#imagine peter asking Christ to shape his life as He has shaped the stones. breaking and carving and smoothing and creating

[i-dreamed-i-had-a-son]

So fun fact the word for "carpenter" is more properly translated "craftsman," which since Galilee/Nazareth are very rocky and trees are sparse means that Jesus likely worked mostly with stone (although he may have worked with some wood).

Anyway what if what really reminded Him of home was the inside of the tomb

why is religious Christmas imagery all so joyful and pleasant? where is the inherent horror of the birth of Christ? A mother is handed her newborn child, wailing and innocent. Her hands come away sticky. Red. Simply by giving her son life she has already killed him. He is doomed from the beginning. Her love will not save him from suffering. Because the thing cradled in her arms is not a baby, it is a sacrifice: born amongst the other bleating animals whose blood will one day be spilled in the name of what demands it. the night is silent with anticipation. Mary, did you know? That your womb was also a grave?

[sarah-sandwich]

Happy FFWF! Take a moment to ramble about your favorite part or parts of your current wip! It can be the characters, your headcanons, the metaphors/symbolism you use, anything at all! And just for fun: Add a gif that represents that wip!

Thaaaaankkk yoooooouuuu and happy FFWF!!! You’re the MVP for coming up with unique and engaging asks every week!

I’m going to ramble about Paradise (spread out with a butter knife) even though no one here gives a poo.

On the surface it’s this...

but under the tom foolery it’s this

and

but also

It’s a soulmates au but it’s actually about friendship and the importance of creating bonds outside of romantic ones and how the romantic ones should be built on friendship anyway, regardless of what you think about fate or destiny.

It’s Peter centric and at the beginning of the fic he’s alone. He lost all of his friends in one way or another and he’s grieving them while stuck in a cycle of self-sabotage that he can’t even see let alone break out of.

Then against all odds, Wade becomes his friend. In Wade he has someone who understands the Spider-Man side of things and can shoulder the load of keeping NYC safe but also keep Peter Parker fed and rested and ensure he gets enough of a break to spend quality time with Aunt May.

He goes back to school. He starts thinking about the future again.

After some badgering, he accepts a job at S.I. working with Tony in the lab and all of the sudden he’s not starving all the time anymore and he finds Tony to be something of a mentor.

“Stop,” Stark says, stepping between them. “Both of you just… stop. Look, I’ve got somewhere to be so let’s wrap this up.”

“Oh perfect. I’m done so you can just fly back—,”

“I could have flown her out if you would have explained,” he states, cutting him off. “There was time for maybe ‘explosion incoming’ or—,”

“No, there wasn’t!” he snaps, losing the remaining shreds of his patience in one fell swoop. “If you would have run for the fountain when I said to then it would have been fine! Why can’t you trust my judgment without knowing every nitty-gritty detail that got me there? I know I keep saying it, but I’m not a kid! I don’t need a babysitter or—or a daddy-figure or whatever it is you’re trying to be to me. I do okay on my own. Good sometimes even. If you want to team up, fine, but I don’t need anyone to hold my hand or check for monsters under my bed.”

“So hand-holding is off the table?”

“Not now, Wade.”

Stark regards him for a long moment, lips pressed in a hard line while Wade hums the jeopardy theme. Finally, he sighs, “You’re right.”

Peter cocks his head to the side. “I am? I mean, I know I am, but you know I am?”

“Listen, I want you to come work with me. Hear me out! I’ve seen what you can do with dumpster scraps. I want to see what you can do with a real lab. Real equipment. Maybe a mentor guiding you when you get stuck.”

He stares.

HOly shit. HOLY SHIT. Is this real?? 

“You’re shitting me.”

It’s too good to be true. It can’t be— Of course it can’t. How is it supposed to work unless… Oh.

His heart drops. “You want me to unmask.”

Stark shrugs. “Ideally, yes, but we can work around it. You can come in that,” he waves a hand at all of him, lip curled in disdain, “if that’s what it’ll take to get you in the door.”

“I don’t trust your A.I.,” he blurts before he can get his hopes up. “No offense to J.A.R.V.I.S., but the more time I spend in your tower the more mannerisms he’s going to learn and you’ll be that much closer to my identity.”

Stark cracks a smile. “You’re smart, kid. It’s why I like you even though you’re a brat.”

“You should see him play Disney Princess Scene It. Total dunce.”

