Now the Advocate Jesus promised has come, and the disciples are transformed and begin to turn the antique world upside-down. They did not plan on this and they truly have no control over what is unfolding.

Yet as Alan Jones observed it is in the unpredictable, the place of risk and the place of no control or security that the Spirit is most present and most able to work through them. They do not know everything now, so they must learn above all to be patient in the company of this Incomprehensible Love, and patient with contradiction, especially when it appears all is lost.

They have been promised they will be guided into all the truth, but this will take God’s time, not theirs. The Spirit in them as a spring giving living water, meant to flow through them for the sake of the world, pours continuously, with no clock saying they have arrived and have nothing else to learn, no greater love to attain. They have all been freely granted different gifts, each with a facet of the truth, so that together, as one, they may be guided into all of it. If they can trust themselves to His action and guidance and not merely to their own conception of these, they can learn what true liberty is, and freedom and fullness of life which fears nothing, is threatened by nothing, can lose nothing.

This is the same Spirit that will teach them not only the loftier conceptions of faith, but also teach them to truly understand and to put into practice the simplest and most fundamental tools of the kingdom and of their life in Christ—because they are not all called to be prophets, teachers, retreat leaders, miracle workers, theologians—but they are all called to love those who hurt them, to withhold no goodness from anyone, to give freely and lovingly, to be compassionate, to not judge, to not condemn, to love freely as Jesus has loved them, to follow Him day after day willing to give up their lives when it comes to that, as it will one way or another. All this is their power from on high, their first and greatest and most urgent witness to the life they have received.

Now I entrust to you the kingdom which my Father entrusted to Me.