Maybe faith, then, is less about believing a fact about God and more about entrusting God and the people around you with the truth about who you are, your joys, and your needs alike.

If we believe, at the bottom of it all, that we are loved unconditionally by God, we can live like we have nothing to lose. We can pray and sing and question and argue like we have nothing to prove.

Perhaps the gospel writer is alluding in the double mention of 12 years that healing does not fully happen in an instant. Healing emerges as multiple layers are unpeeled over time. It happens within and through ongoing relationships.

What if the expansion of our compassion is so important to God that God would rather take the blame for our enemy’s anger than let our anger get the final say in who we believe our enemy to be?

Whether or not you’re a gardener or a farmer, the simple, radical suggestion of this story is that the kingdom is not wholly reliant upon your efforts. In fact, it’s okay if you want to take a nap. I wonder, though, if we can receive this as good news?

Paul sees the mission of Jesus as renewing the unseen foundation of humankind. Christ’s mission teaches us that the pathway to the eternal is not through temporary outward fame or success, but through an inner core of gratitude, humility and service. His mission is to draw us into the ultimate peace that comes from serving a being and a community greater than ourselves.

For all of Eli’s flaws, he is surely a model for any of us called to hold space for anyone else to doubt whatever settled certainty is keeping them from hearing the life God might be calling them to live.

Maybe we could use a reminder that, when we try to talk about God, we are oysters, looking at starfish, trying to imagine a ballerina.

In our lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, the strange signs of wind and fire point not to themselves but to the wild power of the Holy Spirit unleashed not to scatter but to gather, unleashed not to destroy but to re-create.

Jesus says that love is what makes space for the truth to emerge. Love and truth are twin pillars, we might even say, that hold things up so the walls we hide behind can finally come down. Only in truthfulness and love will we become one as Jesus and the God he still draws us to are one.