light to my eyes,  or I will sleep the sleep of death,  and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;  my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

But I trusted in your steadfast love;  my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord,  because he has dealt bountifully with me.

New Testament Epistle Lesson: Romans 6:12-23

Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.

When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

New Testament Gospel Lesson: Matthew 10:40-42

[Jesus is speaking to the twelve apostles before sending them out.]

“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”

Year A Ordinary 13, RCL Proper 8 , Catholic Proper 13 Sunday

Selections are from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings copyright © 1995 by the Consultation on Common Texts. Unless otherwise indicated, Bible text is from New Revised Standard Version Bible (NRSV) copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Image Credit: Cold Water by ERguille, via Pixabay. This is a public domain image.

[Jesus is speaking to the twelve apostles before sending them out.]

“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”

Year A Ordinary 13, RCL Proper 8 , Catholic Proper 13 Sunday

Selections are from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings copyright © 1995 by the Consultation on Common Texts. Unless otherwise indicated, Bible text is from New Revised Standard Version Bible (NRSV) copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Image Credit: Cold Water by ERguille, via Pixabay. This is a public domain image.

[jobsearchtips02]

Commute Might Be Biggest Hurdle to Opening Office…

As corporate executives plan how to safely bring employees back to work in the office, a thorny issue has arisen over which they have no control: public transportation.

The mass transit systems that allowed some of the world’s most densely populated financial capitals to grow and flourish for a century, including New York City and Tokyo, are emerging as a major concern because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Challenges with commuting could keep offices in those locations shut for longer than other places where people can more easily drive to work, human resources and real-estate executives say.

Companies are starting to consider alternatives to mass transit, such as company car allowances, private bus services and leasing smaller office space in suburban locations closer to where many workers live.

“Extremely large companies might offer to subsidize people’s purchases of private vehicles or subsidize rental cars,” said Lindsay Burke, co-chair of the employment practice at law firm Covington & Burling LLP.

To avoid putting workers through a public commute, some companies are considering leases to open smaller satellite locations, said Scott Rechler, chief executive of real-estate investment firm RXR Realty. He is getting calls from office tenants in Manhattan looking for space in the borough of Queens and Westchester County, where rents are cheaper and many employees have cars.

Mr. Rechler decided to open smaller spaces for his own employees after running a ZIP Code analysis on RXR’s New York area workforce. He plans to launch satellite offices in Brooklyn, Long Island City, Uniondale and Westchester, with the goal of reducing the number of people using public transit.

Some employees say they fear using public transportation because they might come in contact with a fellow passenger infected with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, and they won’t be able to avoid people who refuse to follow state or local mandates to wear masks or other face coverings in public.

The pandemic could significantly alter the way many companies operate, with more employers willing to embrace work-at-home arrangements long after offices are reopened. Already, some executives have said they would work differently going forward.

Anaplan Inc.,

an enterprise software company with employees in San Francisco, London and Tokyo, will soon hold focus groups to ask workers how they feel about returning to the office and what their transportation options are, said Marilyn Miller, the company’s chief people officer.

Certain factories and shops resumed work as Germany took its first steps out of the coronavirus lockdown. WSJ’s William Boston reports from Berlin, where bars and restaurants remain closed. Photo: Peter Juelich/Bloomberg News

“There’s a whole series of things that have to be thought through before they even get to the front door of the office,” she said of the company’s plans to reopen. Those employees who are more dependent on buses, trains and subways may choose to work from home longer than employees who are less dependent on public transportation, Ms. Miller said. The company also has offices in cities including Minneapolis and Plano, Tex.

Once inside the workplace, social distancing can be maintained through one-way hallways, limiting elevator use to one person at a time and closing corporate cafeterias and providing boxed lunches instead, HR and real estate planners say. The more fundamental issue that could restrict reopening in a place such as New York City is “Can people even get to work?” said Mary Good, chief people officer of Squarespace Inc.

