Minute Meditations

God created us as bodily creatures. The most important aspects of our faith, the ones that touch the greatest mysteries of how we unite ourselves to God, must be bodily experiences as much as they are spiritual ones. The Church, following the example of a Savior who healed with spit and dirt and then proclaimed it was faith that had saved, does not separate our physical experience of grace from our spiritual experience of it. The Church understands our human makeup, body and soul, and knows our Eden instinct longs for both aspects to come back to the fullness of our original relationship with God.

—from When We Were Eve: Uncovering the Woman God Created You to Be by Colleen Mitchell

Our all-loving God does not desire that we seek suffering to become holy, but he does desire that we surrender to him in our suffering so that in our brokenness, his mercy can make us whole again. In being broken open by suffering, we are offered the opportunity to let those open spaces be filled with the mercy and compassion of our God, and in the depth of that mercy to be moved to love him more deeply. Surrendering to suffering is the path we walk backwards through the pain of the fall toward the life of Eden.

—from When We Were Eve: Uncovering the Woman God Created You to Be by Colleen Mitchell

It is God’s love that is still holding me by the shoulder as, spoonful by spoonful, I consume the warmth of his mercy into my physical and spiritual being. And when I am fully restored and well, it will be with love and great delight that he touches my hand and calls me to serve again.

We are not called to live a life of servitude to a demanding Father. We are his children whom he wants to heal and feed, then lift into service as evidence of his great love and delight in us. Let us not confuse the two any longer but open our eyes and be fed so that we might serve him from the fullness of our hearts and our confidence in his love.

—from When We Were Eve: Uncovering the Woman God Created You to Be by Colleen Mitchell

I began to see that the intent of Christ was never to relegate redemption to the spiritual realm, leaving us to wait desperately to shed this cumbersome physical world. No, he is in all things and he holds everything together. He is in the bread we eat, he is in the touch of our neighbor, he is in the tears of our children, he is in the dirt we dig up, and he is in the voice of the poor. 

I can't escape the million proofs of a Creator’s delight in creation nor his determination to use it to woo me on earth.

—from When We Were Eve: Uncovering the Woman God Created You to Be by Colleen Mitchell