Today's Five Minute Friday continues Kate Motaung's October 2015 edition of 31 days of free writes; today is day 23! We got a list of prompts for every day of the month except Fridays that remain a mystery until Kate posts at 19:00 Thursday. You know how these free writes go―write unedited for five minutes.
Friday 23 October: Joy
Isaiah 55:12 at the end of 2nd Isaiah – the exilic Isaiah – follows the über-famous passage about God's word bearing fruit and not returning empty to heaven. The entire chapter 55 dances and sings with joy-filled hope that forms a paradigm for us to follow in this technology-saturated century. Please note—God promises joy and shalom to the human exiles; creation responds with joy to the people's joy!!
For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Can you imagine what a hallelujah time for rejoicing it would be for the forests, rivers, sky, oceans, mountains, deserts, fields, farms, and cities if the divine presence in their midst cared so well for them they'd sing and dance in joy-filled response? That "divine presence" in the midst of creation now is us, the church, the people of God filled with the pentecostal spirit of life! The rest of creation depends on human creatures that depend on the rest of creation... besides being the venue, focus, and locus of God's merciful grace-filled love, planet earth now is God's temple, God's earthly dwelling.
In addition to several Isaiah passages, Psalms 96, 98, and 148 that describe creation rejoicing are the psalms appointed in the Revised Common Lectionary – RCL – for Christmas (incarnation, nativity, yuletide, noël).
At first I thought this topic of "joy" would be an edit later and write longer for sure, but after writing a little beyond two minutes, instead of continuing for a full five minutes I decided to post the designs I created with the nativity psalms. They originally were timeline banner-cover photos on my Facebook design page.
I love that picture that you made - matches the theme of joy so well.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful image and post.
ReplyDelete