“4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil 2:6 ESV)

Higher purposes exist, but the Christian’s explanation of them rarely is better than Christ’s Cross. Christ encountered a ne plus ultra of His Cross, hoping, praying, pleading that it all mean something “Higher Up”. Indeed, all human endeavor enters the fray, the ulterior Aspects and Currents, where we give up for broke, give up for Overwhelmed, give up for meek and not a peep. Encounters, God’s Master Plan, the Father’s third-eye Wisdom… all these things, and we have a solid Go-To: the Cross.

Because is it true that any and all human endeavor ends in the soldier hung out to dry, a lonesome death (not however forgetting the one or two Faithful, by His side), final solutions inchoate in Mind, because we cannot after all cohere and coalesce and logically deduce the End-All, Be-All, Fact of time misspent, words emptily or nervously invented, work Consuming: at some point Idealism meets timelines and work weeks and charts showing time versus money, time versus expenditure, time versus Accomplishment.

The goal is Life Engaged, the fact of some responsibility for a moment… not stolen away from us, we who are responsible… but hoisted upon the shoulders of Another. Indeed, in the flux of life, we do well to Learn to be dependent on the surety of Another. We see the higher motives and glimpse some weird way that this man’s, this woman’s poverty is still under the guise of an uncruel Lord. The poor folk who do not possess the educational attainment or monetarily-bought License, Understanding, soup-to-nuts Comprehension… these have a genius all their own, if we may talk patronizingly for a moment. God works in the neighborhoods and in the schools. God works in the too-weary-to-pray, too-weary-to-imagine, reality… one person’s personal Ideal, or their Heaven, is not to be mocked. We are all of us possessed of a rare Genius that is our personal Cross, our Decisions that earn no paycheck and land no degrees. We are genius to See, and in Seeing to Do: our next generation, one day they will learn Respect, will learn plain Fascination with just how well so-and-so (older brother, sister, parent, teacher) coped and made Impact on the hectic world.

Only this, that the soldier’s rat-in-a-maze little world is not fruitlessly spent, not weird unmeaningful currents or whirlpools of endeavor: it is rather some Deep principle called Human, called Created in His Image, called Resolved… to Do, to Add something human to the equation, to React and Respond. The soldier is aiming so high as to have already accounted for the Cross, already accounted for a place where he or she is locked in and no-turning-back sold and made for the Journey, for the Battle, for the War. Their peculiar genius will lead sooner not later, to inchoate and Cruciform panic, only not panic because of Him who went before us to His Cross. This is a resolution of Humanity, to respect each other for the wild and weird ways we turn eddies in a river of swirling current, into acts of Beauty and Genius. The Genius of accepting Fate, of murdering the downward tug of sensibility with the resurrected pull of Tomorrow. We will be post-second-cup-of-coffee, post weariness, post defeat, come Resurrection morn. And all things… to someone Up There, they make devious amounts of sense.