When Jesus ascends, he does so, bearing gifts for you.
The ascension is not about Jesus going away. It's about Jesus taking his rightful place so that he might fill the world with his presence and power.

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So it is with my little garden as well; dead, so it would seem. Nothing. Barren.
Have you ever grown despondent from trying so hard to stop behaving in certain destructive ways, but always failing?
This time of year, Christmas time, the world isn't so much Christ-expectant as it is Christ-haunted.
Sometimes we try be the bad god, sometimes the good god, oftentimes a freaky hybrid of both. The result is the same: Jesus the savior just gets in our way.
I have the easiest time remembering all the good things I have done. How I was kind in the face of anger.
Over and over, generation after generation, sinners repeat the same mistake. "How is it possible that God can be a man," we ask.
My husband and I just adopted Duke, a very cute beagle mix, from a nearby shelter. He is about three years old and was found wandering in a park several months ago.
They were incapable of covering their shame. They knew what they'd done was evil, but since they were only "like" God, there was no way for them to go back and replace evil with good.
Christians are Christians not because of anything that they have done but because of everything Christ has done for them.
I once heard an old, retired Lutheran professor give in interview on a podcast. He was asked by the interviewer why people should bother going to church if they could just be saved through a personal relationship with Jesus?
Read your life like a Hebrew, from the end to the beginning, and you will see that the last is first. The dead are alive, the cursed are blessed, the humble are exalted.
We who fall within the Protestant camp of Christianity have longstanding issues with ritual. I get that. Ritual is often abused. Idolatrized. It can easily devolve into a hollow act of religious farce.