2024-02-10 A Meditation on Bedrock

“31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? 33 Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Ro 8:31-39 ESV)

Returning to a foundation, returning to a bedrock; some resounding peace or joy meets the Christian at work, at war, at Encounter; we rise up and we set down, about the Master’s business but no simple personality along for the ride, it is our Duty, our Covenanted Peace, to be active. We are active precisely on the flipside to our more sensitive Encounter or Brokered Peace; some Savior has taught us to flourish in precise reaction not to a carrot on a stick of good works, but because we are Blessed and Valued in our rightful place. We found ourselves as people blanket forgiven and Inducted, favored and Blessed. We found ourselves nourished and calmed, in Favored Expectation of a sillier place we can be humored in, can be lightened up in, can put aside our baggage and any complexes or obsessed-over duties. All this is somehow God’s formula for progress, His no-nonsense marriage to the Call of Duty: He duty-binds His people precisely on the flipside to a Reassurance and Calm most divine.

God is no slouch to lazily equate freely-given Peace with some kind of avoidance of the facts of life, the fact that life measures and pressures and demands and sabotages the Christian soldier about their day’s work. Life is a cruel taskmaster, building up only to tear us down, making us slaves to our own fears and self-chosen demands. It is a more senior voice whose wisdom spells respite, yet again it is not a lazy respite unacquainted with the Human Spirit, the Human Endeavor, the Human’s Progress; rather it is Cause to labor on, to fight the good fight of faith, to have all life’s answers miraculously dealt out to us piecemeal and as needed: we become assured, not because we are know-it-alls, but because we know One who does Know it All.

If only, then, by some manner of holding up lofty ideals, we might likewise be weaned and nurtured with simpler thoughts and basic beholdenness divine. We might likewise discover a stranger kind of work, no slaves to self-advancement and the rat race but somehow Able precisely because we are already Known and already Blessed. We are blessed in some holy and unknowable equation. Somehow God has seen a logic deeper or more heartfelt, more sympathetic, more patient, more calm, then any we choose for ourselves. Our savior complex, our big brother mania, our little brother efforts to please, all this speaks to a Place we can go to in all humility and all “I need someone to talk to” conclusive answer, that God it is whom we can talk to, in prayer, in a moment’s self-reboot, forgiven and remade, built up and Endeared one to another Spirit, to have our circumscribed World most able and ready, safe from the terrors that wake at night, or rather from the daily avoidance mechanisms; we avoid, yet now we face up to and live into a blessed spaceride, our spaceship spelling End and Finality to all those fears. A new slate. A new day. A mania curbed or a depression propped up; we are neither on this diagnosis or that one but rather are fellow-travelers to the average person, who like us fears and avoids, or blusters and shows pride. In all this we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.