Mmmm.. tasty!!!

Is your relationship with the Lord made of words or stuff? The incredible potency of the sacraments is bound up in the reality that they are made of stuff.. bread and wine (ok, juice for us UM's!) and water for baptism...we use oil for healing prayers, incense to add scents and aroma, ashes to speak of mortality and musical instruments to give sonic substance to a message that sometimes seems far away, "eternal" if you will. I remember going to the monastery in Jerusalem where the Lord's prayer lined the archways on many tablets written in dozens and dozens of languages. As inspiring as it was to hear the LP spoken in so many different tongues (we wound up hearing it in French, German, Arabic, and Spanish among just a few; I tackled the Russian!), the heart felt expressions of many languages stayed right there on the wall and the only thing we carried from that encounter were words. Comforting yes, but waiting for each of us to bring them to life, to put them into action. By giving someone else some bread when we had some left over, extending the hand of forgiveness when it was needed, grabbing ahold of the strength of another when feeling weak and tempted, remembering that God has set us apart to not just be good, but to do good! Mack is getting a sensory experience which coaxes the most basic needs out of him; need to eat, to be touched, to look not into a word about Jesus but directly into his eyes.

Does God get mad? It sounds like the kids of the kingdom can make one heck of a mess of their lives! Have you ever felt God was mad at you? Revelation (3:19) tells us that God reproves the ones the Lord loves, so correction is not a sign of dislike, but of love!
"But the only one pretending is you.".... Papa addresses Mack's assumptions by challenging them (p.119). What assumptions do you have about God which might be challenged? How do you work though the challenges?