This is what mothering taught me about God: we relax into this relationship. 5 He caught me with a taste of unconditional love, and then he taught me how to relax into that loving.

Life in Christ is not meant to mirror life in a Greco-Roman culture. An ancient Middle Eastern culture is not our standard. We are not meant to adopt the world of Luther’s Reformation or the culture of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening or even 1950s America as our standard for righteousness. The culture, past or present, isn’t the point: Jesus and his Kingdom come, his will done, right now—that is the point.