11 - LIVING RELIGION

WHEN PRESENCE WALKS OUT THE DOOR

Before sunrise, a door groans.

A fisherman on cold sand watches the gray horizon for something he can’t name.

In a low-lit kitchen, a woman kneads dough. Flour ghosts her hands while hope tries to rise with the bread.

A nurse in fluorescent scrubs hunches over stale coffee, pulse still racing from the code blue she couldn’t reverse.

Between them, Jesus walks the shoreline.

No scrolls. No credentials. No audition for faith.

He breaks their bread, tastes their silence, lets the moment breathe.

This is living religion:

Not the chant caught in vaulted stone, but the hush of a question across a table, the warmth of bread moving palm to palm, the shiver through a night-shift ward when someone finally looks the grieving mother in the eyes.

It’s the ember you carry home risking the burn to keep a spark alive when every other fire has failed.

Living religion breaks routine, unsettles the schedule.

Stay here, says the nudge. Notice the one overlooked. Let interruption become invitation.

It’s Jesus pausing mid-lesson to cradle a child, touching the skin no one else will touch, meeting the heckler with presence instead of proof.

And — one fog-soft morning — stooping beside a woman caught in scandal, writing mercy into dust while her accusers fumble for stones they can no longer throw.

Faith is not assent to distant doctrine but arrival — in the wound, in the waiting, in the unfinished place.

A widow’s last coins. A tax collector climbing a tree to see. A barista slipping an extra pastry to the man who counts his change twice and still comes up short.

Living religion holds its courage in the long hallway between what is and what love might still make possible.

a hallway where some doors creak open and others must be kicked from their hinges because the forgotten were left inside too long.

Few prayers performed, many wounds tended, apologies whispered, meals shared without agenda.

It’s the silence that answers when your words dry up, the discipline to begin again, the question What would love do now? asked in your own accent, then risked in your own skin.

No theory. No product. No mask — only the bare gamble of showing up unguarded, awake.

The kingdom moves. The living water flows.

Forget, and it waits. Remember, and it runs to meet you.

Begin here. Begin again.

Let presence practice itself through you.

Leave that door unlatched — so when the dawn breaks tomorrow, you can step through and call it home.

<3 EKO