The Goodness of God is Tangible
A short note from the road
I’m traveling this week, readers, giving several talks in the Dallas area.
I wanted to pop in to share a couple words of encouragement (no time for proofreading! Sorry,
!).The way my speaking schedule worked out, I ended up with one extra day in the middle of events. So I brought my laptop and some books and figured I’d spend the day doing work.
But my hosts had other plans. After taking me to the amazing Dallas Museum of Art the day before during some down time, they took me the next day to the arboretum where we had a real picnic, to an antique store so I could look for (and did find!) some vintage rings (see below) and to one high-end mall then another (so I could go to a real Uniqlo store—fun, fun!). I even got back in time to hang out at the hotel pool for a bit before being picked up by two of my former students (from 15 years ago!!!) to go get Tex Mex!
Yesterday I posted this about all this:
Then my friend Seana posted in reply:
Here’s the thing: It’s easy to look from the outside without knowing the full story and think I lead a glamorous, jet-setting life. It can look like that. But there is much more beneath the story and what got me here that is not so nice. Even in this very trip there are some elements of that story that played out in very specific ways. Seana knows this (not all, but enough). So she knows enough to state this truth as powerfully as she did.
And it really is the truth.
So I wanted to share that with you before I’m off to my next event today.
God is good. His goodness is all around us even in the sorrows and disappointments.
:My new (old) ring will always remind me.
A theology that recognizes "the goodness of God in the land of the living" is the most attractive to the world...and you exemplify that so well, Karen. And that ring will always be a reminder.
There’s something deeply incarnational in this simple dispatch from the road, a reminder that the goodness of God is not always thunderous or abstract, but often rests in the tangible: a ring, a shared meal, a splash of sunlight at the pool.
What you’ve named, however briefly, is the sacramentality of the ordinary. That joy and sorrow are never cleanly separated, and that divine tenderness often reaches us not in spite of our weariness, but through it. Even vintage jewelry can become a reliquary of grace.