Year A Lent 5: Lazarus and other resurrections

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Of course, they all would ask him about it, after the event. What was it like, being dead? Lazarus would tell them, “I don’t know what I can say to you about that. I can tell you what it was like to come back.
“You know, when you wake up but your dreams carry on, so that you can’t move your arms or your legs? I couldn’t move my eyelashes, let alone open my eyes. My mouth was sealed, my nostrils stuffed up with stale, sour bandages. I could hear him calling, and I had to get out there, I had to reach him. They make it sound, in the stories, as though I lifted to my feet as though pulled by an invisible string – nothing could be further from the truth. I was wrapped tightly like a swaddled newborn, and the best I could do was to roll and to squirm and to twist my way across the floor like a baby who has not yet learned how to crawl.
“When I reached the mouth of the cave, I could feel the sun’s warmth, hear the hissing breath of scores of men, and my sisters. I heard him again, telling them to unbind me, to set me free, and I have never been so grateful for the touch of a human hand.”
They would ask him, then, “What will you do now? What did you miss the first time around?”
Lazarus would get a faraway look in his eye. “I would awaken the sleepwalker, unbind his eyes. I would loosen the shackles of those bound by sin, or by fear. I would seek out and untie the ones who walk as though they are dead, because I have walked in their grave clothes.”

In a sermon preached in London in 1884, the Baptist minister Charles H. Spurgeon said,

In many things our Lord Jesus stands alone as a worker. No other can unite His voice with the fiat which says, “Lazarus, come forth!” Yet, in certain points of gracious operation, the Master associates His servants with Him, so that when Lazarus has come forth He says to them, “loose him, and let him go.” In the raising of the dead, He is alone, and therein majestic and Divine—in the loosing of the bound He is associated with them and still remains majestic—but His more prominent feature is condescension. How exceedingly kind it is of our Lord Jesus to permit His disciples to do some little thing in connection with His great deeds, so that they may be, “workers together with Him.”

Sometimes, something happens that stops us in our tracks. It may be the end of a relationship, a betrayal. Someone does a thing that makes us wonder if we ever really knew them. Or I do something that shakes my own self-image, makes me wonder about myself. Somebody dies, and you feel as though they might just as well lay you out right alongside them.

We wonder, can these dry bones live?

And yet, God demands our life, our resurrection. Lazarus had no more choice to resist the pull of Jesus’ command to live than the dry bones on the valley floor. Life goes on, and we go right on with it.

The question becomes, then, not one of whether to live or to die, but whether to live wrapped in a shroud or clothed in life.

Spurgeon went on:

A notable miracle was unquestionably worked, but it required a finishing touch. The man was wholly raised, but not wholly freed! Look, here is a living man in the garments of death! That napkin and other grave clothes were altogether congruous with death, but they were much out of place when Lazarus began to live again! It is a wretched sight to see a living man wearing his shroud. … Such was their condition that unless you observed carefully, you would think them still dead. And yet within them the lamp of heavenly Life was burning. Some said, “He is dead, look at his garments.” But the more spiritual cried, “He is not dead, but these bands must be loosed.”

It is Jesus who commands, who brings life, who is the Way and the Truth and Life – and yet he invites us to help one another, to loosen the bands of death, to change our clothes for the raiment of light and life. None of us does it alone. Even Jesus, who had no equal, relied on his friends to say, “Let us go also and die with him,” to roll away the stone from the tomb that held Lazarus in, to unbind the living.

There is much work to do. Whether it is lifting the dull darkness of lazy prejudice; it is our task, our call to remove the bandages that blind us to the beauty that God sees in each of us, in all of us, no exceptions. Whether it is teaching those who have lived in fear to stop holding their breath and believe what God has said, that “I will be their God, and they shall be my people;” to be the kind of friend, the kind of companion who will walk through the valley of dry bones, the valley of the shadow of death, when we are needed to give confidence and comfort to another. Whether it is loosening our own death grip on weapons of destruction and violence, opening ourselves instead to love and peaceful ways – we have seen yet again this week in Fort Hood a brutal reminder of the dead ends that war and weaponry can lead us down, and we know that there are many more threads that we never see, that wind in silence to the grave. Whether it is unstopping the mouths that need to cry out their truth, their love, their pain, their joy – it is our work to unbind them and set them free, those to whom God has given life, and life eternal.

