Holy Wholeness

What does the word "holy" mean to you? I think of it as referring to something "of God." Set apart. Sanctified by God.

Merriam Webster defines it as "exalted or worthy of complete devotion as one perfect in goodness and righteousness."

Nancy Ortberg, in her book Looking for God, said that until her father died, she equated it with (and I'm putting words in her mouth) a wrathful God. To her it meant a distant God.

Then her father died at too young an age, after an 18 month battle with cancer. That's not what her parents had planned. It wasn't the way it should have worked out.

She writes:

That's when it hit me. Holiness, whether I liked it or not, was what I craved. A holy world, a world set right the way it was supposed to be. Sacred and pure. Clean and strong. A holy world, where there is no smog in LA, no cracks in the sidewalk. A holy world where children are never hungry, wars are never fought. No snow in Chicago, no struggles that overtake us, no fathers dying.

I think she's right. I think we crave holiness. I think we sense, even if we cannot articulate it, that life is not the way it is supposed to be. It is broken. God came to the world to save each one of us, but also to make his world holy -- to return it to a kingdom state.

The word origin of holy is the same as whole. Wholeness. It fits.

Image: Sunset from Kinetic Park.