He is Good

Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good,

for His steadfast love endures forever. Psalm 138:1

So today we honor The Innocents, the under-two-year-old boys who were murdered by Herod in a desperate and quite-crazed and honestly futile attempt to protect his power.

And I am holding that thought in one hand while holding in the other hand Psalm 138 which frames every single event in and around and about Creation and the Creator with the refrain, for His steadfast love endures forever. Some versions call this steadfast love “mercy,” which is also a bit of a stretch.

Stretch as in tension. Stretch as in broadening perspective beyond the obvious. Stretch as in a leap of faith. A big fat leap of faith.

Yesterday there weren’t so many migrants released by ICE, so after translating for the medical team for a while and doing intake on one family from Honduras, I was rassled into giving two other families a ride to the airport.

One family was a woman and son, and one family was a man with daughter, but both kiddos were two-years-old and absolutely innocent. With round eyes and clutching fingers and slightly runny noses, these little ones are political pawns in a cruel game between the rich and greedy-to-be-richer who are shoving them about with the only goal of power protection. Once again.

As we walked through the process of parking the car, printing the tickets, weighing the tiny backpacks, watching the agent discretely push the secret code to bring in the security specialist to make a phone call to verify paperwork, jiggling weeping children while parents undergo a secondary inspection, pointing out the bathrooms and explaining the tickets, gate numbers and layovers in Houston and Atlanta before a final abrazo and “Dios les bendiga,” I was aware again and again of small gifts of His steadfast love or mercies being extended to our guests by kind agents erasing baggage costs, gracious repacking of emptied bags, or even simple eye contact and smiles.

So it’s one more day of trusting that somehow it is His hands that are actually holding this tension of an all Powerful and all Loving God allowing injustice and pain and that somehow He is Good.

And that I am called to be part of His Good, for this purpose I am God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for me to do.

And it must be Saturday, because once again I entered my Fixed Prayers with this prayer: For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith--that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to Him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

So be it.

For yet another day.