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Christ The King

 That's what we celebrate today. It's a bit like Church New Year's, and that makes sense, because after this is Advent. As I think back over the year, it's a lot. We have much to be thankful for, but we have much to weep and cry about.

It's so hard to be a Christian, and I don't mean just in the usual spiritual ways. It is the hardest when the people who are supposed to be like Christ to us fail in some heinous way.

I honestly can't blame anyone who goes through the darkness of unbelief, if their spiritual leader does something truly evil. It goes beyond the forgiveness that Jesus requires of us in "normal" life. If we lose our temper, or we forget something important, or we say something hurtful, these are things that are normal, almost routine.

And then some things are much, much worse.

It's natural to wonder if God is watching, and if he is watching, why isn't he doing anything?

Tim and I were talking about this the other day, and I recalled that forgiveness according to the Hebrew mind is multifaceted. There is one forgiveness that expects and requires acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and restitution. And we know in the cases of many evildoers, that this acknowledgment and restitution may never come. Yet there is another kind of forgiveness, almost given as a gift to ourselves, so that we are not consumed by anger and bitterness. It is unilateral, and it does not depend upon what others do, or fail to do. Neither forgiveness is easy to offer. Yet we might even realize that we cannot stay in a certain place. To carry burdens, we have to take them somewhere, to someone. We're not meant to hold them in place. Suffice to say, life is a journey, and some parts of the journey are extremely hard.

If I can will the good for someone else, then I love them, even if we're not going to have dinner or a beer together. And in some cases, we really shouldn't. So on this day when we celebrate Christ as King, I think we should proclaim him as Prince of Peace as well. It's a peace that we may be struggling to obtain, but it is a peace that we truly desire.

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