Tabitha

Who are our debtors, literal or figurative, and what do they owe us? Most of us could probably come up with a list. The verse makes us God’s debtors. What do we owe Him? Everything. More than we can conceive of. But a debt is an obligation. The prophets make it clear that sacrifice does not satisfy the Lord’s requirement of us. Doing justice and

“I had been visited by grace in its distressing guise of having run out of any more good ideas.”

— Anne Lamott, Somehow (52)

In the idolatrous worship of Mammon and Molech, there can be no room for beauty. The old gods of greed and consumption do not give us beauty to behold. They attempt to turn all that is beautiful into all that can be objectified and consumed. In the place of wonder, they give us lust. This is because they know what the ancient Christian saints and

“But rationalizing what God does involves the risk of losing its difficulty and otherness to human expectations. His great forgiveness of the first criminal offends people’s sense of justice, unless they can find a way to read vengefulness into the tale. We are instead to learn that mercy is nearer than justice to Godliness, and that mercy can

“If one cannot make a living at writing, then writing is freed from the responsibility of supporting us. We choose to do it anyway.”

Dear Writer by Maggie Smith, pp. 5.

“Abram again show little understanding of the nature of God. In imagining his relationship with God as exclusive, he denies respect to these strangers whose righteousness God Himself recognizes, values, and protects.

The moral appears to be that fear of outsiders, which amounts to contempt for them, leads to unrighteous behavior, and also that God