“Wade! Not now!”

Wade huffs and slumps miserably against the ground. “I’d storm off in a huff if I could. I hate being ignored.”

He ignores him.

“I’ll make a window in the code for you,” Stark says. “It’ll only apply to the lab and the path to your entrance.”

“The Spidey door,” he corrects.

“I’m not calling it that.”

He sighs. What a stick in the mud. “I want to review the code.”

“I’m not letting you look at—,”

“Just the part pertaining to the window.”

Stark purses his lips like he sucked a lemon.

“You gotta trust a little if you want trust in return,” Peter says, wincing as he realizes he’s paraphrasing Aunt May. Christ, he’s gotten old.

“Fine,” he agrees. “Who should I make the paycheck out to?”

He freezes. “Paycheck?”

Stark shoots him an incredulous stare. “Of course. Stark Industries has very strict restrictions on child labor practices.”

“Oh fuck you.”

Stark grins. “So? Paycheck? Do I get a name?”

“Parker,” he says after a beat. Wade stops humming and Stark’s expression goes slack with shock. “Have the checks made out to May Parker and mailed to the F.E.A.S.T. location in Greenwich. She’ll know what to do with them.”

Stark rolls his eyes. “Should’ve expected….” He sighs. “Alright, kid. We’ll do this your way.”

And then his old friends start trickling back in.

He steps out of his room and forgets to breathe. All of his muscles lock and his brain screeches to a full stop.

“Pretty sure you’re supposed to be scared of me,” Wade is telling MJ.

MJ?! In New York?!

MJ (in his apartment!) smirks. Her hair is different. It’s gloriously red as always and her bangs are still choppy but it’s shorter than she used to keep it, barely grazing her shoulders as she tosses it with a practiced flick. “Nice try but I know the truly scary guys have flawless skin and shaped eyebrows.”

“Oh shit,” Wade says, mouth widening into a delighted open-mouthed grin. He cups his hands and bellows, “Vicious and smart, Petey! You better— Oh. Hey, baby boy. You were supposed to go out your window. That’s my bad. I should have been more specific.”

“MJ?” he croaks.

She smiles, bright and beautiful and effortless as always. “Hey Tiger, looks like you hit the jackpot,” she says with a significant glance at Wade that lingers on his biceps.

“I… You… What?”

Her smile dims. “Can we… get a coffee or something?”

“Is everything— Are you okay? Anna?”

Oh fuck, if anything happened to—

“Peter, stop. Aunt Anna’s fine. Everyone’s fine. I was in the city and I thought…” She clenches her fingers once and releases them. She’s nervous. “I thought we could catch up.”

Gwen was MJ’s soulmate. When she died it crushed her and she couldn’t separate Peter from his role in everything so she left. She took off to California to pursue acting and didn’t keep in touch. She’s back for good and they start to mend things. She visits Harry in the mental health treatment facility where he’s been living for the past 10 years since Gwen died and he injected himself with the Green Goblin serum and went berserk. It takes awhile but eventually he gets to a place where he has the staff remove the blacklisting against Peter and asks MJ to bring him with her for a visit.

And suddenly Peter has his old friends back. It’s not the same. It’ll never be the same. They have their missteps and 3 should be 4 but it’s working and it’s good and it’s more than he ever thought he’d get back. Harry is released and him and MJ get an apartment together and they all meet up at least once a week. Everything is looking up. His life is reversed from how we found it in chapter one.

And he still doesn’t know Wade is his soulmate.

“You don’t have a soulmate?”

Deadpool snorts and rolls to his feet, slapping dirt from his suit forcefully. “Can you imagine? What kind of asshole would fuck up bad enough to get landed with me?”

He never questioned it. After five years the specifics of how exactly he knows Wade doesn’t have a soulmate fade. He might have seen the deflection for what it was had they had the conversation later in their friendship, but instead it gets written in stone in his mind that while he has a soulmate, Wade doesn’t and so Wade can’t be his. Until...

Oh my God. It’s Wade.

[johnhardinsawyer]

“We Do Not Lose Heart”

John Sawyer

Bedford Presbyterian Church

2 / 14 / 21

2 Corinthians 4:1-6

Mark 9:2-9

“We Do Not Lose Heart”

(When Our Hearts Shine)

Happy Valentine’s Day!

