“Wilting.”

H,

Everyone lives in a fragile state. We present as all together but we are frequently falling apart. We are always wilting from some unseen force or known fear. We are not having the best time of it and this is well hidden when we succeed, and more exposed if we fail. Failure and success are the currency of how we truly appear.

By success and failure, I do not mean in monetary terms. Many people have overt success at living exactly the sort of life they believe in. They are married and stable and live in the sort of house they want to. They do not want or need a lot of money. And they do not have a lot of money. But it is fundamentally the same. They sense an endlessness to living, a desperation, a realization that life has no meaning after you get everything you want. If you are chasing something and never catch it, you can live a whole life of ‘meaning’ in pursuit of the ideal. If you do catch it, the questions begin.

In either case, the hunger and the wilting go on. We must reconcile this even in the light. We are not advanced human beings because we know some aspects of God. It is does not stop the wondering. It will not kill the questions. We are all on a journey, all carrying our states along the road to meaning and we are all doing this with hearts that could break at any moment. We should always remember to be kind to ourselves and each other, along the way.

“Wisdom is humility.”

H,

The old rules tell us that there is no difference between being wise and being smart. Wisdom is for the sharp, the up at it, the ones who can apply knowledge and the outliers always ahead of the curve.

Yet wisdom, as God intends and creates, is something else entirely. It is an awareness of the vastness of the universe and an understanding of our place in it. It is the belief that something eternal is always afoot and it is impending. It is the vulnerability to accept that you are weak and this will show up in acts and omissions and causing hurt, but knowing when to say you are sorry and knowing that the light is within you and will become you.

Wisdom is relying on God’s mind and not our limited thoughts. It is the humility to know that your trauma will end but God will not. There is an endless stream of light and love ahead of you. Yet, in the now, you will struggle, you will fall, you will not feel that anything said above is true. Wisdom is standing up when you realize who you are, your actual place in the Universe, and walking slowly back home.

“The end of the individual.”

H,

There is not a subjugation of the individual in God. It is the other way around: it is the realization of the individual. It is not going smaller; it is going bigger. This is what we must always realize. There is never a need to put ourselves down. This is not God’s intention. He is not building self doubt, he is not angling for the annihilation of who we are. It is not about being subpar or never enough. This is not some kind of spiritual eugenics.

You will find no joy either way: the striving for imperfection or the lure of false perfection. The new heaven and the new earth and the new human that transcends both will be built on eternal principles. It is not who we were being made into but who we were always meant to be. There is no end to the individual. We can all exist in the mind of God. This is the power and beauty of the Godhead.

This does not mean we are fixed. It merely outlines the purpose of the great fix. “We are being made into who we will forever be”, Willard tells us. This is not the end of the individual but the beginning.

“The Weight and the Kindness”

H,

We ought to always carry with us, a certain kindness. Hate is not the way into anything or the way out of anything, but we might have reasons to hate. Yet, those are isolated and special circumstances. In the main, we are faced with the everyday decisions to be kind to the people around us who have done nothing to us, who are trying to cobble together their fragile lives as much as we are and who are not a party to, as the Buk would say, “whatever is doing us.”

The weight of kindness is not the arrogant idea that our actions have life or death consequences on anyone’s life but the eternal prescription that we are pushing people toward the light or the dark by how we treat them. There is a difference; the former presupposes that we are central to the plot of any given life while the latter suggests that it is a shared weight. People are not brought low by one single cruel act as much as by a thousand, over the course of any given life.

Let us not be arrogant enough to think that we are tin gods but let us not be careless enough to believe that it does not matter how we treat others. This does not mean being “soft” or “indulgent” or “permissive”. Many times, kindness is firm and deliberate. It means making it clear, in your heart, actions and words, that the other person has value, is worthy of your efforts of love and is accepted to be as flawed as you are. So, help us all, God.

“To not hurt others.”

D,

We do not have to be heroes to not hurt others. It is the most basic part of acceptable behavior. It is the kindness of being human and alive and having a spirit that dwells in the light. As you grow up, and I hope it is not in the toxicity or abuse that we grew in, you will learn that the darkness calls all of us to be our other side; the base of the fallen soul.