Vehicles on a nearly empty road during rush hour in Southeast Portland.

Photo: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg News

For weeks, Squarespace executives have been analyzing floor plans and meeting on video calls to create a detailed office-by-office plan to bring workers back. The technology company has locations in New York City, Portland, Ore., and Dublin, Ireland. Dublin, for instance, has had fewer cases of Covid-19 and could allow businesses to reopen sooner.

Some U.S. offices are highly reliant on public transit, Ms. Good said. New York’s sprawling subway system moved more than 8.6 million riders on a typical weekday before the pandemic, and Portland’s aboveground light rail lines connect that city’s major neighborhoods.

Some companies are considering the idea of setting up private van or bus services. NewYork-Presbyterian, one of New York’s largest private health-care systems, is using private coach buses to run about 30 routes around the city and surrounding areas, allowing essential medical workers at its hospitals to bypass the subway and commuter trains. Capacity is capped at 50 percent on each bus to ensure distancing, and a cleaning person scrubs interior surfaces after every trip, said Joe Ienuso, who runs the hospital system’s facilities and real estate. Other staffers were offered free parking in lots adjacent to hospitals or discounts on car rentals and moped sharing services.

Debbie Spero, a manager of sales and new business development for a staffing and consulting firm in Manhattan, takes the train from her Upper West Side apartment to midtown. She said she’s concerned about being able to keep 6 feet away from other riders in a subway car and worried that people may not wear masks.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How might you change your commute in the future once offices and more workplaces do reopen? Join the conversation below.

“Do I trust people in the subway? Absolutely not,” she said. “On the other hand, what are my options for getting to my office? Not so many.”

Gary Frey, an executive coach and head of business development for a public accounting firm in Charlotte, N.C., said he is eager to return to work because he misses the camaraderie of his colleagues. His car commute takes less than 20 minutes.

“I’m fortunate. I live fairly close-in,” he said, adding that if he had to deal with public transit in another city, he might feel differently. “The subway would give me pause.”

—Konrad Putzier and Lauren Weber contributed to this article.

Write to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com

Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/commute-might-be-biggest-hurdle-to-opening-office/

[vacationsoup]

New Post has been published on https://vacationsoup.com/planning-your-exuma-trip/

Planning your Exuma Trip

Planning your  Exuma Trip?  Wondering what to expect, how to get there, what to take, how to get around.

Planning a trip to a new destination is a mixture of excitement and concern. Let me share my twenty years of experience of The Bahamas and Exuma in particular, with you, and answer the many questions that are buzzing through your brain like bees round a honey pot. Maybe checking through our list will calm your nerves, let you relax and enjoy this new adventure.

Exuma, The Island Exuma is part of The Bahamas, located south east of Florida, and is a tropical island some 80 miles long by between 1 and 5 miles wide with the deep Atlantic Ocean on the eastern shore and the shallow sheltered water on its western coast. Famous for its blue warm waters and its friendly locals.

Exuma Map

Exuma Weather The climate of the islands is tropical with air temperatures varying from 70 degrees in January to 90 degrees in August with only 20 inches of rain per year.

Hurricane Season Exuma is subject to hurricanes. The highest risk is in September and October and rather than risk cancellations many properties close at those times. If you are traveling during those months you should give thought to taking out an insurance policy against having to cancel.  In fact you should consider whether to insure your trip, whenever you are traveling, to cover those unforeseen circumstances, like medical emergencies.

Planning your Accommodation So planning  your Exuma trip begins with choosing your accommodation. You have a choice of staying at an all inclusive resort (adults only), hotels or rental accommodation. Resorts include Sandals, Lumina Point, St Frances Resort, all of which have their own websites. Then hotels range from Peace and Plenty, Beach Resort, Hideaways and Augusta Bay.  Then there  are many rental properties in Exuma and if you choose from the selection listed on the three major listing sites you will be paying a premium of around 20% extra. My advise would be check the newer websites that do not charge a commission, such as Houfy.com and VacationSoup.com or contact me   for  advise.