When Jesus set his face towards Bethany, Thomas the Twin said, “We can’t let him go alone.” When Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb, he made sure that he was surrounded by his family and his friends; he told them to go and lay hands on Lazarus, to unbind him, to unwind the winding cloth, so that he would know the tenderness of their touch, and know himself wrapped in love. Such is our work, to love one another, even our enemies, and our neighbours as ourselves, and not to hold back our help from the living dead, the walking wounded, the fettered and afraid, from one another.

The body count at the beginning of today’s readings is incredible – it is not just Lazarus, but there are dry bones and filled tombs everywhere – which only makes the miracle more stupendous. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you,” says Paul.

And so the glory of God is revealed, and we follow in the footsteps of Lazarus, helping each other off with our grave clothes and working out, every day, how to shun the shadow of the tomb and live in the light of life.

And Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Amen.

Ref.: Charles H. Spurgeon: http://www.gospelweb.net/SpurgeonMTP30/spursermon1776.htm

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Dry Bones

Posted on April 5, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

I cried so long my very bones were dry;
I couldn’t raise my head, lay loose-limbed, sunken.
I heard a voice cry, “Prophesy!” My body jumped,
of its own volition, to attention,
knocking the stale breath out of me with a sigh…

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An Interview with Lazarus

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Of course, they all would ask him about it, after the event. What was it like, being dead? Lazarus would look at them with strange eyes. He would tell them, “I don’t know what I can say to you about that. I can tell you what it was like to come back.

“You know, when you wake up but your dreams carry on, so that you can’t move your arms or your legs? I couldn’t move my eyelashes, let alone open my eyes. My mouth was sealed, my nostrils stuffed up with stale, sour bandages. I could hear him calling, and I had to get out there, I had to reach him. They make it sound, in the stories, as though I lifted to my feet as though pulled by an invisible string, and shuffled, zombie-like, out of the cave – or perhaps even I flew!

“Nothing could be farther from the truth. I was wrapped as tightly as a swaddled newborn, and the best I could do was to roll and to squirm and to twist my way across the floor like a baby who has not yet learned how to crawl.

“I knew, though, when I reached the mouth of the cave, because I could feel the sun’s warmth, and hear the hissing breath of scores of men, and my sisters. I heard him again, telling them to unbind me, to set me free, and I have never been so grateful for the touch of a human hand.”

They would ask him, then, “What is it that you have the greatest need or desire to do before death claims you for good? What did you miss the first time around?”

Lazarus got a farway look in his eye. “I would awaken the sleepwalker, and unbind the eyes of the one who doesn’t see. I would loosen the shackles of those bound by sin, or by fear. I would seek out and untie the ones who walk as though they are dead, because I have walked in their graveclothes.”

His voice choked up, every time, and they would be afraid to ask him anything else.

 – As I have discovered, the Rev. Charles H. Spurgeon preached a rather marvellous sermon, in London, in 1884, about Jesus’ condescension to allow his disciples’ participation in such miracles as this one, and the unbinding of others.

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Blind

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

He sent me away. I don’t know why,
having shared with me his spit and mud,
he wouldn’t lead me to the pool, cup the water
in my hand; he didn’t see the wonder through.
If he had, the first thing I had seen
would be his face. Instead,
having never laid eyes upon him,
I had to search him out blind.

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Year A Lent 3: Come and see

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

Come and see. That’s what she says. Come and see this man who told me everything I had ever done – could he, he can’t be, the Messiah, can he? Come and see.