At our house this past week, my wife prepared a bunch of Paw Patrol Valentine’s cards for our son’s preschool class.  Seeing those cards reminded me of exchanging similar cards when I was growing up, except I had to make my cards.  Every year, my mother would break out the red construction paper, the white heart-shaped doilies, and the Elmer’s glue and we would construct some homemade Valentine hearts that looked, well. . . homemade by a child.  Now, there are benefits to making your own hearts for Valentine’s Day.  You can always personalize your message.  You can also practice your fine motor skills with the scissors.  But. . . at the time, those handmade hearts just didn’t seem as cool as the store-bought ones.  So, even though my friends would give me the 1980’s equivalent of a Paw Patrol Valentine, there I was with my red paper hearts.

On this Valentine’s Day – whether you have the slickest, coolest, store-boughtenist Valentine’s cards, or your own homemade construction paper hearts, or whether the only heart you have today is the one that is beating inside of you, today’s scripture reading from 2 Corinthians is all about not losing heart, but embracing the light that God shines in each of our hearts.

The very idea that God somehow shines light in our hearts is kind of a strange one.  I mean, we do live in the era of heart catheterizations and other tests that doctors can use to tell what is going on inside of our bodies.  We know that we do not have some kind of holy lantern, or flashlight, or floodlight planted somewhere inside of us.  And, if you look up videos of open-heart surgeries – which, I don’t necessarily recommend – you can see for yourself that the only lights shining are coming from overhead in the operating room.

Most – or all – of the light that we see with our eyes comes not from within us, but from outside of us.  And yet, the God that we can come to know in the words of scripture is intimately connected to both light and our hearts in literal and figurative ways.  In the Bible, this is the light that we see at work, from the first moment of creation when God says, “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.  And God saw that the light was good. . .” (Genesis 1:3-4)  We see this light at work, in a literal sense, at the birth of Jesus when the wise men from the East follow a star (Matthew 2:9) and in a figurative sense at the start of the Gospel of John when Jesus is referred to as “the light” that is “the life of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:4-5)

In today’s first reading from the Gospel of Mark, we see the transfigured Jesus shining – his clothes become “dazzling white.” (Mark 9:3)  In the original language, Jesus becomes “radiant” –  “like the radiance of the stars”[1] – and it causes his friends, Peter, James, and John to be completely terrified.  Right before today’s second reading, Paul makes reference to another terrifying use of light.  In the Book of Exodus, after Moses finishes talking with God, the people don’t recognize him because his face is shining[2] with a kind of holy sunburn crossed with a holy halogen bulb, and it freaks the people out, so they ask him to put on a veil whenever he speaks with them.  When Moses speaks with God, he takes the veil off, but when he speaks with the people, he puts the veil back on – shielding them from God, physically. . .  and, perhaps, spiritually.  As Paul writes to the Corinthians, though – right before today’s passage – when we turn toward Jesus Christ, the veil is removed.  We do not need a veil anymore to protect us or shield us from fully understanding and experiencing the holiness of God.  As Eugene Peterson translates:

Whenever, though, they turn to face God as Moses did, God removes the veil and there they are—face-to-face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. . . God is personally present, a living Spirit. . .  Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.[3]

And so, as Paul writes, “we do not lose heart,” (2 Corinthians 4:1) because just as Jesus was transfigured on the mountain – shining brightly – so we, too, have the light of Jesus shining brightly in our hearts.

You know, that sure does sound nice, but there are times when I wonder if it is true.  Because it sure is easy to lose sight of the light and to lose heart in the process.  It can be hard to not lose heart, these days – to not get discouraged when the winter is long, but the pandemic is longer, when the absolute worst of human nature and our national division are on display for the world to see, when injustice walks free on a technicality, when it feels like good times are either only ahead or only behind but never in the present, when we find ourselves at our lowest ebb, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been spending time with the Apostle Paul and his letters to the church in Corinth.  Now, the church in Corinth had some problems.  There were conflicts and difficulties from within and without.  People were losing heart with the whole Christian enterprise.  

Paul knew a few things about losing heart, though.  Over the course of his ministry, he was beaten, and arrested, and thrown in jail, and run out of town, and shipwrecked, and tried and found guilty – all because he loved Jesus.  And, I am sure that there were times when he lost heart, too – or was at least tempted to lose heart, to lose hope, to get discouraged.