We must talk about this openly, men frequently hurt women. There are things in memory and mind that are too disgraceful to face. We must look at it square in the face. The monster is us, not you. The monster is the shadow in us, and the shadow is us, but it does not have to be you. We are unlearning what you must never learn. We are learning to listen, to take account and to do better. It is not enough that we do not do the vilest things on record. That we condone it makes us criminal, that we support the monster makes us culpable and that we do not speak against it makes us cowards.

None of this, dear son, should be your burden. Grow steadily in the light. The legacy of indulgence, of entitlement and of indifference should not be your reality. The weight of being different or speaking out and reforming these relationships should not be yours either. I hope simply that you remember this: do not hurt others, be kind and attempt to live in the light.

“Fearing the new.”

H,

This speaks to the more romantic sides of the argument. The newness will come at us, no matter what happens. It seems like an adventure from afar but when we get down to the bones of change, it is manifestly uncomfortable. Let’s face it; the familiar had us and does not want to let go. We like the certainty of forms and processes that we can understand and rely on. We like a certain order to our lives and our loves. The thing we are in is not about that life. It is about constant revelation and steady growth.

There is no reason for fearing the new. We are new every morning, we hope. We are learning to be better at the unknown and unfathomable depths of God’s love and grace. We are finding ourselves in the light that reveals slowly but thoroughly, the whole breath and scope of life in the universe. There is nothing but wonder here and on this we must be clear. There are no safe havens in the gospel. Prepare to have your mind constantly blown.

Change, growth and re-invention are not buzz words that some ad man thought up to sell laptops and phones. They are the monikers of the reformed soul. They bring us closer and closer to the light we once saw and now follow. We were not told it would be a smooth ride. We were told the rough travel will be worth it.

“Kindness above blind rage.”

H,

You know this thing about my temper.  I am always pressing away from it. I have a series of easy build ups and then there is the volcano, up and about and curbing my soul into tiny eruptions that have no grace in them. I have to learn kindness over blind rage.

There is nothing wrong with being upset or angry. There are things to be angry and upset about. The reaction is the thing. The expression of it in violent words or actions is the bane of it. We should never be hurtful, even though we frequently are. We should never be unkind, even though we frequently are. This is not coda for how we will behave. It is part of the map of how we should behave.

Dwelling in the light means you will have more questions about your own behaviour. If this does not happen, you may be slipping into the dark spot of yourself.  If it is all that happens then you have become the point of reference for yourself, your flaws have become things you can handle, and you have decided to fix yourself. Both positions are untenable. We are to dwell in the light and not fix ourselves in the light. The same kindness above blind rage we are to give to others we must also give to ourselves.

“Tender in spirit.”

H,

There is nothing wrong with being fragile. We all are. We are not made of the stuff that would break mountains. We are more likely to be broken. We tie everything to external opinion. We are all so easily bruised. This is not a weakness. This is being human.

The tender in spirit are going to inherit the new earth God is building. It is not for the callously weak. It is for the brittle strong and the shaking brave. We are not here to be strong as an act. We are here to be broken. We are here to find the humiliation in humility. These things we face are no accidents. They are the ways God makes us whole.

The tender are ripe for the glories of the kingdom. They are closer to the real human state than almost anyone else. We live in simple bodies and have limited minds. We cannot conceive or create anything infinite; we just act like we can. Our posture of defiance against the vastness of the time and space that we do not know is not a wise position to take. Wisdom is knowing that you cannot possibly comprehend what all life is. It is a story you have to be told. It is a story you must locate your place in. It is a story about the tender soul of all being becoming the thriving spirit of all time.

“Time to light.”

H,

The question is always what you will do with the light. We talk about it enough. We are always on about spreading it. We build whole sermons around it. There are platforms and seminars and conventions and books and audiobooks and podcasts about it. Yet, in actual form and substance, there is little of it in our world. Or not enough of it to contrast the darkness.

This is not to blame anyone. That will do no good. The only reason to bring up a problem is to reflect on how to solve it. I am not even sure this has a reflective answer or a set of steps to make it work where it did not before. It will simply be time for it to happen. The scary thing for all of us has always been how our choices do not frame or frustrate the will of God. We would like to think it does. It does not. This is a ship we are on by choice, yes. The ship will leave the harbor when it is time.

That time is now. Can you feel it in the air? Things are shifting for this age. All sorts of disruptions and upheavals and opportunities to be a voice in the dark. All these things we talked about in the past we can begin to do in the present and the future. It is finally that time.

“Telling the truth.”

