I said I would pray for a miracle, but I confessed I wasn't sure what a miracle would be like. And I began to think more about miracle. And the boundless cosmos. And then yesterday, as many of us gathered for the funeral of Stephen's daughter, I felt in a way that was so real that I could almost hold it in my hands the even more unbounded richness of the love for us and in that moment, especially for Stephen and his surviving daughter, of the God whose own child died. In that moment, in that place, I had a glimpse of the unimaginable grief of God, held in and upheld by an even more powerful love.
Grace abounds, and comfort.
Wilderness, for the writer of that great poetry we heard today from the second, later Isaiah, was a place of beginning. To invoke it meant to summon a birth. Wilderness is where life begins, and begins again, and again. Into that wilderness, God sends us-willy nilly, like it or not. And all flesh shall see it together .