“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.” (Romans 8:31-39 ESV)
The heightened self-image, knowing we are Created in His image, begins the Christian’s saga. For, if we truly understood belovedness by the Father, we would be not glib but have clarity of self-image, jesting almost, lightly-held: we would be slightly coy or smiling around the ways we have failed Him. For, we would know: He patiently put up with all the ways we test Him, our demands for assurance, our faux pleas for intervention, our self-injury to force a Response.
People join this sage, engage the Mantra, adhere to the Master Plan, spelt out in early Christian and Jewish (Muslim as well) scriptures, because it suddenly Means Something to be at odds with our Father in Heaven. O, but we would never be at odds! We long for greater not less visibility, for His gaze in some fatherly, hands-off way, to be unperturbed, unbothered, uncorrupted, by our silly ways.
The soldier of Christ turns over a fresh leaf each and every day, so long as it is called “Day”. The Christian soldier in sanguine and held-together Mantra ostensibly engages a war already Won. We engage, because curiously enough some folks are on a very different level or playing field. We forget, that such were we once upon a never, once upon a lonesome, once upon a journey. Just how… do they really do such things “in the wild”? How does any of that make sense? Goodness, we thought everyone was like us!
Enthusiasm, then, engages the give-and-take, His blood for our pains. We are surprisingly Content, though we can never forgive ourselves, to accept His nurturing Progress. He progresses, our sins never allowed to harbor impasse, to harbor sticking point, to harbor pain of correction. We cannot correct. But in light of a world economy that Today is speaking of battle lines and the end of purely numeric Attitudes, Contrasts, Engagements, Debts, and speaking a language we grapple with because in part we know it well: the language of You, O Soldier, being Now needed and Today called upon. Forgetting what lies behind, and scoping out what lies ahead, we scarcely take a moment to reflect and philosophize on what we have learned. But learn we have, and to the end of a Better engagement and self-knowledge par excellence.
Those we’ve used and forgotten along the way… to these we try to demonstrate by our lifestyle, that life isn’t easy for any of us. It was a false charge, then, to say we were manipulators of passion or social animals unrestrained. We were not sociopaths then or now, but more: the ghost stories do elide a Realization that we have debts unrepayable and Warm to the blood of His lamb-like Sacrifice. Because we are today Fools for Christ, and make peace with any and all parties, ourselves knowing at times: jealousy, I’d like that lifestyle. Passion, I now find it in religion. Engagement, I am on a solo journey because of dreams from long ago, one day to come to light. Of a soul we fall in love with, but a pained soul, a soul not automatically won over by our charades, a soul Different and passionately In Love, with life, with the shared belay of Christ in our midst.