“Today is the only day”

H,

In the pantheon of great examples of things that we have no control over, surely there is one that stands out from the beleaguering pack: tomorrow. We have only today.

This seems simple enough. It is axiomatic when we say, today is all you have time for. Yet, most of our concern is about things in the future and things we cannot yet see. Worry comes from the undefined and can live even higher in our hearts than present concerns.

The whole tension over Mondays is subsumed in the idea of the unexpected week to come. We always stand at the beginning of things worrying about the end.

That is not how living in the light works. We are engaged in great acts of faith every day. We look up to a benevolent creator, one who will fix the nature of the universe back to the original design, who sees and knows and is a lover of every soul. We believe that He is big enough to fill all of reality but intimate enough to listen to our lazy scribblings we call prayer. We can read the catalogue and say we believe all this but still doubt when that faith tells us, today is the only day?

All the grace, strength, joy and love given to us, is for today. Let us live in that and leave the rest for when we need it. Faith is for daily life and not epochs and milestones. It is for the ordinary as well as what we consider extra-ordinary. It is present and palpable and effective and living.

It exists in our moments and all our moments lead up into eternity.

“Let’s not forget the joy”

H,

There is mostly a somber tone to the things we profess. I suspect some of this is just our antidote to the dole-eyed faux optimism of our youth. We had a run where we performed the great role of sounding like we knew all the answers and making God a rewarder of them that seek Him with smile and song and dance. This laughable coaxing of God to be “who He is” fell flat as we pursued Him and the fragments that remain in our spiritual experience have been crushed by the other overreach, the stoic nature of false depth. No clapping or singing or ability to dance masquerading as the apologist stance; too high and intellectual for these low things.

We must not forget the joy, though. This is a story of the light and not the dark. We cannot go further the other way. There is joy in both approaches. Surely, there are many ways to approach the “multi-breasted” God. There is no superior one. They are all parts of the same experience accessed by our diverse hearts and souls and happenstances. There is joy in all of it.

We are discovering who we will forever be. We are learning to be honest about who we are now. We are thriving through sin and decay and taking on the cloak and moniker of eternal beings. There is nothing small occurring. The whole world is designed to make us forget this. It is made up of false symbols and false precepts of power. It tells us to chase the things that will protect us from feeling, from connecting with others, from feeling ‘ordinary’ and from really empathizing. It is arranged in rules to make it all black and white, to make some things unforgivable and others acceptable according to bent and ideology. It is not made for the fragile heart. It is not set up for feeling. We are only happy in relation to someone else. We are only advancing in competition, stated or not, with some ideal life. All of our identity is subsumed in the thing we produce. The idea of “purpose” in the Christian life has become a clarion call to justify living by what we produce and not who we are. It is a slight variation but a significant one. We are learning to pray to God as idol and then chase our dreams without the limit of a God on whom we hang our hopes and dreams and all our waiting.

Let’s not forget the joy. This is all a passing world. All our real “impact” is in the eternal kingdom to God. This present world does not hold a candle to that holy call. The joy is in that other place, where everything dark here will bow to the eternal light. We are seeing troubles now that are already conquered. That’s the joy of the thing. The light is coming. The lord is coming.

“Fear and all that”

H,

There is a living fear inside everything we do. I am not so sure we will ever be rid of it. Sometimes I actually think it does some good. It is a marker of how much we care about an event or person or outcome. Indifference has always been the much greater sin to me.

Yet, the fear itself can be crippling. It can rob us of connection. It can take our most fruitful ideas and intentions and render them inert. It can make us hate others and refuse to be loved. It takes so much and gives absolutely nothing.

Fear in itself will not do these things. Like I said before, it can simply show us how deeply we feel towards something. It is our reaction to fear that is always the kick in the teeth. It is a note and not a call to action. It tells us something about ourselves but that is all. It is not the inspiration to engage with life. Most of the time, it actually tells us to do the exact opposite.

We must learn that there is no way to live a full life in fear. It will take everything we have. It is an instrument for the dark. We are creatures of light. Just as the dark is only a contrast for the light, so fear is only a marker for courage. We must press on. We must not relent. The thing to fear the most, death and futility, has been taken away. There is no longer a hold or lien on the human soul. Freedom is sure. Living or dying are just the two sides of our human experience and the latter will only lead us home.

