Introduction by Jeff Lawrence,
Communiqué Co-Founding Editor

When the hugely popular Blue Like Jazz first hit the stores in 2003, I heard about it almost weekly from friends at the church where I pastor. It didn't help that my office is decorated with classic jazz album covers like Mahalia Jackson's Newport 1958 and John Coltrane's Blue Train. Turns out the book has more to do with my love of God than my love of jazz, the former of which, on a good day, I consider the more important of the two.

Donald Miller, with the success of Blue Like Jazz, emerged as the next hot writer in irreverent Christian spirituality, following Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies. In addition to Jazz, Miller now has four books on his list, including Searching for God Knows What, Through Painted Deserts, and the new To Own a Dragon. Remaining within the boundaries of Evangelical theology, Miller likes to push most other limits of Evangelicalism, often seeking to free Evangelicals from the social and political restrictions found in that culture.

It seems odd to write it, but Miller reminds me of C. S. Lewis. I might have been infected by the hype of the movie The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which was released in December of 2005, but I think there are significant similarities between the popular Christian writers. Most obvious among reasons not to associate the two: Lewis was an Oxford professor while Donald Miller, in his words, "never really went" to college. While Lewis's attempt to sound conversational in Mere Christianity appears rigid next to Miller's free-flowing style, both writers have written deeply of Christian spirituality in a way that connects with Everyman, maintaining an apologetic bent (the subtitle for Blue Like Jazz is Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality). But the real connection for me is the ability to describe what the spiritual life feels like. They capture the experience of believing and doubting, following and failing Jesus. In reading Miller, as with Lewis, I have the sense that his sins are as real as his dreams and that love and faith penetrate both equally.

I met Donald Miller recently at a conference for pastors, where he presented a session titled "The Gospel: More Like Marriage, Less Like Formula." To make his case, Miller talked us through the balcony scene from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which he describes as "the greatest art I've seen that explains how beautiful it is to cast our hope for redemption upon Christ." As I listened, I couldn't help but want to share his insights with the readers of Communiqué. Some of his presentation was published as the final chapter of Searching for God Knows What. Donald Miller and Thomas Nelson Publishers have allowed us reprint that chapter, "The Gospel of Jesus: Why William Shakespeare was a Prophet," for you.

May it bring you hope for tomorrow.

After attending the writers' seminar, the one that taught us to present self-help arguments in three-step formulas, and after I tried to write one myself, having looked through Scripture to find anything like a self-help formula, and after having found nothing, nothing appealing anyway, I started wondering exactly how a person would explain the gospel of Jesus. Let's say you had a friend like Omar who was wondering, and you no longer believed the gospel could be presented accurately using a step-by-step guide with all the beauty of blender instructions, what exactly would you say?

And I supposed what you would have to do would be to tell a bunch of stories. You could explain the basics in propositional speak, but to get to the heart of the thing you would have to tell a bunch of stories. After all, this is what God does in Scripture. And it's real-life stuff, too, as though He interacted with humanity to create allegories inside the actual story, so that the living allegories would point outward, toward what the big story is about. Take the book of Job, for instance. Some would say the book of Job is about pain, that hidden inside the story are secret steps to take when you happen to be dealing with pain. I don't think this is true, exactly. I think the book of Job is a story about life, and there aren't any secret steps in it at all.

My friend John MacMurray tells me the first book written in the Bible is the book of Job. Moses wrote Job before he wrote Genesis, scholars agree, and so the first thing God wanted to communicate to mankind was that life is hard, and there is pain, great pain in life, and yet the answer to this pain, or the cure for this pain, is not given in explanation; rather, God offers to this pain, or this life experience, Himself. Not steps, not an understanding, not a philosophy, but Himself. I take this to mean the first thing God wanted to communicate to humanity was that He was God, He was very large and in control, storing snow in Kansas, stopping waves at a certain point on the beach, causing clouds to carry rain, causing wind to race down imaginary hills of barometric pressure, and that if He could do all this, then He could be trusted, and that, perhaps, this would help us through our lives. And so from the beginning, from the very first story told in Scripture, God presents life, as it is, without escape, with only Himself to cling to. It worked for Job, after all, because even before God healed him and even before God returned his wealth and even while Job was sitting by a fire picking scabs from his wounds and mourning his family, he would respond to the whirlwind God spoke through by saying, All this is too marvelous for me.

