The downturn in her health was so precipitous that it was frighteningly obvious that something was very wrong. This slower more difficult road to recovery takes a bit more care and attention to see.
I revealed a few days ago that I was a big fan of the book of Acts because of the story that it told, but there is also something to be said for how the story is told. Acts, even though it was not read this way by the early church, is more or less the sequel to Luke. It continues the Gospel story as the story of the fledgling church. Luke is the longest gospel, and when you add Acts to it, it becomes quite a miraculous piece of literature.
Movies with sequels generally take their time with character development and plot. With movies like The Godfather, The Lord of the Rings, etc. individual movies within the series may make sense in and of themselves, but they blossom into new intricacy and meaning when viewed together (Especially if you waste a Saturday and watch them consecutively). This perspective is only gained, however, through a significant investment of time.
So too with Luke/Acts.
Mark on the other hand is a violently fast paced Gospel. The author of Mark uses the word "immediately" no less than 30 times. Scenes crash into one another, and you can sense the urgency in the writer's mind that this Kingdom of God thing is important and that it's probably coming very soon. My favorite moment in Mark's Gospel is when Jesus is baptized. In most modern translations it says something like "the sky opened and the spirit descended like a dove", but in the Greek the word for "opened" is "schizomai" which literally means torn apart. It's the same root from which we get the word schizophrenia. The kingdom was breaking through, impolitely at best, and it was doing it right then and there.
Mark was written very soon after Jesus' death, and it was years until the author of Luke took to penning his works, and so the urgency of Mark gave way not to complacency, but to nuance. Luke realized that the church might be in this for the long haul, and so they would need to develop patience, and the eyes to see the Kingdom of God in the ordinary.
Our lives were torn apart with Mark's efficiency, but recovery has taken a more Lukan theme. There are thin places where those with the patience and perception can see the Kingdom breaking through the everyday. I have begun to see that what I believed to be an impassible chasm is perhaps one of these thin places. Where God seemed nowhere to be found, I have begun to sense signs of the in-breaking kingdom.
In Rodney Stark's book "The Rise of Christianity" he proposes, among other things, that one of the primary reasons the church in Acts grew so quickly was that they were not afraid to care for one another. They devoted themselves to the teaching of the disciples, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer, but they also devoted themselves to one another. When there were plagues that wiped out hundreds of thousands of Romans, the Christians stayed to care for the sick while everyone else got out of town. Not only did this lower mortality among the Christians, but it served as a witness to others. To them, even a plague was an opportunity to enact the kingdom that Jesus (and Luke) had urged them to imagine as present among them in even the smallest acts of kindness.
So, if the Kingdom of God is marked by mercy and grace, you have been ambassadors of that kingdom. In each prayer or loving thought, in food, in visits, and in a thousand other kindnesses, you have enacted the kingdom on earth. It has taken me a month to come to this understanding, but as loathsome as this condition is, it has been an opportunity for God to come near to us in each one of you.
