God is not in a hurry

one of my goals this week is to reread one book and read another...

gerhard lohfink has written a book that i connect with. i am picking it up again and rereading and through the review seeing things i saw before plus other things, the way you look at something a second time and are amazed you missed it the first time.

in the book he says that God is not in a hurry, and starts small, and begins new and special things in specific places. he works through specific places through specific people...so we know of people like abraham and places like jerusalem and an execution on a cross. and we can also read in the bible of the vast quantities of time in which his intentions happen, across generations, his purposes happen but at a different rate of change than most would accomodate.

"God begins with very small things, not by setting masses in motion. To change the whole world God has at first no one but Abraham...the description of how Abraham moves from one encampment to another reveals something else: God is not in a hurry. In light of the problems of the world the movements of a wandering Aramean and his concerns for tent and flock seem positively laughable, and yet the reader senses that something crucial is happening here: the very fact that someone relies entirely on God's promise will change the world. God takes time, but not empty time. In one place in the world now faith is being practiced; not an otherworldly, world-ignorant faith, but a faith that is at home in the daily events and economic necessities and yet lives out of an endless promise....It is the very opposite of the temporal urgency of revolutionaries....All this makes clear that from the point of view of terrible social affliction there is no time. From the standpoint of the world the hands of the clock are always close to twelve. And yet God continually provides humanity with more time, even exposing gigantic periods before them, because God does not use force like a revolutionary in a blind rage. God favors a 'silent revolution' hat has time to see, to understand, to learn, and to repent."