Another story God tells is of Hosea. This is a story God actually made happen by telling Hosea, His prophet, to marry and have children with a whore. It's a terribly painful story, to be honest, thick with love and deception, with the pain and heartache of a man who loves a woman purely and a woman who opens her legs at the drop of a hat. She has issues, to be sure, but Hosea loves her through those issues, sees her beauty, is mesmerized by her beauty and the hope of a love with her. His love is unrelenting, pure as diamonds. It's real-life stuff, blood and tears, and in it is all the introduction we need to the love of God, identifying ourselves with this prostitute who runs from the only one who really cares about her. In this story, God explains to us the great dynamic that is taking place in the universe, the great story unfolding in the annals of humanity. God never could have said any of this with a formula. God could not have explained this by presenting a few steps, a few principles of spiritual growth. God wanted Hosea to experience this, and He wanted it written down for all of time, because He wanted humanity to know how He feels. And yet Hosea is another book largely ignored because it has nothing to help us achieve the American dream, unless, of course, we use it as instruction for sleeping around.

It strikes me, even as I type this, how distant and far our formulaic methodology is from the artful, narrative sort of methodology used to explain God in Scripture. It makes you wonder whether we can even get to the truth of our theology unless it is presented in the sort of methodology Scripture uses. It makes you wonder if all our time spent making lists would be better spent painting or writing or singing or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the church has a kind of pity for Scripture, always having to come behind it and explain everything, put everything into actionable steps, acronyms, and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of illiterate hillbillies. I don't think they were illiterate hillbillies, and I think the methodology God used to explain His truth is quite meaningful.

What I mean by this is I feel my life is a story, more than a list; I feel this blood slipping through my veins and these chemicals in my brain telling me I am hungry or lonely, sad or angry, in love or despondent. And I don't feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty, all this sun and moon, this smell of coming rain, the beautiful mysteries of women, or the truck-like complexity of men. It seems nearly heresy to explain the gospel of Jesus, this message an infinitely complex God has delivered to an infinitely complex humanity, in bullet points. How amazing is it that Christ would explain that to be His followers we must eat His flesh and drink His blood, and that He is the Bridegroom and we are the bride, and that we will be unified with Him in His death, and that we will love forever with Him in glory.

Do you know where I found what I believe is the most beautiful explanation for the gospel of Jesus ever presented? It's been under our noses for hundreds of years, right there in the most famous scene in all of English literature. You've probably rented the movie, and you studied it in high school. You may even have some of the lines memorized, or you might have played a character in its performance onstage. The greatest art I've seen that explains how beautiful it is to cast our hope for redemption upon Christ is the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.

I confess, the first time I saw the play I didn't think much of it; it seemed just the story of two kids who, rather stupidly, killed themselves over a misunderstanding about some poison, but a couple of years ago I got to thinking about the play again and stayed up late a bunch of nights in a row and read it over and over, always coming to the balcony scene and wondering why exactly Shakespeare would word the dialogue the way he did. I think you will find the wording quite peculiar.

At the beginning of the play, Romeo thinks he is in love with a girl named Rosaline, but he sees Juliet at a party and immediately falls in love with her, understanding his previous love for Rosaline as something formulaic and invented, something to make him feel he is in love rather than actually being in love. Mercutio, in fact, criticizes Romeo's affection for Rosaline, saying, "he loves by numbers." Immediately, however, when his eyes fall across Juliet, Romeo feels an instant love only the poets understand. They meet at a party, a party Romeo was not invited to, a party he and his friends have crashed, and he cannot take his eyes from this remarkable woman, a child of the Capulets. It becomes obvious that Juliet has, as Shakespeare says elsewhere, "taken prisoner the motion of Romeo's eye." And when Romeo and his friends leave the party, the young Montague sneaks away from his friends and moves stealthily back toward the Capulet home. His friends chastise him for such erratic behavior, to which Romeo responds, under his breath, "He jests at scars, that never felt a wound."

