2024-07-23 A Meditation on Our Makings

“13 Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret. 14 For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unfruitful. 15 What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also; I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also. 16 Otherwise, if you give thanks with your spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say “Amen” to your thanksgiving when he does not know what you are saying? 17 For you may be giving thanks well enough, but the other person is not being built up. 18 I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. 19 Nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue.” (1 Cor 14:13-19 ESV)

Familiarity. The makings of a soldier. Some way to arrive at simple life observations is also to imply many unspoken things. Such as that soldiering Call. Such as just who and how we endear ourselves to in simple fashion. To begin to advance our life’s thesis… it can be a lonely perch. A discovery that, in that moment of clarity so hard to face squarely, it is a thesis needing a syllabus. A list of observations. Patient line upon line, iota upon iota, tittle upon tittle.

What is this, to say we know it all, that we are better people? On the contrary, we are present more like a Jonah, who forgot all the beauty Jesus had shown him and grumbled. We are like the early disciples who, when Jesus died, they—shocked? Mournful? Inchoate and mystified?—went back to fishing.

Therefore the ideas that Serve us, are ideas not foreign even to Jesus’ generational thinking: we can do one up, and think on a Dinosaur scale, that those of God’s Creatures way surpassed our human brief time on earth, yet Armageddon of some little-understood nature did come about. A statistical certainty when spread over a hundred thousand years, right? The death spell for Humans as well, correct? Armageddon? Yet… ideas… not to forget, that our hangups and peculiar knowledge, is rife for Today Testimony, to be Convicted and dwell Near the Company: to soldier is to imbibe that Gospel of Now.

Now… somehow a word just as important as Christ. Somehow just as important as Jesus of Nazareth. Somehow His Vision of a few generations passing before He would come again. Somehow that meek Man’s identity, as a mother hen, as one whose faith failed on the Cross just a bit, as one a bit loud and rambunctious, perhaps to a fault… some would argue: shouldn’t a religionist be docile and Perfect? Perhaps that obedience, that loyalty, that faithfulness to the Cause was contagious and Inspiring. We saw here one who Prayed, thereby knowledge-gaining around what-all was transpiring in the Big Picture. It’s like a schadenfreude or a deja vu, that those who pray are both sinners and Inspired limbs of the Frame, of the Risen Core, of the Man Himself.

Therefore as some pastors who precede us have said, “What is the Substance? What the Information? What the Core?” And their answer via a question inspires ours: do we begin with a bookshelf of secular works and another of theological? Where do we begin?

Thus any Tutor is entertained with that question: lonesome to be one with a Thesis gifted from some Remote Spiritual Outpost, summed up as “Now”, with an asterisk perhaps, but still thus summed up, and not the end of the world, either: joy in Believing, whilst humbled like a Jonah for still being Human. Hoping to Share and appeal that some few souls will be Edified. Hoping to be that contagious Zen that spells a word Transcending Dinosaur-scope, Dinosaur-longevity, Something unhurried and Special, seen in a glimpse.

To the soldier, the quality of life is something mysterious and Special: that we need not go into epochal considerations, but understand today’s Gift of fellowship and little pockets of Life. Things we Need, the imaginations of Others so coaching and prompting of our own… our own limited scope of Imaginative Power. Thus we are Carried and Consecrated, thus we are Observant and Rested. Thus we are Game to Go On, and Helmeted for certain devolution of Man’s Rest. Devolution because that Thesis needs some tutoring that by awful chance hasn’t had time nor place. Devolution because each of us is unimaginative around how we project upon others. Devolution because we are of a caste system or class-based society that never ever in a hundred thousand years shall see one descend, nor another rise. Devolution because we haven’t made a formal title or name for those awful things we shirk away from. Unfamiliarity. Certain familiarity, as well, as though we had already met up with and seen right through those we differ from.