2023-08-05 A Meditation on Alternate Story Lines
“28 And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. 29 Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant? 30 If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. 31 The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, he who is blessed forever, knows that I am not lying. 32 At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me, 33 but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands.” (2 Co 11:28–33 ESV)
The lives we can’t live. A certain finesse heals any forlorn outlook: do recall life is in fact too short to do all we might like to do. Love the ones we can at best only think of at a distance. Remember Jesus, in whose company absence becomes presence, who sends out His disciples two-by-two, creating a franchise for the Gospel. Remember that there is too much momentum, goodness, healthy vibes, to dwell insecure or down on ourselves. We must act. We must rise up. We must appreciate and acknowledge.
Ask the soldier who he or she was, and who he or she is today. Awkward brands of gear, a stock-sized uniform solemnly donned, and the mission: what of the mission? Too regrettable to be our only hope. That we should fight. That fighting should be necessary. Yet we do so in mind of the lives we can’t live: every woman and man in their plot of land, glad tidings from neighbors and friends, family around the supper table. Communally living it up as those no longer bored silly with life, but living into life as Advisor and Friend, to kin and kids, to friend and neighbor. For we enlist because we sense no time to delay. We enlist, and bring to the mess hall table a patent gift for looking on the bright side of things: all that we couldn’t get up to in life; all that inspires us and qualifies us to be agents and servants of a Higher Power; all that mediates to the crew gathered a one-hundred-percent On, Moral Code as backdrop, Inspired gestures of Love, those things that win wars. The zany, and the reflective.
Therefore, to capture in a few words the lover or friend in whose absence we pour out a drink libation, is to capture Life. Life, and that more abundant. We could dwell furious at ourselves over this peccadillo or that outlay that in strange time past seemed necessary, yet we go easier on ourselves in light of what alternate storylines we simply haven’t the time in this incarnation of life to live out. That time with Jesus.
We recognize that for some, life is a pleading game because of the regular daily experience simply of not being listened to, of simply not being quite liked. And such are some of us, plaintive, and, were the case known, strangely okay with it and peaceful, yet we wish the peace to be Heavensent rather than our head falling to pillow at night unkempt and incomplete. All of us have a strange quality of Spirit ministering to us, through the despondency and through the self-awareness: wow, is my outfit gauche. Wow, are my personality quirks loud. Wow, to be loved is to find something I scarcely acknowledge to myself as needful: so pent up and so determined am I to push through it all on my own.
Therefore, the actual storyline is enriched, because we’ve begun to see so deep and innate are the sins of life on all sides, and so great the love letter to life as it stands. Life stands broken and really quite bothered. It is quite hemmed up and needful. When abundant goodness creates healthy self-presentation and self-image, it is an abundance to cultivate, to turn on the time-worn world around us, knowing in fact all was a dream, and this reality is no-time-to-delay ours to live into.