Power tries force. Love changes the room. In Madeline's Laigle's A Wrinkle in Time, a sister enters a chamber that demands sameness and to acquiesce. Picture the scene on the planet Kamazots. A central intelligence called IT keeps a whole city in lockstep. Same rhythm, same pace, same smile. Meg's younger brother, Charles Wallace, has been pulled under that rhythm. His free self swallowed by the pressure to match the beat, to assimilate. Its goal is perfect control. And Meg stands there with one deep fear. If IT remains in power, she'll lose her brother forever. She tries what most of us try first. Logic. Then defiance. Even anger. Nothing cracks in. Then Meg turns to her brother, and not the system, and speaks what is stubbornly particularly him. His offbeat humor. His curious questions. The way he notices what so many others miss. And the pulse in the room stumbles. Not because she has overpowered it, but because love entered and makes space for Charles Wallace to come back to himself.
[00:27:47]
We know rooms like this. Conference tables, classrooms, living rooms, where control sits heavy, and people shrink to fit in it. Shoulders rise and voices thin out. When force fills the air, everything narrows. When love shows up, space opens, breath returns, hope gets a seat at the table, and we remember and see each other for who we are.
[00:29:34]
Maybe you've felt it lately in your day-to-day lives, a pull to clamp down or to win, to hold tighter. I usually experience it most with either my 4 or my 16-year-old. It works for a moment, and then it slips through your fingers, like trying to hold sand in fists instead of open palms. And the human question underneath it is sharp and yet fairly common. What actually changes a room or a relationship or a community? Pressure or presence?
[00:30:05]
If that question lands with you in any way today, I invite you to stay with it. This may be how a next chapter begins in our bodies and our neighborhoods and our shared life together. And here's why that matters. What changes a room has to change a life. It has to change a block or a city. Otherwise, new is only a mood or a season. It's not a future.
[00:30:48]
And if love is going to loosen the air that we breathe in, it has to become a practice. Habits that we carry into meetings and into our kitchens, onto the sidewalks and into our Zoom calls. It has to honor bodies as they are, stories as they are, places as they are.
[00:31:15]
Seek lawyer and organizer Valerie Purr calls this revolutionary love. And she treats it like a public practice, not the mood I alluded to and spoke of. She names three habits that she recommends, wonder, grieve, and fight. Wonder is choosing curiosity about a person we'd rather flatten. Telling yourself, you are a part of me and I do not yet know. We've talked about curiosity before, what it means to come into situations, especially those in which there's tension or disagreement, with curiosity first. Grieve is letting another's pain weigh something in us. And fight is the courageous protection of the vulnerable in ways that don't dehumanize anyone.
[00:31:43]
Kerr learned all this while facing real harm in post-9-11 hate and family trauma, and kept moving towards repair without surrendering truth. And she believes these habits are teachable. They give us muscle memory for love that can change a room, not in sticky sweet niceness, but in presence and courage. That's the type of hope that we can practice.
[00:32:32]
Nancy Islid is a theologian writing for her lived experience with disability, and she pushes this a little bit further. In The Disabled God, her book, she says newness does not erase scars. If wholeness means looking like the norm, then most of us are actually shut out. But if new creation includes and honors wounds, then belonging doesn't actually require pretending.
[00:32:54]
Islid names the harm that churches can do when they make healing or normalizing the price of entry. Her witness keeps us from ableism. It invites us to practice to say that your cane or your chair or your sensory needs, your whole self, as you are, belongs here. And we're a space for that diversity and uniqueness. That love changing the room, that's love changing the room. Not forcing bodies to pass or personalities pass, but redesigning a room for all of us. And this includes all of us here, those we miss and those we're yet to meet.
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Indigenous theologian Randy Woodley widens the lens a little bit further. Shalom, he says, is communal and ecological. Right relationship with people and land. He talks about it as kinship and reciprocity. Woodley refuses a cut off spirituality. If new doesn't include soil, air, trees, rivers, then it's just a private upgrade. His wisdom asks us how are we relating to this place, our blocks, our parks, even our watershed. What would reconciliation look like on our actual streets if we were engaging in planting and repairing, sharing, returning, and learning from those whose land stories predate ours? This is hope in the next chapter that invites us to roll up our sleeves a little bit.
[00:34:14]
If you hold these voices together, the tension sharpens in a good way. Thank you. Real reconciliation and community isn't a shortcut to harmony. It's concrete repair of bodies and those stories and places. It's corporate, not private. It's courageous, not sentimental. And it readies our ears for a word that names this kind of repair at its deepest level.
[00:35:06]
When we talk about transformation, which we talk about a lot, it is about, the word transformation for me means a deepening connection and relationship with the divine. To growing closer in that relationship, to growing more fully to who we are called to be. And Paul is one of those most dramatic transformations that you can find in scripture. He is a man who literally was murdering people who were following Jesus. And he becomes, quite literally, the most prolific writer of scripture today. I don't know how to discuss the chasm of that spectrum. But when we talk about transformation and we talk about Paul, I hope that sits in the back of your mind as you listen for the little ways in which God is calling to you.
