May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. 2 Corinthians 13:14
“God’s generosity to us is out of the abundance, mutuality, and completeness of God’s own trinitarian life. Our generosity starts with this sense of abundant life appropriated by faith…There is a generous staring of time and space to the lonely and dispossessed. There is generosity to meet immediate as well as long-term needs. There is the sharing of ourselves, allowing other persons to enter our communities, just as the Trinity has invited us into the divine society of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This form of generosity, patterned on the generosity of God, is a means of becoming whole and holy through the participation in God’s own divine life…
What the Trinity offers us is a whole and holy model that informs and guides our commitments to just, caring, mutual relationships with others, as well as our commitment to their becoming. Becoming whole and holy occurs in our ongoing participation in the divine life of the Trinity, and through our attention and practices of virtues, those habits that form us and help us integrate what we believe with how we live. Desiring consonance between who are becoming and how we live is the expression of lives moving toward embodied wholeness and holiness, that which enables us to attend to the needs of others based on God’s vision of shalom.”
Wyndy Corbin Reuschling in “Wholeness and Holiness: Christian Moral Formation” in Becoming Whole and Holy: An Integrative Conversation about Christian Formation by Jeannine K. Brown, Carla M. Dahl, and Wyndy Corbin Reuschling (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011) 137, 140.
Every person either functions out of fear and scarcity or faith and abundance. We take hold of the latter when we participate with our trinitarian God in the divine life offered to us. Thus, “becoming whole and holy” is what happens to us on the faith journey, we become the people God designed us to be and live the life God designed us to live.
I thought of this yesterday when my son and I took Hope St. Teresa, his German Shorthair Pointer puppy, to her first hunting class where I shot this header photo. Sammy is training her to be what God made her to be, a bird dog. It was fun to watch her retrieve a bird over and over and grow in the process.
Along these lines, the Apostle Paul reminds us that Christ lavishes us with grace so we can extend it to others, the Father fills us with love so we can love others, even our enemies, and the Spirit unites us together in fellowship (koinonia), which implies a community that gives and receives the good gifts of God. Collectively, the triune God offers us shalom.
Are you becoming whole and holy? Don’t try to figure it out and then live it out. Following Jesus requires faith. You must do what He says and you figure it out as you go. He transforms you on the journey. Just like it takes many lessons to train a hunting dog, becoming whole and holy takes time.