Planning your Flight to Exuma Planning how to get to Exuma involves choosing the flight as there are no ferries that can get you there. So you have your accommodation sorted, now to flights. Your destination is Exuma International (GGT) and we have direct flights arriving from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta, Toronto, Charlotte and Nassau. For more information on flights with contact details go to our website links page. You must also provide evidence that you have a return ticket to your country of residence.

Getting Around in Exuma So you have your flight sorted and you know where you are staying. Next step in planning your Exuma trip is deciding how you are going to get around and explore the islands many beaches and oceanside bars and restaurants and shops.  There is no public transport in Exuma, you have the option of renting a car or relying on taxis. My advise is rent a car. I know its another expense but when you rent a car you can go where you want when you want. Sudden decision to go to a restaurant? if you have a car… off you go. No car then wait for half an hour while a taxi drives from the airport. Finished your meal?  Wait another thirty minutes for a taxi and be faced with a hefty bill. So rent a car.  For a list of providers and contact details again go to http://harborviewexuma.com./links

Planning Ahead for the Trip So now the dates are getting closer and its time to turn to the next part of our planned trip to Exuma. We need passports for everyone, are they up to date? Do they all have at least six month between the trip and when our passports expire? If traveling on a US, Canadian or EU passport do not need a visa to visit The Bahamas.

Skitterphoto / Pixabay

Drones If you are planning on bringing a drones to get those fabulous aerial shots, be aware that you need a license. for full details go the government website . If you do not have the license then your drone will be held at customs and you can only retrieve it as you leave.

The Bahamian Currency Note that the currency in The Bahamas is the Bahamian dollar but you do not want to get Bahamian currency for your trip, get US dollars. The Bahamian dollar is pegged to the US dollar so the rate of exchange is 1:1.  When you pay for goods in Exuma you can pay in US dollars or Bahamian dollars, or a mixture of both, and any change may well be a mixture of both.  Just ensure that when you leave Exuma you change any Bahamian bills you may have back to US currency.

Some shops and restaurants take credit cards. Some charge a fee for the use of credit card. Some places do not take cards, so have the cash available.  There are ATMs around the island.

Packing for your Trip to Exuma

Clothes So now your vacation dates are close and you are getting ready to pack. The climate in Exuma is tropical and dress is casual.  So pack cotton and light weight linen clothes. For men shorts are OK day and evening, lightweight long pants if you are more comfortable.  The most important item is swimwear, pack plenty, you will probably spend most of your time in swimwear. Ladies take some wraps to wear over swimwear when in town or traveling, locals will not be comfortable seeing you in a bikini shopping, take wraps. Another useful item is a lightweight windproof jacket so if you go on the famous swimming pigs trip, when you get out of the water and back in the boat, you will not feel cold when the boat speeds up and you are still wet.  Pack hats for sun protection, flip flops and water shoes so you can walk across rocks at the waters edge. If you are traveling in the cooler months like November through February, a thin wetsuit or shortie would be good for swimming.

Northshore of Moriah Cay

Electronics

Next part of planning your Exuma trip are items other than clothes that you should consider. Are you taking your laptop? Your I Pad? or other electronics, if so don’t forget your charger or USB plugs.  The electronics in The Bahamas is 120 volt and the plugs are the same as US. So if traveling from Europe you will need to bring a converter plug. Have you checked if a hair dryer is provided at your room?

Luggage Now some advise when traveling. Don’t have labels on your luggage with your home address. It has been known for thieves to spend time at airports noting the addresses on luggage then robbing the home knowing that the owners are away on vacation. Any external labels should only have your name and cell phone number. The full address should be inside the luggage. Ladies do not take your best jewelry. It not worth the risk of losing expensive earrings on the beach. Similarly check that your wedding ring is not loose, loosing that when swimming could be a disaster. Your on vacation so use fashion jewelry.

