Prayer of Rev William Coffin Jr

"May God grant you;

the grace to never sell yourself short,

the grace to risk something big for something good,

the grace to remember that the world is now to dangerous for anything but truth

and too small for anything but love."



-Rev William Coffin Jr.

Love and The Wrath of God

"I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn't God love? Shouldn't divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That's exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, where I come from. According to some estimates, 200 000 people were killed and over 3 millon displaced. My village was destroyed. My people shelled day in and day out. Some were brutalized beyond imagination. I could not imagine God NOT being angry.

Or think of Rwanda in the last decade. 800 000 people hacked to death in 100 days! How did God react? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators basic goodness? Wasn't God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who WASN'T wrathful at the sight of the world's evil. God isn't wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful BECAUSE God is love."

from Free of Charge, by Miroslav Volf