Romeo then crawls over the wall into the Capulets' courtyard and stands beneath Juliet's balcony, quietly so as to not disrupt the Capulet house because Romeo, a Montague, is despised by the Capulets, because of a feud between the two families, which, according to the prince of Verona, was "bred of airy words," that is, had come from nothing. And here, in the Capulet courtyard, Romeo speaks the now infamous lines:

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!
Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.

The scene indicates more than Romeo's preference for Juliet over Rosaline, but also his willingness to consider a lover who would disrupt his life, the obvious enmity between the two families having been established from scene one. Not only this, but in comparing his love for Juliet to his previous feelings for Rosaline, Romeo is comparing this compulsory love he feels for Juliet to that of the formulaic, Petrarchan feelings he experienced for Rosaline.

In this scene, Juliet may be considered the Bard's Christ figure, and Romeo the embodiment of the church, thus presenting Shakespeare's opinion of a Christian conversion experience. I realize it sounds farfetched, and that I may be reading theology into a play that is simply a love story, but upon closer examination we see Shakespeare borrowing exclusively from the themes of Christ's love for the church, even going so far as to leave his own story, that of Romeo's wanting of Juliet, to enter completely into the unique complexities of Christ's interaction with His bride.

You will have to remember that at the time of Shakespeare's popularity, everybody had an opinion about salvation. Many scholars believe the enmity between the Montagues and Capulets, for example, represented the tension between Protestants and Catholics. This view holds merit because at the time Shakespeare wrote the play, tension between the Protestants and Catholics had risen to a fever pitch on the streets outside the poet's home. Shakespeare was not writing in twenty-first-century America, where religion and state are separated and great caution is taken to keep opinions about the heavens within personal fences; rather, opinions regarding theology burned bright as flags. A brief history lesson might help us understand the poet's intent with the scene in the Capulet courtyard.

William Shakespeare was born not more than a century after the invention of the printing press, perhaps the most important invention of all time, greater in shaping culture than the Internet. The streets of London were alive with new buzz at the time Shakespeare began writing plays. People were learning how to read, and because of this nothing in history would be the same. The most dramatic changes in the social landscape stemmed from people's access to the Bible. Before the printing press, the Universal Church had distorted Scripture in an effort to control communities and amass wealth and power. As mentioned in a previous chapter, great cathedrals were being built throughout Europe from the profits of indulgences.

Luther's writings, then, along with those of John Calvin, began the Protestant (protesters) Reformation, which had dramatic implications in Shakespeare's London only thirty or so years later.

In England, the Reformation did not gain power until Henry VIII divorced his wife, which earned him an excommunication from the pope. Parliament then reacted to the pope by passing the Act of Supremacy, which made the king head of the church in England. Henry VIII was then succeeded by Edward VI, a ten-year-old boy, whose short six-year reign allowed the Anglican church to grow and begin its persecution of the Catholics. A sickly Edward VI died in 1553 and was replaced by his half-sister Mary, who earned the name Bloody Mary by upholding her Catholic roots, turning the tide on Protestants and executing them in large numbers. Mary's successor, Elizabeth, complied with her half sister's Catholic leanings while Mary was alive, but on her succession once again restored Protestantism to the throne. In this way, England's throne passed from Protestantism to Catholicism and back to Protestantism in the span of a single decade, each change bringing with it the slaughter of thousands.

Shakespeare was born and worked during the reign of Elizabeth. This set him in an England in which the religious tension had yet to subside. Like the factions that live in tension today in Northern Ireland, these two groups were at odds, their faith connected to their ideas about God and heaven, their political leanings, and their identities. It makes a great deal of sense then that from the struggle of Catholics against Protestants and Protestants against Catholics, Shakespeare may have molded his idea of a tension between the Montagues and Capulets. It is true the story of Romeo and Juliet existed many years before Shakespeare adapted it for the stage, but the poet may have borrowed from the tension on the street to color the tension between the two families. Indeed, with the tension as high as it was at the time, it is doubtful the argument did not color the text.