Don’t forget that you cannot have liquids in your hand luggage, those must go in your check-in luggage.

Medicines. Packing for your trip it is easy to forget to get sufficient medication and remember to pack it. Bring your prescriptions with you. We do have a hospital and a pharmacy on island, so if you run out of your prescription medicine you could get refills.

Cell Phones in Exuma If your cell phone does not work in Exuma you could call in at Bahamas Telephone office in George Town and purchase a local SIM card and have them fit it. Dont forget to keep the original card somewhere safe to replace it in your phone when you head home. Lastly don’t forget the charger.

Drones Your drone will be held by customs if you do not have a license to import it. See notes above and in the government website

Importing Items into Exuma There are some items that cannot be imported into any Bahamian island, and these restrictions may effect you if you are stay at a self catering address. No fresh fruit or vegetables. If you are bringing in meat or cheese make sure it is in its original packaging. You are allowed to import up to $100 worth of goods.

Exporting items from Exuma If you are thinking that at the end of your trip you would like to take back some fish or lobsters then be aware there are limits to the size of catch you can export. They are: 6 pelargic fish such as mahi mahi, wahoo, king fish or tuna. 6 lobsters (during lobster season) and a maximum of 20lbs of other fish.

Conclusion. I trust that this information helps you have a smooth and trouble free holiday on our tropical island and that one thing you definitely take home are fond memories.

[earlrmerrill]

Acting Coach West Philadelphia

Actors can benefit a great deal from an acting coach West Philadelphia, as long as they are open to the process. Receiving more individualized attention from an acting teacher or private acting coach can be a rigorous process that strips away many of an actor’s preconceived notions of their skills. Even more challenging, the job of an acting coach is to get to the very bottom of the actor as a person, look into and listen for their deepest notions of who they are as a human being and begin to draw this out to use in the development of a character.

The Best Acting Coach West Philadelphia Instills Trust and Security

Acting Coach West Philadelphia – Maggie Flanigan Call 215-600-1669

An actor’s innermost thoughts and feelings can be difficult to expose to a larger class of actors. A good acting instructor and coach should create a safe space and know how to create a sense of trust so deep that the actor can risk the vulnerability needed to become a better actor. Serving as psychologist, part parent and coach, the definition of the word coach-to instruct or to train-is too limiting. When we think of coach or teacher we imagine a person talking, imparting knowledge, when in fact a good acting coach first will be an excellent “receiver.” They will be able to quickly assess body language, pick up cues in conversation, make accurate predictions about what an actor truly feels about many things.

A great acting coach will get a growing sense of who an actor is, determine set goals for how the actor can improve and then formulate a method for getting them there. They are masters of manipulation, pushing, guiding, breaking down and building up a student by twists and turns in a way that may sometimes seem brutal. This is one field where manipulation is not only accepted it is encouraged as long as the manipulation guides the actor to deeper more complex performances. An acting coach ultimately should be working constantly, every step of the way, to help the actor develop their unique voice and a successful method for getting to a deeper sense of a character more quickly.

A Private Acting Coach Knows How To Listen Deeply

Acting Coach West Philadelphia – Maggie Flanigan with Sam Rockwell

The first sign that a coach is good is their ability to listen and assess. They must begin by listening to what an actor says about their goals, and look for clues about what the actor feels about their own ability. The next step is to assess the skills the student has and be completely honest about what it would take to achieve those goals. The coach may agree or disagree with the student’s self assessment but, their obligation is to be honest about that opinion. Then they should be willing and able to formulate a plan moving forward.

When the work begins, they must establish a bond with the student. Acting students, however, must also be careful not to simply choose someone they “like,” but, rather someone willing to push them into potentially uncomfortable places emotionally, while still feeling safe. A good acting coach and instructor should also be able to offer very specific methods, such as the Meisner technique, to build up an actor’s areas of weakness. An actor is very much like an athlete, needing to practice and continually grow throughout their entire career. Any actor who thinks they have “arrived” and no longer needs to learn something new is on a path to irrelevance. If they are not growing, they will not be able to successfully portray a character with any real sense of authenticity.