The woman at the well has got a bad press in the past, possibly quite undeserved. People have said that the fact that she was at the well at noon meant that she was an outcast, under the scorn and beneath the contempt of her townspeople. They have said that the five husbands and the man with whom she now lives had a lot to do with that scorn and contempt. Yet the text contains no hint of judgment. Jesus does not accuse her of any moral sin when he uses his insight to surprise her with his knowledge of her situation, so why should we? Their meeting at noon stands in high contrast to the meeting between Jesus and Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, at midnight. This Samaritan woman is more ready to see the light that he was. In fact, while Nicodemus took a lifetime to decide about Jesus, this woman, in a few short minutes, in a brief encounter beside a well, moves from “Who are you, and what do you do want?”, through, “I see that you are a prophet,” to “He couldn’t be the Messiah, could he?” to the conversion of a whole city: “At first we believed because of what you told us, but now we have seen and heard for ourselves, and we know that he is the Saviour of the world,” and all because she was willing to say, “Come and see.”

What if she was an outcast, a reprobate? They heard her anyway: Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony. What if she was not an outcast, but one respected and well-connected? Then they listened to her, and because they listened to her they heard Jesus: “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.” We do not need to know where she stood to follow her example.

I have to wonder why, out of the two meetings, at night and at noon, in secret and at Sychar, it is Nicodemus’ name that we remember, and not that of the woman, who gets to be the Samaritan woman, or the woman at the well, or the one with five husbands and more. It is as though we want to sideline her, as though we are afraid of her challenge: “Come and see. He can’t be the Messiah, can he?”

Nicodemus was prudent, cautious, careful and judicious, all qualities that we appreciate. The woman was a little more extravagant, exuberant, garrulous, loud; qualities that we might enjoy in others but are wary of displaying for ourselves (or is it just me?). Are we, even the ones who show up to church on a Sunday morning, who tithe and provide the coffee, who pray and provide rides to one another, who volunteer and do good works – are we still a little afraid to follow the example of one who casts caution to the wind and calls all who will listen to “Come and see? See what you think. Do you think he is the Messiah? Do you think that God really might love us that much?” Are we still hiding in the shadows of the dark with Nicodemus, afraid to come out into the light of day as disciples of Christ?

What are we afraid of?

Perhaps we are afraid that those we meet will not understand. We tend to look for God, for the gospel, in times of stress, but we are afraid to offer it as a salve to those who are wounded, in case we are misunderstood. The woman said, “Give me this living water, so that I will not have to come here any more to draw water,” but that is not the offer that Jesus is making. He does not promise that life will suddenly become easy, that the well will bring water to the city by itself so that the women don’t need to carry it. He doesn’t promise that the heat of the day will diminish, or that winter will end. He will not rewrite her troubling and ambiguous history. He doesn’t offer to end the realities of human life, but to sustain those living through them, to slake their thirst for hope, to soothe their feverish fears, to give them life and courage, all that they need to get through this day, and the next.

Give us today our daily bread, we ask, each day, not that we will never need to eat again, not that we will never hunger, but that we will be sustained, that we will not starve for the lack of God’s mercy and providence.

Are we afraid that it will not sound like enough? Are we afraid that the offer of hope will resound hollowly to the one who is facing death, that the offer of courage will falter before the one facing foreclosure, that the offer of life will be a slap in the face to the disappointed parent, to the grieving widow, to those in despair? Who do we think we are to make such judgments, to keep our help to ourselves, to ration the hope that we offer to others, to dispense, judiciously, only the courage that we deem appropriate to their situation, when we have found the waters of eternal life, when we have seen the Messiah, and have heard him tell us everything about ourselves?
What brings us back to this well? Isn’t it worth sharing?

We don’t have to be the ones with all of the answers, we are not the answer. We are right not to pretend that we have found the panacea that will cure all ills; we know that we cannot take away someone else’s pain. But we can offer the help that we have found. We can say, “We have met someone who spoke to us, when we were at the well. When our tears welled up and when our lives dried up; when our courage failed and when our hearts were parched and stony. When we plumbed the depths to find that the well was so deep, and so dark, and the water beyond our reach, we met someone who understood it all, and who offered to stay with us, beside the well.”

“Come and see.”

Even better: “Come with me, and see.”