“Calm in the storm”

H,

There is only so much a poor heart can take in the midst of various storms. I suspect that because we do not live in a storm ravaged part of the world, we may dismiss the pure viciousness and violence of one ravaging through our homes and lives. We may not be able to appreciate the way it takes from you and the loss it gives in return. When we use the analogy of a storm, we may not be wired in to the devastating level of upheaval which this represents.

I always think of the disciples in that boat and how they must have felt. We always see it as a lack of faith, but it is a fairly normal reaction to be afraid of being swept away and drowned. It is how we would all feel. We were not built for anxiety or chaos or the fires that ravage most of human life. It is like that burst of fear that makes you believe you are coward even though it is just a feeling and cowardice is mostly how you act not how you feel. We are told to be scared at all shows a lack of faith. This is simply not true.

I do not even think that was Jesus’ point with his disciples. He was not telling them that they could have stopped it by faith. He was asking them why they did not have the calm of faith in the midst of the storm. He had been teaching them and showing them that there was no end to the glory of God. They had seen the miracles and heard the words and called Him “messiah”. He was asking of them to understand what Paul would later summarize as: “To live or die is Christ and gain”.

The storm does not matter because it cannot kill the eternal destiny we have in God. Whatever it brings.

“Always an opportunity to love”

H,

The years do add on this extra texture of hate and desperation. We are not wiser by trauma but more bitter, full of untouched rage and waiting for an opportunity to strike back while always thinking we are healing. This realization that we are going the wrong way is not in itself fatal to anything real, it is merely an opportunity to love.

We love first because we are loved. Simplistic but absolutely true. We do not have the tools to delve back into our own darkness and find the healing we need to live in the light. We have to experience something of that old weight of glory, the idea that we are more than flesh and bone and incidents that scar us. The very true revelation that we have inherent value, that we are creatures of purpose and that within every life is a fantastic story that will make full sense in the end.

It does not make sense now. We would be lying to ourselves if we said it did. All of present life is tainted with the dark. We see tragedies beyond description and live in situations that have no tinge of romance or levity and sometimes, seemingly, no trace of a benevolent creator. All sense of goodness we have is in the hope and faith right there in the love of God. There is no easy way to describe it: it is like the best story about us is suddenly and clearly true and we are living in it. This is what the love of God feels like.

And in that great repair, lies the great wave of being able to be honest, to be true, and to love others. But let us not hurry along to solutions we do not yet have. It is enough to learn this slowly. We are edging into eternity, becoming out real and final selves. We will have many opportunities to show love. Let us take the one we have right now to experience and grow and become that character that lights up the whole universe.

“Created, creator"

H,

I remember struggling, in my younger years, with the idea that art meant anything to God. It was my old Pentecostal soul, the one that always mistook serving the whims of the movement or person at the head of the movement with living in the high ideas of God. I thought every expression had to speak about Them in the most overt sense possible, even if it did not ring true. I still had the idea in my head that this was a praise hungry and insecure god who looked through all the pages of life to see how many mentions He got.

Of course, once I rid myself of these stolid ideas, I discovered that all my mind was in that question of deity. I could not write a paragraph without exploring what the idea of God meant. It was already in my mind as the path to meaning. It does and will come out clearly in all my art.

This should come as no surprise. All of truth is accessed in stories. They present to us as an eternal tale culminating in the merging of story and life in a forever blend. That He is creator and maker of all things should have alerted me to where the artistic impulse comes from. The questions we ask and the answers we find and the creativity we use to get from question to answer are all parts of our God-side. It is a creator creating creatives. It is God as creator and what is the most vivid image of where we will be when we see Them: right hand side, co-creating an eternity that is still being written.

So, now art for me is that reality. It is not propaganda. It is not an advertorial. God needs no public relations unit. We must tell stories that elevate truth and speak to the inherent value of every life. Do not waste a word. Do not make anything glib or light for folly sake or take away from the glory within or without. Let it always sing. Let it be honest. Let it say what you think and feel and know and want to think, feel and know. There are no barriers to the human mind. Let us create as we were once created.

“The light that repeats itself.”

H,

There is always a tale to tell about grace. We live under a light that repeats itself solely for our benefit. It is set up in such a way that it is available again and again, without fail. There is no gain for God in how we act or what we say. He is not larger or smaller because of what we do or don’t do. The only thing that living in the light changes in the whole of the universe is us.