The Right Acting Coach is a Master Teacher

c

Finally, a necessary quality for any acting coach West Philadelphia is an ability to encourage. An acting coach must be one part cheerleader, establishing for their client a belief that the hard work will pay off. That the work being done has an ultimate goal and that working together, they will get there. As they continue to move the goal posts, change up the expectations, set the bar higher, they should also be communicating in subtle ways that you will get there.

To learn more about the studio and how it can help you land your next part, call the studio and speak with Katie or Charlie. 215-600-1669. A private acting coach can help you prepare for your next role or audition.

Our Meisner Studio faculty includes acting coaches West Philadelphia for serious students and working actors from all West Philadelphia metro areas including: Center City, Avenue of the Arts, Callowhill, Chinatown, Elfreth’s Alley, French Quarter, Logan Square, Naval Square, Jewelers’ Row, Market East, Old City, Museum District, Penn Center, Rittenhouse Square, Fitler Square, Penn’s Landing, Society Hill, South Street, Washington Square West, Midtown Village, South West Philadelphia, Bella Vista, Central South West Philadelphia, Devil’s Pocket, East Passyunk, East Passyunk Crossing, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park, Girard Estate, Greenwich, Grays Ferry, Hawthorne, Italian Market, Little Saigon, Lower Moyamensing, Marconi Plaza, Moyamensing, Newbold, Packer Park, Passyunk Square, Pennsport, Two Street, Point Breeze, Queen Village, Schuylkill, Sports Complex, Tasker, Wharton, Whitman, Wilson Park, West Passyunk, Southwark, Graduate Hospital, Southwest West Philadelphia, Angora, Bartram Village, Clearview, Kingsessing, Eastwick, Elmwood Park, Hedgerow, Mount Moriah, Paschall, Penrose, Southwest Schuylkill, West West Philadelphia, West Philly, Belmont Village, Carroll Park, Cathedral Park, Cedar Park, Centennial District, Dunlap, Garden Court, Haddington, Haverford North, Mantua, Mill Creek, Overbrook, Overbrook Park, Overbrook Farms, Parkside, Powelton Village, Saunders Park, Spruce Hill, Squirrel Hill, University City, Walnut Hill, Woodland Terrace, Wynnefield Heights, Lower North West Philadelphia, Brewerytown, Cecil B. Moore, Hartranft, Ludlow, Poplar, Sharswood, Spring Garden, Stanton, Strawberry Mansion, Yorktown, Fairmount, Northern Liberties, Upper North West Philadelphia, Allegheny West, Fairhill, Glenwood, Hunting Park, Nicetown-Tioga, Bridesburg, Fishtown, Harrowgate, Kensington, Port Richmond, Andorra, East Falls, Wissahickon, Roxborough, Manayunk, Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy, Germantown, Morton, Wister, Cedarbrook, East Oak Lane, Feltonville, Fern Rock, Koreatown, Logan, Melrose Park, Ogontz, Olney, West Oak Lane, Northeast West Philadelphia, Burholme, Castor Garden, Crescentville, Fox Chase, Frankford, Holmesburg, Juniata, Lawncrest, Lawndale, Lexington Park, Mayfair, Northwood, Oxford Circle, Rhawnhurst, Ryers, Tacony, Wissinoming, Academy Gardens, Ashton-Woodenbridge, Bustleton, Byberry, Crestmont Farms, Krewstown, Millbrook, Modena Park, Morrell Park, Normandy, Parkwood, Pennypack, Somerton, Torresdale, Upper Holmesburg, Winchester Park

To learn more about the professional workshops and training at the studio review these details: Meisner Studio West Philadelphia – Acting Coach West Philadelphia

Acting Coach West Philadelphia was first published to Philadelphia Meisner Studio}

Acting Coach West Philadelphia published first on http://ift.tt/2plSYJG