E,

Your only real burden is to tell the truth. This will be easier in younger years and in the right spaces. When there is no pull or push on your soul and extraordinarily little to lose by looking or feeling stupid. It will seem like you are real enough at times and this little bit of a lie may be useful to get you out of awkward situations. This is the first step down a slippery slope. A more convenient fiction will always be more desirable than any hard bit of truth. You must learn early to know the difference.

Why is the truth so important? I fear in your age this will be an even more pertinent question. It will be a true moral question if the lie can be better than the truth. This already appears in stops and starts in mine, but it will have its full day in yours.

The truth is important because we believe in the answer to the absurdity of life more than the question it raises. Cadmus was absolutely right to point out the flaw in finite life. We believe that the answer to that flaw is infinite life. This is an objective sense of belief. We are not creating a subjective reality; we are submitting to an objective one. Our first premise is that all things must make some sense. Our second is that we may not have the mind to conceive the dynamics and specifics of that reality. Our third is that objective reality is not just a way of looking at things but a being. You know where this is going.

The truth will always matter because at the centre of the universe sits an unyielding force that creates everything else. Reality is framed in His image and present reality is marked by Her absence. This being, genderless and gender-full, is the basis of all truth and being. It is essential that we do not make Them up. It is vital that we accept this reality. In Their eyes lies the infinite life of all things. In that powerful and perfect soul lies all things bright and beautiful, all things great and small, all being and all life, all light and all suns and all galaxies and all forms. And all the things we do not know and cannot possibly conceive. Here, is the truth about everything.

“These mirrors.”

H,

Introspection is always the thing that gets you. Who wants to look at these mirrors into our true state all the time?  We cannot take the truth and light about who we truly are, not in this human moment where ego and id are the key to our self-identifiers. We are fragile in body and in soul. Most stains last a lifetime.

The light we get is in small doses. We cannot take our full medicine. We would wilt in the full sun. We must, almost, live by night. The fantasy is that we are well from the first day. The reality is that our present lifetimes are a tiny drop in the raging ocean of eternity. We will get on this. We will be better in time.

We will more than that. We will be perfect. We will be whole. All the ugliness in us will fall flat in the face of power, truth and form made in the eternal shape. This is not the end of the story. You may look in the mirror today, but they hold only a sense of present reality. They do not tell us the whole truth. Remember this, every time you look in the mirror. There is much more to come from you and everything else.

“What happens to the heart.”

H,

It is never simply fine to do as we please. We know what happens to the heart. There is no free lunch, even in the soul. Things will affect you. Dwelling in the darkness has its effect. We cannot simply seek the disbalance of feeding one side of ourselves. We are whole people for a reason. We are all made for bigger things and should not be slaves to any one thing or anything at all.

This is the main problem with addiction. It reduces us to our needs and then to one single need, all the time. We cannot function without succumbing to it, and this over and over again. It takes a toll on who we are and who we can be. Sin, defined as turning our nose up at the light, has much the same effect. It is not a single thing but a “posture of defiance”, a push away from God and a worship of the transient and the temporal. Without the context of eternal good, we fall into the trap of self-reference. It becomes a matter not of the validation of self but the preponderance of self over everything else. The heart becomes removed from the universal nature of existence and becomes trapped in today but spread over a lifetime. Living for today and tomorrow and then the next is the most limiting view of existence there is.

And the heart cannot fold itself into this new meaning. It continues to beg for more. It needs more. It cannot be healthy in this state. It cannot be full. It is constantly hungry and constantly wrought. It begins to look for thrills and not wholeness, for power and not love, and, finally, for glory and not meaning. The only hope there is to become what it was meant to be in the first place: the House of God.

“Tired but still walking.”

H,

Life does not present as anything but exhausting. It is one thing or the other and if you are not trying, they say, you are decaying, lazy, and not worth the price of admission. You are always under pressure to pay the levy on your life, to fight against inevitable entropy and to focus energies on things that will show overt success. And so, tired but still walking, not sure what you want but chasing the common dream that no one remembers who started and no one, perhaps, really wants.

We are told of a new way. Yet, the old way seems more impending. Everything is made integral to living when most things are not. We forget how universal the good news is. We lose track of the simple faith we profess and hold on to the complex web that preachers weave in their search for meaning. We forget to just lie down and sleep. We forget to rest and to think. We forget that it is not pace that matters because time is truly on our side.

