Because of the noise and activity of the struggle and the work, we often do not hear the hidden gentle sound and movement of the life that is coming into being. But here and there, at hours that are blessed, God lets us feel how he is everywhere at work and how his cause is growing and moving forward. The time is being fulfilled and the light shall shine, perhaps just when it seems that the darkness is impenetrable.
- Eberhard Arnold
April 27,2023
- Eberhard Arnold From a letter, May 1920How glad I am that you are so positively united with me in the experience of peace and of Jesus’ spirit of love! The question is not at all one of our only refusing to do military service, though people always put it in this negative way. This refusal, after all, follows as a matter of course from a positive experience of the Spirit of Christ. When this Spirit, which is expressed so very intensely in the Sermon on the Mount and in Romans 8, penetrates us and glows in us, then we will become victorious people who must work as long as it is daylight—work in the productive, creative work of love.
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We work until we are weary to the bone and yet see so little fruit. Does everything remain as it was? Haven’t we made any progress? Have we actually helped at all, or have we merely scratched the surface of things? Is there any trace or glimpse of the goal we long for? What do all our efforts amount to in the face of all the forces of misery and evil in the world? Left before such agonizing questions, it is good to remember the light that shines from the stable of Bethlehem, for it is here we are able to sense what it means that the kingdom of God came as a little child.
- Eberhard Arnold
Advent is a time when we await God’s intervention in the need of the present day, as he intervened then in Jesus’ birth. We long for the highest power to rescue this unhappy, torn humanity that knows so little community. Now is the time to ask God for a radical change in all things, even if this means we must go through judgment.
- Eberhard Arnold