And many from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all about myself.” So when they came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this truly is the Saviour of us all.” Amen.

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The well woman

Posted on March 22, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Give me that water,” she said;

“no more drudgery of trudging to the well.”

He fixed her with a look so keen

she felt the bucket of her belly tip over;

all told she was empty, and bottomless.

The water jar fell.

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Year A Lent 2: born again

Posted on March 16, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

The thing about being born is that it is less of an event than a process. We might put a time on the birth of a baby, but the minutes and seconds may seem arbitrary after hours or even days of labour, after stages and ages of waiting and worrying and breathing and hold-it-now…  And everybody here has been through that process, one way or another, whether aided by a midwife or a skilled surgeon or a very surprised stranger (it happens); every person here has experienced birth. Most of us don’t remember it happening to us, although some of us remember it happening to our children. But can you imagine what it was like, waiting in the dark, wondering what was happening to that ocean in which we had lived and moved and had our being, which had become suddenly stormy, wracked with waves and currents, light becoming stronger, familiar voices calling us out and the shock of that first breath of air?

Birth is risky; there are those of us here who know close-up how dangerous it can be even to attempt to be born. I know, by the way, I am certain after many and prolonged conversations with God about the matter that those babies who were lost to us were never lost to God, never at a loss for life, and that we will see them, and know them in love, when we see God face to face. I am sure of that.

Birth is unpredictable; like the coming of the Son of Man, no one knows the day or the hour, even if they book the operating room in advance, sometimes Mother Nature has other ideas than the expectant mother with child.

We think we know what we mean when we talk about being “born again” – the NRSV renders it, “born from above,” but almost any other Bible that you pick up will say that Jesus said, “You must be born again.” But Jesus was rarely glib, and he knew what it meant, how complicated and dangerous and unpredictable being born can be. Nicodemus struggled to hear him; he was not quite ready yet; but we see him labouring through the Gospel to be reborn, out of water and with the Holy Spirit, to enter that new life, that new light of the kingdom of God, that Jesus offered to him.

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, because he was a teacher of the Jews, and a Pharisee, and the Pharisees as a group had a somewhat tense relationship with Jesus and his disciples. They tended to view him with suspicion, or at least caution. Some, it is true, invited him to dinner. But most probably kept their distance. Nicodemus was curious about Jesus, but he was also afraid of what his friends would think if they saw him consulting this strange new prophet and miracle man. So he set out in the middle of the night – a popular time for a labour to begin – and sought out Jesus in the dark. You might set down their conversation that night as the beginning of the labour contractions for Nicodemus.

Another contraction is recorded in John 7. Jesus had gone up to the Feast of the Tabernacles in Jerusalem, and began to teach in the temple. Some of the people began to whisper that he was the Messiah; others wanted to lay hands on him and arrest him, or worse, for stirring up such rumours. The chief priests and the Pharisees finally asked the temple guards, “Why didn’t you arrest him?” The guards said, “We’d never heard anything like this!” The Pharisees told them not to be taken in by Jesus’ teaching or presence or person, “No one who is anyone believes in him, only the mob, the little people, the unimportant people,” they pronounced. They disparaged Jesus and judged him, but Nicodemus must have felt a twinge, a squeeze, because suddenly he found the courage he had lacked in the night time. “Is this what we do, to condemn a man out of turn without hearing him first?” he asked them, and they scorned Nicodemus, as he had feared that they would, but he was one step closer to new life.

The third and last time that we meet Nicodemus is towards the end, in John 19, after the arrest, after the trial, after the death on the cross. Joseph of Arimathea, who had also been secretly following Jesus, but not wanting to make his allegiance known to his fellow Pharisees, did penance by going out and asking Pilate for the body, so that he could honour Jesus publicly in his death as he had failed to in his life. Nicodemus went with him, carrying a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds in weight. Nicodemus must have thought himself stillborn, to give over so much of his wealth to be sealed in the tomb with a dead man. But it was not over yet, and Nicodemus was yet to take his first breath in the shock of realization of a new life.