And all this does not reduce the value of the human soul. The whole idea of inherent value comes from the creative love of God. They created beings capable of understanding the light. We are made to be friends with our creator. Not robots or toys or fodder but actual friends. There is nothing deeper than this idea. There is no precedent for what a human being is in this regard.

We cannot be friends and not know that it all means. We cannot be friends without understanding what He means and what that means for us. We are slowly learning, as in the dark and through failure and obedience, the height and depth of the love of God.

This is the reason the light repeats itself. We have no context for what that is. We are learning slowly. To run it all fast will only lead to error. To act like we know when we are still in process is the singular crime of our faith. When we invent doctrine, we invent error and chaos and ruin other lives and our own. For a time.

For the story is not yet ended. What we lose sight of here we will see fully over there. There is no human act that is fatal to the will of God. We must remember this. There is nothing They cannot do. The reformation of the human heart is always and only a choice away. And with that, the many choices after, always leading into the light.

“The high price of being human”

H,

We all have a tendency to shut off from the pain of the world and become immune to the suffering of others. I suppose they are good reasons for this. We all have a plate of suffering in front of us. There is enough sadness around but none to spare. It is far easier to focus on specific pain than general anguish. We cannot solve the problems of the world and so on and so on.

And some of that is absolutely valid; we cannot save the world or cure many of its ill by mere empathy. We cannot even save it by constructive and sustained action. It would require too much work, or a draconian state of things were all evil thoughts are banned and only the best intentions, generally agreed upon by a congress of the human whole, are allowed to flourish into action. It would be 1984, with a human heart.

The problem, of course, is that 1984 did start with a human heart. It began with the best of intentions. It was trying to solve famine, hunger, inequality, violence and the freedom to be bad.

I think, and this is from a dark glass viewpoint, that the grand design is the reformation of the human heart. Valhalla, heaven, utopia, or whatever guise we call the perfect state, is only possible within the human heart. We can either be heaven or hell to each other.

This is the state that we are being led to. This is the fulcrum of love and power and the light shining forever. We are either becoming more like the fire that lights up the universe or more like the darkness that will end before forever starts. There is no middle ground.

The high cost of being human is that we learn how little control we actually have over the vastness of time and space. The high cost of being human is also that we learn that the little we do control, love and light and being like Christ, is the spice of the Universe and will change the nature of everything else.

“Look how beautiful the thing we are wasting is”

H,

I had one of those scary conversations about violence yesterday. It was about our country and the tensions around identity, resources, history, tribe, power and everything else. It was not a hopeful look at possibilities. It was not based on the idea that challenges have solutions. It was simply this: blood is the problem and blood is the solution.

I could feel how inciting words said in a certain tone and with certain facts could be. I could see the easy solutions make a point to me and become powerful as an idea growing steadily to fulfilment. When we think violence, even state-controlled violence, is the answer to problems lodged in the human soul, then there will be no end to killing and no end to blood.

It is a path to take, this incisive surgery against the rakish kinds, but what a high price to pay. When we take lives, we are wasting all sorts of things, including the divine ability of people to change. It has become too easy to not believe in the light above the dark. The simple solution is always the immediate one but look how beautiful the thing we are wasting is. We are missing the opportunity to learn, love and be surprised. We are missing grace.

I don’t know. Maybe, one day, I will know the arduous decision-making turn it takes to make bold action louder than kind words. Everything eventually has to be weighed. God help us that we always weigh these things with a full heart.

Amen.

“Waking up to Wonder”

H,

The not so fine details of everyday life will constantly rob us of our feeling of wonder. There is so much pulling against the idea that this is all a miracle, life and living, that we might be tempted to walk straight into the lie that everything is ordinary. This cynicism is costly. Things without value lose their place in us. Things we do not value we will frequently abuse, including ourselves.

I think it is far more important than we think to wake up in wonder. I do not mean to force on our minds the idea that everything is grand and great and perfect. I do not mean to fake happiness or to make joy a certain way of dancing. I simply mean to realize the centre of the thing we are presently in. The great unfolding story of all conscious things.

We are on a precious planet, billions of years old, rolling onward into the future through space and time with a finite number of years giving to each person to experience it all. Whatever you think of what comes after that, there is enough wonder in the now to keep our hearts occupied.