Reading the balcony scene through the lens of an Elizabethan audience reveals what I think is a powerful double entendre, one that suggests not only a sort of negotiation of love between Juliet and Romeo, but a kind of invitation from Christ to the church, to you and me, walking us on the heart path a person would need to traffic in order to know Christ and be saved from our broken natures. Without question, the precepts Juliet presents Romeo may be broken down as identical matches of the theology John Calvin penned only a few years before Shakespeare wrote the play. And it is these principles set in the context of a dramatic love story that truly bring the implications of the gospel of Jesus to life.

The Gospel of Jesus

Romeo is standing beneath Juliet's balcony, having wished for her to step onto her perch above the courtyard, bright as the sun, doing an end to the moon, when his wish is granted. Juliet slips out the doors of her bedroom, looks out on the evening with a sigh, and leans her gentle frame against her balcony railing. Romeo is silent beneath her beauty when Juliet speaks:

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father, and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

In these lines Juliet is expressing her love for Romeo, but also stating her understanding that the two shall never be one as long as he is called a Montague and she is called a Capulet. In a monologue Juliet would soon deliver, asking, "What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," the playwright borrows from the trouble of man's nature and the duality of his goodness and his brokenness, one being compatible for a relationship with God, and the other set in enmity, unable to mingle with the pure nature of God. Juliet asks Romeo to doff, or disavow, his name, and if he won't, then swear his love, and she will no longer be a Capulet. This means the two of them will have to meet within some other name, and, allegorically (though it's questionable whether Shakespeare intended this much), within some other nature. In the context of the story of Romeo and Juliet, this idea makes complete sense. The two want to be together, but their names keep them apart, so Juliet asks Romeo to throw off his name so the two will unite.

It struck me as I read these lines, however, that no less of a proposition was made by Christ in the Gospel of Luke:

Now great multitudes went with Him. And He turned and said to them, "If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple" (Luke 14:25-26, NKJV)

I used to read this passage and think of Jesus as difficult and strict and, to be honest, I didn't like Him for saying it. But when I saw it in the context of the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, the same ideas being expressed in an effort for two people to unite, it became something different. I wouldn't want the language to be any less strict. Language less strict might suggest love less pure. True love, love in its highest form, must cost the participants everything. Both parties have to be willing to give up everything in order to have each other. In exchange for what Scripture calls repentance, by renouncing our natures, by admitting our own brokenness, we may take all of Christ, identifying ourselves with His righteousness. We see this beautifully portrayed in the words of Juliet, who, after musing about Romeo's dual nature, delivers the thrust of her invitation:

Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

Should Romeo take Juliet up on her proposition, he will not gain love for love's sake, but rather Juliet herself. This idea is all biblical but the stuff of poets. The playwright understood that Christ's invitation was not an offer of heaven or mansions or money; it was, rather, Himself. In multiple contexts Jesus claims we shall be one with Him even as He and the disciples are one, and the Trinity before them are One. Just as, if a wife travels away from her family on business, the family feels her absence in their hearts, so we are to have this kind of oneness with Christ. And just as a sheep knows the voice of its shepherd, so are we to know the voice of Christ, and just as a lost child in a store feels fear and pain in his parent's absence, so we are to feel disoriented in the absence of God, and comfort in our relationship with Jesus. This, I believe, is what the Bible means when it speaks of our oneness: it isn't a technicality — it is an actual relationship.

Romeo hears these words from Juliet and understands the implications of her invitation. He believes that if he denies his name, she will deliver herself and the two shall become one. And this is where Shakespeare leaves the parallel elements of love story and picks up the pen of Calvin. Romeo, speaking to Juliet, says:

I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

Here Romeo indicates he believes what Juliet is saying is true. This confession of belief is crucial to Shakespeare's understanding of the proper recipient of love. There can be no doubting, no mistrust; one must have complete faith in the other that nothing is being held back. In our spirituality, we see nothing different. No less than two hundred times Scripture speaks of the importance of belief. "I take thee at thy word," Romeo says, meaning he believes Juliet's invitation, that she will do what she says she will do. Anything less than this complete trust from Romeo would not be love, anything less than pure trust would be a kind of careful negotiation. And careful negotiation isn't love. A person must be willing to be dashed on the rocks or made the fool in exchange for a relationship in order for pure love to take place. And in our spirituality, anything less indicates a question of God's character.

