Be kind and hopeful with your family and friends and the strangers you meet along the way. We need one another. This is not a prediction of a need arising, we have always needed one another. Think of the technology, money, and man hours that has gone into our hate and our wars. If we put that into our love and our hope maybe we could bring heaven to earth. But we fear if we did our enemy would stay our enemy and over run us. Faith has to begin somewhere in someone for something.

Respect, trust, and love has to rise up among the fires of war or nothing will ever change. Love has to walk out of the tomb of death and bring new life. Grace has to return everyone back to a state of innocence, or we stand guilty in our shame, and the war between man and man and man and God continues. Forgiveness has to keep us in a state of peace that passes all worldly understanding or the destroyer will continue to destroy lives and liberty. Personally, I believe God through Jesus our Savior has provided an answer that even professing Christians cannot agree on.

The weapon the destroyer uses is our ideas of good and evil. The peace begins with grace for our ideas, and grace for the ones we see as evil based on our ideas. The purging of our minds and hearts begins with grace. The one who does evil is evil, and the one who does righteousness is good – only God is good! Now remains faith, hope, and love the greatest being faith and hope in love. Righteousness only exists for mankind when we abide in the righteous unaware of our own good and evil. The destroyer armed us against God in the garden. But our ideas could not destroy God. And changing our belief system by a mandate of law will not either.

When we were free, we used our freedom to oppress and hate those we could not bear to see as equally desiring of the liberty. That is what the knowledge of good and evil does. It destroys liberty for everyone because it will not allow liberty for all to exist. With our liberties in danger, now we want those of another opinion to show us mercy and grace and return the liberty we denied them. We denied them liberty to choose love over hate, because hate is all we gave them while their opinion remained different from our own. Yes, we were told a time would come when good would be called evil. And we did just that when we called hatred of others a love for God.

We are none innocent, no not one. None of us deserve the love God has bestowed upon us. God is worthy to love us anyway. None of us deserve grace, but Jesus is worthy to give us grace anyway. Our belief in a loving graceful God does not give us the liberty to hate. We have the liberty to love as a gift from God’s Spirit. We have the gift of grace for grace given to us by God, purchased by Him for us. Grace is free to us as a gift shared by love. Even before one accepts salvation from God as a gift, love covers a multitude. So, be kind and hopeful with you family and friends and the strangers you meet along the way; covering them with the love that sent the One who bled the blood that washes away.