The messy little details of the immediate constantly knock at us, telling us this is all ordinary and means little or nothing. There is no such thing. All of it matters. All of it adds up. There is a story in everything. We are part of an ever-unfolding piece of history and destiny. And there is inherent value in everyone.

Everyone born matters. There are no little lights or small lives. The wonder is not all in the stars and galaxies and the universe above, it is also buried in the single human heart.

“Remembering that it matters”

H,

In the middle of all the grand things that have happened recently, maybe I should say “grand”, it is hard to stay focused on why we began this journey in the first place. The technical part of living and being sometimes blinds us from the actual purpose of living. We can also strive to create all this art and forget what we trying to say with it in the first place.

These past few weeks have had that stormy tinge to it. It has been like those dreams I keep having of being thoroughly unprepared for an impending examination only to remember at the last moment that I had already written it. It has been brutal on the legs and brain, but I fear I have not yet felt enough pain in my heart.

I know this seems like a sadomasochistic thing to say but you know me well enough to know I am not one for pain. I can freely say that this job requires feeling the pain and frustration within yourself and others and making it useful through grace. I have to always remember that it all matters, and it is not, as I am accustomed to doing, a mad dash to conclusions. Any service is all like this. Any true living deals with the problem of pain and how to use it.

I hope we never feel like we have to avoid it again. We have to run to it and embrace it. No more silos and no more hidden hills. We have to live powerfully and fruitfully in the dark. That is what this time is. This is all the reason why we remain on earth.

“In place of pain”

H,

There is no hiding from the painful world around us. It will take a herculean feat of closing our eyes and ears and hearts and souls to what is really going on, to not feel the pain of abuse or war or violence all around the falling and fallen state of the world we live in now. There is no story to put in place of pain.

And I think it is important we face up to it. We have to stop webbing these terrors with the veneer of respectability. We have to stop putting a spin of life so we can all live better in the trap of it and not in the truth of eventual solutions. There is something beautiful about the advocate, the peacemaker, the activist and the one who shouts truth above power. There is something godly and holy and sacred about the soul who sets about to face the sickness in the world and, sometimes, in themselves with a heavy heart and a beautiful mind. That to the common eye, they may seem to fail, is only our own lack of imagination.

The extra dimension for us, is that we actually do believe in divine redemption. We think the world is on fire, but we also believe that there is a flood of truth coming to restart the human heart. There is a Kingdom of light to come and we try to be sparks for it, heralds, progenitors and harbingers of this eternal truth. We do not miss the pain. We know it well. We know that there is violence and darkness in the world and in us. We know we will give and receive pain. Our only hope is in the painless era to come. We have bet big and large on the grand idea that God is good, and the Lord is coming.

Amen.

“When we wake up, we shall see His face.”

H,

The joke has always been that we are a few years into the forty-year cycle. We had this grand idea that we were on the road with God, circling the promised land until our weaknesses fall off and we are able to live in glory unencumbered. It was a good story, but fantasy is all it is.

First of all, we will not be rid of our weaknesses on earth. They will control us less or more, but they will be with us till we snap this mortal coil and live in the eternal light. There is no forty-year cure. There is an eternal cure.

Also, we assume that the great ideas in our head are the great ideas of God. Some of them may have a tinge of the Him-Her-Them but none of them live up the vast mind that created the known and unknown universe. We have sparks of light from stones and God is a blinding, blaring and forever light across the universe. Our ideas are too small. That’s why we are better off trusting the path laid out for us.

None of this is said to diminish our value or to say our ideas mean nothing. This is merely for context. We are trying to run countries on one small planet, but we are called to exist and co-create galaxies. We must remember that this is all learning. This is all school.

We must remember to be the image of the one who sent us. There are no practical ways to do evil for good purposes. That is a fantasy. It is the myopic view of life on earth being the only life there is. YOLO is a lie as much as “By Whatever Means Necessary” is a lie. We are learning the right way to live and build and be leaders. There is life beyond the obvious sting of human death.

When we wake up, we shall see His face.

We should not be afraid or puzzled or give in to easy answers about how to address the world. We must stand in the light and become more and more influenced by it. We should not to forget that patience, kindness, longsuffering, forgiveness, faith, hope, love, joy are the marked traits of the forever soul. We must never forget that we are becoming these things we will always be.