[00:36:10]
Paul says the first move is God's. And that's the ground that our hope can be built upon. Not hustle or moral pressure, but a new reality already breaking in and calling us to entrust in it. That we're now invited to take that step.
[00:37:58]
If anyone is in Christ, then that person is a part of new creation. Not a private upgrade. The world opening and cracking up. The already and not yet simultaneously lives in there. The signs of newness we can name and work still to be done. And hope sits in that tension like a steady hand. Present enough to anchor us and unfinished enough to send us. To call us. To invite us. To roll up those sleeves.
[00:38:20]
This newness changes how we see people. According to the flesh is the old lens that Paul talks about. That rakes bodies and smooths out differences. Either in how we present, or how we behave, or how we speak and interact, or how we engage the divine. According to the flesh, Hall's saying this, normal. And the new lens refuses that ranking, and because of that, it insists on justice for real bodies and real personalities in real places. New creation doesn't erase particularity, it re-sees it as a gift and a responsibility.
[00:38:49]
And Amy's introduction about who Kord was and how they interacted with the empire is really important here, because of Paul's use of ambassador. In an empire, an ambassador enforces the ruler's terms. And Paul flips the script. The one who has been wronged sends and voiced to the wrongdoers with a peace offering, not force, that presence we talked about. And that's why rooms change. God's appeal arrives in voices and practices shaped by grace and non-domination.
[00:39:44]
Hear how those earlier guides simply keep this honest. Nancy Iceland guards us from pretending, new creation honors scars, belonging doesn't require passing. Randy Woodley keeps it local and ecological, new means people and land learn to breathe together. And Valerie Carr gives us muscle memory. Wonder to approach without flattening the other, grieve to hold the truth with tenderness, and fight to protect without becoming what we resist. And notice this through line, through all of it. None of this is sentiment. It is God's work entrusted to people, willing to carry it through.
[00:40:15]
If God has already opened the future and handed us the pen, our next chapter isn't about proving ourselves any more than it was for Meg to overpower it. It is about matching God's move with ours. Small, concrete, relational acts that carry the flavor of this new creation into our ordinary lives.
[00:40:59]
Hope isn't a mood we try to hold. It's a new creation entrusted to ambassadors who write the next page in ordinary rooms. This series kept saying it out loud over and over again. The next chapter is written by people in those ordinary rooms with ordinary courage. Hope is a future already opening and entrusted to us to carry page by page, ordinary step after ordinary step.
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This week's page is simple and brave. Before this week gets noisy for you. Maybe even in this moment, I invite you to picture someone whom you miss. Someone where there's honest distance. Adrift after a hard season. A silence that grew while life piled up. A misunderstanding that never got words. Then your action, your invitation, is to reach out. It can be a text. A call. I don't know about you, but I like to put pen to paper when I have hard questions or hard words to say. Keep it honest and light. And if you want some words, you can borrow these. I miss you. Is there anything I got wrong? I don't know. Would a short coffee help us name what's shifted? Offer one small step of reconnection and then let them set the pace. Offer your presence.
[00:41:58]
Hope has other doors too. Choose presence in a nearby direction. You can sit for 20 minutes with somebody who is actively grieving and you can ask them, are you needing company and conversation today or would some quiet be nice? Where you can engage in one patch along your route of your daily life. You can pick up litter or water on a thirsty tree or notice that it's alive and needs care and extend your care beyond the plot of property that you typically care for.
[00:42:59]
This is how our theme meets the ground or the tire meets the concrete. New creation has a shared horizon that becomes the next paragraph in your life. On your block or in our city or in our community. It honors bodies and stories and places as they are. It sounds small and it is because they add up. And that's the scale where rooms start to freeze again. Where we start to show up with that practice in all the different places we interact.
[00:43:31]
And that's also the scale where we live our calling as entrusted ambassadors. We arrive with presence instead of pressure in all the different areas, carrying the tone of the one who sent us. We become ambassadors of Christ. Ambassadors of God.
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So I invite you to choose one step today. Reach out to one you missed. Choose a public act of care this week. Small is faithful and small is how pages turn.
[00:44:21]
The invitation of new creation is now. We're not to wait for a different world before we act. We act because a different world is already breaking in. God is present whether you see God or not. Like Paul says to the Corinthian church, we're reminded to notice where God is at work and to come alongside it. Sometimes with us, sometimes despite us. The spirit is among us breaking in. It's the already and the not yet all at the same time.
[00:45:36]
Hope is not a feeling that we keep. It's a future entrusted to us page by page in God's story. So if a name rose up for you today, trust that. Respond to it. If a small act of care came into view in your imagination, take that act. This is how the next chapter gets written. This is how the next chapter gets written. And in kitchens, and on sidewalks, at bus stops, and in bedside chairs. Power tries force, and love changes the room. May we be the ones who notice the help arriving, and by grace, be the help that arrives.
[00:46:15]
Carry with you the truth that your life is a page in God's living story And that every step you take Is a part of the chapter we are writing together For the sake of the story yet to be told Go in peace
[01:11:53]
