Thursdays

Thursday mornings are quickly becoming my favorite morning of the week.  It’s only the third week of the semester, but I can tell I like Thursday mornings best.  I have a little graduate job as a grader for one of the professors in my department, and Thursday mornings I have to get to campus early to give him the graded papers so he can pass them back to his class.  I don’t have a class until 11, but he needs the grades by 9.  This means that I have two hours to just enjoy some quiet time in the middle of the busy campus.  And to make it even better, Thursday is farmers market day, right in the middle of the courtyard!  The food vendors get to their spots early to start preparing all of their specialties, and the smells are absolutely wonderful.  Here are a couple pictures of this beautiful, last day of January:

 

Found

“The Kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.  When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.  Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls.  When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.” Matthew 13:44-46

I had always been taught that this parable is about us finding the kingdom of heaven, but a year or so ago, I began to think about it differently. I was at a conference, and one of the keynote speakers talked about the parables in Matthew chapter 13 leading up to this one: the seed and the soil, the weeds, and the mustard seed.

In each of these parables, the man in the story is God, the field is the world, and the thing in the field is us or our faith.  In that context, Jesus would not have changed the characters or representations in the parable of the treasure in the field.  Do you know what this means?  Let’s look at it again:

“When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”

We are the treasure.  God sold everything He had- His only son Jesus Christ- to find us.  Me finding the kingdom of heaven would have never worked.  It gives me way too much credit; it makes it seem like I found Jesus by my own strength.  Really though, in His joy HE found ME.

Through this blog, I hope to navigate life keeping the truth of His grace at the forefront of my mind.  I hope that I can encourage you to do the same, and that we can celebrate in the joy of being found, together.

-Alicia