A is for anniversary, B is for blessing.

Some things are counted in days, others in months. I celebrate with a young couple whose child with neo-natal problems reaches 4 months, and also sit with a mother whose baby died at four months. I counted months, but now count the years in my own pain.

The Roman Catholic church currently begins the Jubilee year celebrating the birth of Paul the apostle two thousand years ago. Paul who counted nothing as worthwhile except knowing Jesus Christ. Paul who experienced a conversion so deep that he endured floggings, beatings, shipwrecks, imprisonment to continue preaching the good news that Jesus Christ is the answer.

The answer to our deepest longings, angst and experiental woes.
Jesus Christ the only person who can fill the earthen vessels that we are. Jesus Christ the real treasure. Not a treasure that makes us feel good for a day, a season for a number of years, but for eternity.

Paul ran the good race, and ran until he was crucified. No stranger to his own failings he knew that Jesus was the one who made him wholly whole and well. Well for eternal life. A promise he preached around the ancient Mediterranean world.

Paul knew that nothing can separate us from the love of God, made visible and Gods' proof of resurrection in Christ Jesus. The next twelve months is a time to re-engage and deepen in the understanding of God's love for each of us.

It was Paul who prayed that:
May God give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparable great power for us who believe.

and

May your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you will be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ – to the glory and praise of God.

It's never to late to meet Jesus again. To accept him as Lord and Saviour, to realise that the things of earth grow dim compared to the glory that Jesus offers.

Favourite Quotes:
But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith; that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection of the dead

With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him. Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity

and my penultimate fav:
What can separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: "For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter." Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

and thus to my #1 fav:
For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

And so gentle reader I pray with Paul that The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Amen.