Jason G. Edwards

May the veil between this world and the next grow thin enough to breathe through, so you find yourself whispering thanks to no one in particular, for everything in sight.

We often say God is love, God is light, God is just. But what if God is also the healthiest Being in existence? Not just spiritually whole but emotionally resilient, relationally wise, fully alive in every sense of the word.

If God is the smartest, wisest, most knowing Being in existence (as Christians have always confessed), then nothing we discover is new to God. Every truth uncovered is simply a truth God already knows.

Tomorrow at jasongedwards.substack.com, the fourth installment of this midweek series:

Spirit-Shaped Character as Sails (Braving the Winds: Faith that Meets the Demands of Reality, Meditation #4)

When the holy overwhelms you…too vast for your pen, too wild for your speech, may one line rise…clear and sufficient, to carry the fire.

May you never fear the silence that burns with meaning, nor the ache that arrives when you realize how much beauty goes unspoken.

May you walk today not in haste
but in wonder, as if the sidewalk you follow leads straight into holy ground.

May the veil between this world and the next grow thin enough to breathe through, so you find yourself whispering thanks to no one in particular, for everything in sight.

A Blessing -> To See

open.substack.com/pub/jasonged... #Prayer #Blessing #Attention #Mindfulness

😂

Let your heart break toward mercy, not despair. Let your tears be small refusals, not of sorrow, but of forgetting. Do not believe that resurrection begins in sunlight. It begins underground, where no one sees, among roots and tombs
and people who still choose to love anyway.

But keep your heart soft. Do not make a theology out of numbness. Light a candle. Sweep a floor. Weep and bless and work in the same breath. Pray for peace with your feet in the dirt.

I watch so many wrestle with faith, struggling to hold on, longing for something strong enough to endure and spacious enough to breathe. I want to support not only the survival of faith, but its thriving: faith that is resilient, generous, and alive to the Spirit of Christ.

The biblical words for Spirit— ruach in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek, also mean “breath” or “wind.” Breath prayer is a way of remembering that God’s Spirit is as close as your next inhale.

If faith cannot hold real life, it will not hold at all. A faith that can hold sorrow and joy, mystery and trust, reflects the humanity of Jesus himself — God with us, God for us, God among us still.

In mystery, we learn that faith is not about control but about trust, a steady resting in the God who holds what we cannot.

Mystery is not failure; it’s a way of honoring God’s greatness and our limits. Some questions will not resolve; some grief will remain unanswered. To welcome mystery is to release the need for certainty while clinging to what we know of God’s character: mercy, justice, love, presence.

If Jesus reveals true humanity, then faith must be large enough to hold the full range of human experience: anguish and hope, anger and trust, tears and praise. To follow him is to grow into that kind of humanity, spacious and honest, carried by the Spirit.

As Jürgen Moltmann writes in The Crucified God, God is not a distant observer of pain but the One who suffers with us, sharing in the world’s anguish so that healing and hope might be born from within.

The incarnation does not skim across the surface of human sorrow. It enters fully, showing us not only what God is like but what it means to be truly human.

Modern psychology echoes this truth: grief that is denied or buried doesn’t disappear. It festers, taking shape as anxiety, depression, or even physical illness. As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler have shown, naming and expressing grief is essential for healing.

As Walter Brueggemann notes, laments are not the language of unfaith but of faith itself, prayers that bring grief and protest into God’s presence.

The pressure of reality tests our theology, showing us what splinters and what holds. Painful as it is, what falls away may need to, so that what is true in Christ can come to the surface.

A God who only rewards and protects cannot stand in the face of tragedy. A gospel reduced to escaping pain or avoiding questions can survive neither grief nor scrutiny.

Religion at its best gathers the wisdom of generations. It steadies and supports us as a companion. Left on our own, we’re tempted to shape God in our own image, but tradition interrupts that impulse, calling us into a story larger than ourselves.

Imagine holding the text up to the light of his face, and asking, does this reading reflect the mercy, justice, and love of Jesus?

Read scripture through Christ’s lens: Begin with the Gospels. Hear Jesus’ voice in the Sermon on the Mount, his mercy at the well, his tears at the tomb. Let his way of reading shape yours.

Again and again in the gospels, Jesus reads this way, not discarding the scriptures but drawing out their heart. He lets mercy interpret law, love deepen tradition, people take precedence over precedent. To read in his light is to learn that the truest word is not a text but a person.

These moments of dissonance and re-centering are never easy. They ask humility of us, and courage too. But they also widen our vision of Christ’s embrace, pressing us to trust that love is large enough to carry the weight of reality.

This is how God works: unsettling us, re-centering us, pressing us toward mercy. At the heart of the gospel is not exclusion but embrace.