At the start of his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experienced in Asia; for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself.”  (2 Corinthians 1:8)  Talk about losing heart. . .  I can only imagine the hardship Paul endured.  But then, just a few verses later, Paul writes, “[God,] who rescued us from so deadly a peril will continue to rescue us; on him we have set our hope that he will rescue us again.” (1:10)

We have set our hope on the God who has rescued us – the God who will rescue us again, the God who will restore us to full and abundant life, the God who will bring healing and joy and contentment, the God who will offer us the very thing we need. . .  just as God has always done for us in the past.  You know, hope like this is not just wishful thinking – it is the very essence of faith.  And it is needed, especially in times that are hard – times when the darkness threatens to overwhelm us.  

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about a woman named Fannie Lou Hamer, who was a poor sharecropper from Ruleville, Mississippi.  Mrs. Hamer was steeped in the life and culture of the church.  For her whole life, “the church had sustained her wearied spirit when all other institutions had served contrary purposes.”[4]  In August of 1962, she went to church and heard a powerful speech about her constitutional right to vote – a right that had been denied her by the Jim Crow laws that had been enacted in Mississippi to keep people like her from voting.  The speech was so powerful, though, that it prompted Mrs. Hamer to “step out on God’s word of promise” to put her faith into action.[5]  So, she started trying to register to vote and began trying to get other folks to register, too.

Those were dark and frightening days for Mrs. Hamer and the other people who were working with her.  And yet, when things got dark and frightening, Mrs. Hamer would sing the songs she learned in church.  “That’s Fannie Lou, she know how to sing,”[6] people would say.

Less than a year after hearing that speech about voting, Mrs. Hamer was arrested while sitting at a lunch counter.  That night she endured a horrific beating by her jailors.  As historian Charles Marsh writes, “Mrs. Hamer had nothing to confess; she harbored no information needed by the torturers.  She was not abused for the secrets she kept.  She was abused, it seems, for being – for being a black woman with a voice.”[7]  And yet, that night as she laid in her cell – bloodied and broken from the beating – she began to sing:  

Paul and Silas was bound in jail, let my people go.

Had no money for to go their bail, let my people go.

Paul and Silas began to shout, let my people go.

Jail doors open and they walked out, let my people go.[8]

Pretty soon, the people locked up in jail with her started singing, too.  As Charles Marsh writes,

Their singing did not remove their suffering or the particularities of their humiliation; rather, it embraced the suffering, named it, and emplotted it in a cosmic story of hope and deliverance.  At first tentatively, and then with grown confidence their song floated freely throughout the jail, exploding the death grip of the cell.  “Jail doors open and they walked out, let my people go.”  Despair turned into a steady resoluteness to keep on going.  A miracle happened.  And at least for Mrs. Hamer, a peaceable composure, incomprehensible apart from a deep river of faith, transformed not only her diminished self-perception but the perception of her torturers.  She said astonishingly, “It wouldn’t solve any problem for me to hate whites just because they hate me. . .”[9]  

If, the end, the story of the Bible and the story of our faith is one of hope, and light, and abundant life lived in the presence of God, then maybe transformation – transfiguration – is possible for us, too.  This is what Fannie Lou Hamer believed – with her broken, yet loving and faithful, transfigured heart shining in the darkness – a heart that had compassion even on those who had beaten her.  This kind of faith and hope is a lived theology – embodied by Fannie Lou Hamer – and built on the ultimate triumph of God’s freeing grace and mercy despite all signs to the contrary and all of the pain and hatred that the unjust realities of the world can throw at us.

“We do not lose heart,” Paul writes, just a few verses after today’s passage:  

We do not lose heart – even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.  For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. (4:16-18)

We do not lose heart, because the light of Jesus Christ shines in the darkness of this world and in our own hearts.  Our hearts, as fragile and fallible as they are, have been handmade by the Holy.  And oh, how they do shine. . .  May God grant us the vision to not only see this light, but may we be transfigured, too – shining the light of Jesus in the world.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

------------

[1] Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1979) 768.

[2] See Genesis 34:29-35.

[3] Eugene Peterson, The Message – Numbered Edition (Colorado Springs:  NAV Press, 2002) 1591.

[4] Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer:  Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1997) 13.

[5] Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 13.

[6] Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 15.

[7] Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 21.

[8] Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 22.

[9] Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 22.