So, we must refocus on these thing of ours. There are no games here. There is no pecking order, no reward for human effort, no tracking system, no honour role, no performance medals, and no favorites. It is the complete opposite to all our heroic ideals about self. We do not get tired only because life is exhausting. We get tired because we forsake the truth and make it so.

“Trembling through.”

D,

When I was younger, I had the old images of a perfect father who hated imperfection. Weakness and sin were things the divine could not swallow, and the blood of Jesus was not to be wasted in trembling through the issues. It was once and for all salvation over constant grace.

This, however, says more about the nature of us than the love of God. We are easily bruised and full of ego. The idea of working from failure to success, very slowly, seems like a terrible story. We are more into the glory than the pain. We forget that the cross is the pain and the glory comes through death, the daily and then the final kind.

The fire is part of the glory, death is just a door and the trembling fear is just a reminder that we care about the things that matter. We have the learn to embrace the whole process.

“This is our source.”

H,

There is no doubt about how flawed we continue to be. We do not need another look at this. We may focus too much on it, in reality. We are not able to rise above it or rise to other occasions. It is always in front of us. Yet, it is not our source.

We live for bigger things and in utter reality. We have taken a look into the beautiful infinite and returned feeling this incredible hope. We know our lowest point is not the end of the universe. We know our highest point is just a rumour of this lovely glory. We are in this beautiful place. We live in the grace and power of the creator of everything. There are so many limits to the human experience but there is no limit to the mind of God. This is our source.

This does not make us inert. This is the great misunderstanding. Fruitless effort is as pointless as loud inaction. We are not here to look busy or to sleep through our lives. It is not about doing anything at all, but it is also not about doing nothing at all. We are neither determinists or nihilists nor anything in any of these middles. We believe that God made the path and we walk it in that light. We believe that God is the path and we follow, warts and all. We believe that all creation has a destiny and so we do not fret over the hiccups. We know how reality and the universe, including all the multiverses within, are framed. This is our source.

“Guilt.”

H,

In remembering the old days, can we truly say we are without blame? That we carry no guilt? We may escape the legal definition of guilty deeds, but we cannot deny the moral one. There is such a thing as sin, we believe, and if we are not guilty of crimes, we may be accountable for sin.

This is why we must not join the large chorus of men who cry out against the great revealing that “men are scum”. Didn’t we know this already? Isn’t this the human and fallen state? And as men, are we not aware of the tenuous and unfair rule of thumb that puts men in a position of power over the lives of even random women around them? Do we not already know this?

And the least Christian thing to do is to dislodge ourselves from the common pool of humanity and say:  it was not me. It was all of us.  It was our silence, our cowardice, our complicity, our trauma come alive, our acquiescence, our lack of empathy and our toxicity. We were raised to be hunters, but our Father is a lamb.

“Silence and Prayer.”

Love is learning

Breathe in, wait, breathe out

Know that love is learning

You will not learn it in one day

It will take a lifetime

It is your destiny to learn how to love

That is your pilgrimage, your path, and your purpose

It is the only way we become like God

All prayer is this:

Father, teach me how to love

Amen.

“Silence and Prayer.”

May we always get better and never worse at living

May we always be able to change

Breathe in, wait, then breathe out

Do not let the burden of living be heavy

Come into the lightness of being

Do not let the world break you

Do not let it alter you from your given path

You were made for times like this

You are not an unformed figment; you are not out of time or place

You are exactly who you are and where you should be

Embrace it

Let God take your hand

En-joy this

This will lead to that

Amen.

“Silence & Prayer.”

You were put on earth for a reason, no doubt

Do you know what it is?

Breathe in, wait, breathe out.

You were put on earth to be yourself

More than work or passion or “purpose”

You are here as a specific portrait of grace and energy

Get to being yourself

Everything else is expression

Your life in the light is being

God may appear in expressions, but They live in beings.

Amen.

“In Silence and Prayer.”

Consider, in the dark, the source of your light

Dwell in the idea of this light

Think of it as the answer to wrongdoing, to injustice and to death

Breath in. wait. Then breath out.

Think now of your own wrongdoing, your own acts of injustice and the places were you do not come alive

Consider, in this dark, the source of your light

Can it cure you from the weight of your sin?

Can it bear the weight of sin in the world?

Yes, it can.

In hope of the resurrection

Amen.