These ideas played out in the pages of Scripture have Christ asking that we "follow" Him, a term that in the Greek also indicates a clinging to Him or imitation of Him. Christ, in short, asks us to give everything, all our false redemption in the lifeboat, all our ideas about who God is, all our trust in something outside ourselves, to redeem us. In so doing, we die to our broken natures in exchange for His perfect nature, and find a unification with Him that will allow God to see us as one, just as a husband is one with a wife.

Pay attention to Romeo's response to Juliet. Romeo does not say yes, that he will change his name; rather, he understands that he has no power to change his nature, and he looks to Juliet and submits all power to her. Romeo says: "Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd."

If Romeo is to be made new, if his name is to be changed, it will not be of his own doing. He understands he has no ability to change his own name, that it will not be by an act of his own will that his nature is made new; rather, it will be on the whim and wish of Juliet. If she calls him love, then he will be called love, both his name and his nature changed, made new.

Indeed, a few lines later Juliet will call to Romeo, and Romeo will remind his muse that his name has been changed, and he will no longer answer to Romeo.

In our spirituality the idea is no less critical. Paul indicates that we have no ability to do good on our own. Now certainly we have the ability to do good things, to do nice things for people and even for God, but Paul spoke of a problem at the very core of our nature, that even our desire to submit to God, a good desire indeed, would have to be stimulated by Himself. We are in the lifeboat, children of Chernobyl. In this way, like Romeo, the whore that is the church of God bends itself before its muse in complete submission, asking only God, who has given Himself, to invite her into this dramatic story of love, passion, and union. The strength is all His, and the gift is all ours.

In this beautiful way William Shakespeare weaves the intricate complexities of the love relationship between God and the church into the context of narrative, and in so doing creates a scene that has not been eclipsed by ten million stories told since. When we read the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, we understand that what is being negotiated is love, and that the poet has explained the mysterious complexities of this negotiation perfectly. Everything is at stake, and everything must be given to achieve the unity of souls.

And yet the poet is not finished. The agreement has been made between Romeo and Juliet, but they are far from unified. In any other story, the credits would roll, but Shakespeare has more to teach us, and the true beauty is yet to come.

Unity in Death

In the pages of Scripture the desire for the afterlife does not involve a euphoria over troubles, exactly, but rather the opportunity to be with God. The euphoria over troubles comes as an afterthought, but it isn't the aim. The writers of the Bible seem to want to go and be with Christ the way the most intimate and passionate lovers, when separated, desire their reunion.

In this way, Christ is our Juliet. What we feel for Him now is but a shadow of what we will feel for Him in His glory. If you can imagine the greatest love of your life, multiplied by millions, speaking affirmation into your soul, you will have in your mind the awareness of Christ and the community of the Trinity. All the self-awareness that occurred to us in God's absence will dissolve as Christ's love tells us who we are. In His presence we will not hate ourselves, second-guess ourselves, or compare ourselves to others; but rather, our lives will be filled with the gratitude of His presence, and we will know for the first time the glory of being human. Just as each member of the Trinity is thankful for the other, just as it was in the Garden between man and his Maker, it will be between you and me, and between ourselves and the Godhead.

As such, there is still great trouble between Romeo and Juliet. While their love has been expressed, a certain poetic agreement has been made: the two cannot be unified because of the enduring strife between their families. They are still, for allegorical purposes, sludging their way through a fallen system. In this way, you and I must be unified with Christ in His death, and only in our actual deaths will we go and be with Him.

When man sinned against God, the wages of sin was death because, as has been said, no life can exist outside God, as He is the author and giver of life. Scripture indicates Christ took the sin of the world upon Himself and was crucified on a cross to satisfy God's necessary wrath toward that which is evil. He did this, Scripture says, because He loves us. As we die to ourselves, doff our names, we find He gives Himself to us just as Juliet to Romeo and we become one with Him, so that, like a couple newly married, God looks at us and sees one Being, His Son, united, as it were, with His bride, alive in His purity, just as Romeo was made new by Juliet. Christ's death, again, was not a technicality by which we are covered with grace, but rather a passionate and inconceivable act of kindness and altruism and love stemming from God's desire to be reunited with His creation.