Nicodemus’ second birth was the product of a long labour; it was a process of coming out punctuated by moments of stress and confusion. His emergence into the light, bathed in water and the Spirit, would not be completed until after the Resurrection; David Rensberger (Johannine Faith and Liberating Community (The Westminster Press, 1988), 37-41) argues that Nicodemus and Joseph represent a group whose faith and courage would never be sufficient to won Jesus as the Christ, who would remain outside of the community of true believers. True, Jesus told them, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born again,” but he also said that God loved the world so much that he sent his Son not to condemn it, but to save it. No one is lost to God. Not me, not you, not Nicodemus. Just as Paul describes Abraham’s labour to become the father of his people in his letter to the Romans, Nicodemus’ labour would be completed “in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

I think that one of the reasons that we try to reduce the idea of being born again to a single experience or moment is that it is easier than seeing our lives as labour. I am sure that those moments and experiences matter massively – they are contractions that make us gasp and know that something real is happening – but some labours are less dramatic, and some require more help – I don’t want to push the metaphor beyond breaking point. After all, getting born is not an end in itself, but the gateway to a new way of living.

It is risky, being born anew, emerging into a new life which we have not yet seen, which we do not control. We don’t do well with unknowing – we hate not knowing what has happened, what will happen. Sometimes we hate it even more than the certainty of death. We do not do well with suspense, and being born is full of suspense.

It used to be that the first question after birth would be, “boy or girl?”; these days these things are more often known ahead of time, but still I think that the question of identity: who will we be? What gifts have we to offer? Whom will we love? – those questions are some of the big ones that hold us back from really giving ourselves over to the labour of new birth, because with it comes a whole new life to live into. We are used to the messy mix of saint and sinner, the angels and devils that we know. Why change?

But the possibilities of new life are just too good to ignore. The ability to live as those born of the Spirit, as well as water and the flesh. The chance for a life washed clean, with infinite and eternal possibilities.

So I invite you as this Lent winds on to pay attention to where the Spirit moves, like the wind, as she will. Those places where you feel that pressure to move closer to God, to become more involved, to stand up for Jesus in unexpected places; those are the contractions that move us towards new birth.

Pay attention, too, in the life of the parish: where are we as a community feeling that push, that impulse to something new, to something good, to something life-giving? Those, too, are contractions, moving Epiphany towards new birth.

Being born again is not a one-off, momentary, unrecoverable event. It is a process, and it is a gateway. It is a process that we can enter into and be a willing partner in. And it is a labour of love:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son [to be born into it], so that everyone who believes in him may never perish but have eternal life.”

We, who once were nothing, are born into being not once, not even twice, but eternally, fearfully, wonderfully, and we, each of us, and even those whom we never saw, are completed “in the presence of the God in whom we believe, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

In the name of Jesus Christ, born and reborn in resurrection for us. Amen.

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Born again

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

There are no shadows at high noon, or at night,
but Nicodemus’ brother is crepuscular, sneaking
out in the gray dusk and slinking home at dawn.
You will know him by his eyes, blood-red,
searching, wildly, for the womb,
the last time he felt warm and beloved;
he is too old now for such soothing, being
born again of whisky and other spirits.

* updated Sunday, March 16, 2014

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Ash Wednesday : heart-rending, heart-mending

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing,” says the prophet.

Rend your hearts: “a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise,” says the Psalmist.

A broken and contrite heart you will not despise. “We entreat you on behalf of Christ,” then, “be reconciled to God,” says Saint Paul.

Be reconciled to God: the lesson of Lent. Return to God with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, with mourning. Rend your hearts.

Yet it seems strange. It makes for some head-scratching, the notion that reconciliation with God comes through a broken heart, through dust and ashes, symbols of death rather than life. Isn’t it rather healing that we are looking for; health and wholeness and life abundant? It seems almost counter-productive to gather the people to a solemn assembly, a feast before the Lord, in order to proclaim a fast. And then, in a crowning irony, once we are all here, gathered to pray, Jesus tells us to go and hide in our rooms and close our doors and pray to God in secret.

