…if Jesus did rise again from the dead, then there is nothing ultimately to be afraid of. When we grasp at that which is not ours, it is because we are afraid that if we don’t we won’t have enough. Lust itself is nurtured in fear, fear of rejection, far of loneliness. When we lie, we do so because we are afraid that the truth will be embarrassing.
And if we believe in the God who raised Jesus, then, as our fears are dealt with at a deeper and deeper level, as they are met by the astonishing love of the surpassing God, we will be able to leave behind the image of a bossy, bullying God who wants us to keep His laws in order to control us, to squash our individuality.
If then, we recognize the truth about the surpassing God, the God who raises the dead, we can trust Him with every lesser task that may come our way. He can be trusted with jobs, even when they don’t necessarily work out the way we thought they should. He can be trusted with marriage. He can be trusted with money, even when it seems as though there is even less of it available than we thought. He can be trusted with old age. He can be trusted with death itself. Of course He can; He is the God who raises the dead, who takes precisely the situation where there seems no hope in human terms, and brings new life exactly there.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

The understanding and honoring of time is fundamental to the realization of who we are and how we live. Violations of sacred time become desecrations of our most intimate relations with God and one another. Hours and days, weeks and months and years, are the very stuff of holiness. Among the many desecrations visited upon the creation, the profanation of time ranks near the top, at least among North Americans. Time is the medium in which we do all our living. When time is desecrated, life is desecrated. The most conspicuous evidences of this desecration are hurry and procrastination: Hurry turns away from the gift of time in a compulsive grasping for abstractions that it can possess and control. Procrastination is distracted from the gift of time in a lazy inattentiveness to the life of obedience and adoration by which we enter the “fullness of time.” Whether by a hurried grasping or by a procrastinating inattention, time is violated.