Reintroducing Grace: Restoring Praise and Community

You see, the elk no longer could just stand around, they had to keep moving. And because they had to keep moving, they couldn't destroy the young trees, and so then the beavers could get the willows and they could create the dams, and the dams could create these little ponds for the otters and weasels and all sorts of other wildlife. And then the songbirds returned because the trees could grow up into mature trees, and it only took five years for the ecosystem to respond to that amazing reintroduction of wolves. [00:36:14] (35 seconds)  #WolvesHealEcosystem

What a beautiful example of Ubuntu, which we've been looking at all year. This sense of everything being interconnected, all of creation being interconnected and interdependent. So if you remove one part, you impact the whole system. And, you know, that applies to us as well. If we remove one part of who we are, it impacts the entire system. [00:37:04] (28 seconds)  #UbuntuLiving

And so it helps us then see a little bit about how God desires for us to live together, how God desires for us to praise God through that interdependence and that relying on each other and the interconnection that is a part of who we are. And so we can see, the most beautiful reflection of our selves when we look at nature. And I think that's part of how then we praise God. [00:38:26] (29 seconds)  #InterconnectedPraise

This is a beautiful psalm. It's at the end of the book of Psalms. A 150 is the last one, so it's definitely moving towards the end, and it's inviting everyone to praise. The word in Hebrew is allelu, which means praise, yeah, which is short for Yahweh, which means God. And so when you say, alleluia, you know, we say it as kind of like, hallelujah. We're we're praising. Right? But it actually is an invitation to praise god. It's saying, come on, praise god with me. Right? Praise god with me. I'm not gonna praise god by myself. I want us to hallelujah. I want us all to praise God. [00:38:55] (44 seconds)  #PraiseTogether

So it starts with all of this, you know, cosmic glory that we see when we watch the moon rise or the stars in the evening. And we think about how those very same signs showed up at Jesus' birth, didn't they? The star that led the magi from the East all the way over to Bethlehem so that they too could experience and praise God. Hallelujah. [00:39:57] (27 seconds)  #CosmicPraise

And so we are invited to praise god because god sent Jesus into this world, to deliver us from the darkness, from evil, to turn us back towards the light, to restore the balance of the world to where it was meant to be. And so Jesus invites us into that place of praise. And because he is here, then we have the courage to praise, and we have the wisdom to know how to praise. And Jesus has infused grace back into the system of a distorted world. [00:43:23] (39 seconds)  #GraceThroughJesus

So just like Yellowstone was distorted by having a missing part, our world often is missing grace. And so Jesus came to reinfuse our world with grace so that it can be restored, so that we can then live the way that Jesus and God intended for us to live, so that we can live in a way that is interdependent on one another, a way that honors each other and respects each other, a way that builds one another up, a way that works together cooperatively. And that's what God wants for us all along. [00:44:02] (39 seconds)  #RestoreWithGrace

And so they brought the four young men together with the parents, and they started having conversation where the parents could express just the heartbreaking pain of losing a child and especially in a violent way. And these four young men were able to hear that and to see the consequences of their choices. And so what they ended up doing after much conversation and prayer and trying to figure it out was the family, the parents, established a foundation called the Amy Foundation. [00:48:29] (39 seconds)  #RestorativeConversations