Martin L. Smith, in a very prayerful book, writes that the reason that Jesus gave this strange instruction to his disciples, men and women who probably found it quite difficult to secure a private place to pray, was to emphasize the whole-heartedness of prayer. Smith says,

 Jesus could have recommended his followers to go on praying in public as before, but to suppress all outward signs of being at prayer. ‘When you pray, make it appear to those around you as though you were merely carrying on your everyday business.’… Isn’t this, after all, just what many of us try to do?  We pray ‘in our heads’ while keeping up the appearance of merely walking the dog or of being lost in the usual reverie of subway passengers.[1]

What Smith doesn’t say bluntly, but could, is that we tend to pray whilst trying not to look ‘weird,’ or ‘different,’ fanatical,’ or, let’s face it, religious.

Fair enough. Because as long as we are worrying about what other people are thinking, we are not giving our full attention to God. We are praying, we are trying, we are learning, we are grasping at straws, but we are not taking whole-hearted gulps of God-air, of devoted, reconciling, one-with-God prayer.

So, in order to pray with our whole hearts, bodies, minds, spirits, with all our strength and soul, we need to develop the practice of private prayer. Jesus, remember, used to sneak away by himself when he needed a time of prayer, a time to reconcile, to know himself one with God. Smith, again:

 Prayer in private is prayer which can give God undivided attention and in which we can be wholly ourselves without the inhibitions imposed by the presence of others. Unobserved and free from the fear of interruption, there is no need to behave as if we were actually engaged in something other than prayer. If we cry the tears may flow without disconcerting others or arousing their curiosity.[2]

In private, with only God to see us face to face, we may rend our hearts without shame, or distraction, or reserve.

Our hearts, let’s face it, are already broken. We know our sin; we know our own wounds; we know the hearts that we ourselves have broken. We may hide them from one another, washing our faces and blotting our eyes and walking tall, putting on a brave face, but behind closed doors, God waits to hear the whole truth, the true story of our lives; waits to heal our broken hearts, if only we will place them in God’s hands. And, Jesus tells us, God will richly reward us.

The Reverend C. Eric Funston, Rector of St Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, writing about friendship with God on his blog on Monday quoted the writer Anais Nin:

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”[3]

What greater reward could there be than to know God as a true friend, and to build a new world, a new life together? What better new world than one in which we are washed clean, presented with a clean heart, a new and right spirit, new life?

What better hope, in the midst of our mortality, than a God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love?

Our hearts are already broken, but God waits to heal them, if we will place them in God’s hands, risking the vulnerability, the intimacy of private prayer, trusting our hearts to God’s hands, who will hold them, those fragile, beating things, tenderly, as the most precious gift in the world.

“For,” Jesus also says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

God has invested great treasure in us, making us even from the dust in the divine image; breathing life into us by way of God’s own Holy Spirit; sending Jesus to us, God’s own Son. God has invested the greatest treasure in you, and where God places treasure, there the divine heart will dwell, too.

Do you doubt it? That’s ok: go into your room, close the door, and pray to God your Father your secret doubts, and your Father, who hears you in secret, who is gracious and slow to anger, who is awaiting your reconciliation, your trust, your broken heart: that God will reward you with the most tender mercy, with abounding and astonishing, heart-rending and heart-mending, steadfast love.

May you know a wholly holy, no-holds-barred Lent; and may you find new worlds, new life in the God who has entrusted the heart of Christ to you, so that you may be reconciled to him.

Amen.

[1] Martin L. Smith, The Word Is Very Near You: a guide to praying with scripture (Cowley Publications, 1989), 71

[2] Ibid, 72

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Ash Wednesday treasures

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Rosalind C Hughes

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” says Jesus. God has invested great treasure in us, making us even out of the dust in the divine image; breathing life into our nostrils, even through God’s own Holy Spirit; creating in us clean hearts and new spirits; investing in a human body just to be among us, to touch us. God has invested great treasure in us, and where God’s treasure is, won’t the divine heart be/beat also?

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