Here I shall remain, with worms that are your chambermaids.

In keeping with the biblical narrative, Shakespeare painfully demands the couple's ultimate unity take place in their deaths. The two have tried at length to be together, but the rage between the families only intensifies as the play carries on toward its tragic end. A trick is planned: Juliet will fake her death, and the two will run off together. But Romeo is fooled by the seemingly dead body of his love, drinks from a poison himself, asking death to be the guide that leads him to his love. Slang during the Elizabethan period refer to sex as "one dying in the other," and Shakespeare has Romeo drink from a round cup, the symbol of a woman, and has Juliet thrust a dagger, a phallic symbol, into her stomach. Two distinct sets of imagery are employed, the first being that of sex, or union, and the second being the Christian imagery of the church being united with Christ in His death.

In Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet, the director pays reverence to Shakespeare's use of Christian imagery and so sets crosses and icons in nearly every frame. And in this final and most meaningful scene of the play, Luhrmann sets the characters in a cathedral complete with neon crosses posted at each pew. Romeo walks the aisle as though he were the bride in a wedding, an aisle lit with candles that lead to Juliet's body, which is set on the altar like a sacrifice. It is here that Romeo takes his life to be with his love, and, once awakened from her sleep, Juliet does the same. Their painful struggle is at an end as the two are thought to be united in heaven, where there is a wedding in waiting. The camera then lifts upward from the bodies to reveal Romeo's and Juliet's tender limbs gently folded in an embrace, their forms laid amid a thousand burning candles that, as the camera lifts farther, reveal the image of a cross, the two lovers, finally, together in peace, one purifying the other, now enjoying the beauty of their companionship uninterrupted by the enmity that once ripped them apart.

The last time I watched this dramatic scene unfold I was preparing a series of lectures on the theological implications of the play, considering all of this in academic terms. And yet as I did this, late in the evening and alone in my room, I was suddenly struck with the power of Paul's words in his letter to the Romans. I confess I was moved to tears at the implications of his statements, set in the context of a love story to explain all love stories. Paul passionately presented to the Romans these beautiful ideas:

Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him! (Romans 5:9 NIV)

For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! (5:10)

If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. (6:5)

And later in his letter:

If we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. (6:8)

I had known in my head that these principles we understand, these beautiful theological ideas, were plot twists in a story of love, a story of God reaching out to mankind, but I don't think it was until I watched that final scene of Romeo + Juliet, with Paul's letter to the Romans open on my desk, that our spirituality was in fact a love story for me. These were not principles I could figure out and deliver to an audience, or ideas I could present in a book. This was God whispering in my ear that I no longer had to perform in a circus, I no longer had to defend myself in the sinking lifeboat, that God had come to earth, made Himself human, taken the world's sin upon Himself, and was crucified for me, so that His glory could shine through me, and I could be made whole.

And I go back to Eden, in my mind, to imagine what it is going to be like for you and me in heaven. I suppose it will be a new and marvelous paradise, where love will exist in its purest form, where the beauty of diversity will be understood for the first time, where self-hatred will fade into an agreement with God about the splendor of His creation, where physical beauty will no longer be used as a commodity, where you and I will feel free in our sincere love for others, ourselves, and God. And I suppose it will be in heaven that you and I actually understand each other, all the drama of the lifeboat a distant memory, all the arguments we had seeming so inconsequential, and the glory of God before us in all His majesty, shining like sunlight through our souls. This will be a good thing, my friend.

The lifeboat system of redemption seems so ugly in comparison to the love of God. We can trust our fate to a jury of peers in the lifeboat, we can work to accumulate wealth, buy beauty under a surgeon's knife, panic for our identities under the fickle friendship of culture, and still die in separation from the one voice we really needed to hear.

To me, it is more beautiful to trust Christ, deny our fathers and refuse our names, die to ourselves and live again in Him, raised up in the wave of His resurrection, baptized and made new in the purity of His righteousness. I hope you will join me in clinging to Him.

Time, which was God's friend, is now His enemy, and you and I are going to end with it soon. If you will lift a glass of wine with me, I would like to remember Him: Here is to Christ for making us, to Christ for rescuing us, and to Christ, who gives hope for tomorrow.

O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick.