The First Ordinary Evening After Hearing Jesus Speak
Chapter 1: The Question Waiting at the Door Your child is standing in the kitchen with a broken glass beside their feet. You have barely taken off your coat. Traffic was awful, a problem at work is still unresolved, and the first thing you see when you get home is another mess. You feel the familiar response rising before anyone speaks. Then your child looks at you and says, “I was trying to help.” In that moment, what you believe about patience is about to become something more than a belief. The next few words out of your mouth will tell the people in that kitchen what kind of person has come home. That is the part of the Sermon on the Mount I keep returning to. We can imagine the hillside and the extraordinary experience of hearing Jesus with our own ears. We can wonder whether we would have recognized who was speaking. But imagining what it was like to hear Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount also leads to a more practical question: what would happen when we went back to th...