2024-02-02 A Meditation on Braced for Impact

“2 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” (James 1:2-4 ESV)

Bracing impact and questions of what, out of everything, can we bring with us. Pride, former resting places and abodes, these by God’s good grace only humble. Be warned, O pilgrim, that you have attained unto something magical, mystical, heady and strong; it feels just like its right, it is a special hour of our day or several hours, and with ease and austerity, powerful calm, we ebb and flow and enter that state called Blessed.

Be warned, then, of untold weights leveled our way. We warned, then, of an occasion to practice the arts of stewardship, rightly discerning each humble body present is a person a body joined to some scale of advancement in the Spirit. Each witnesses the jealousy when another pilgrim leaps past them, the early convert gladhappy and solidly enthused; where, says the casual churchgoer, is the reward for me? Where is the insight Divine, for me? Where is the gratitude for all the years of careful living? Where is the promise that none shall inherit the Kingdom of God who are idolators or living in sin? All this is reason to meditate and moreover reason not to forget: we were bought with a price. We were inducted so as to be Capable and Effective, even as our former limelight or starlight dissipates, is packaged up and sold for parts, is mocked and turned into a liability.

Believe it, that all the world is on the line, and some have well surpassed their peers in the pews, while others are in a state called Blessed but Forgetful: live into the loving newness, the new environs spellbinding and curiosity-inspiring. And brace because we’ve just received enough to account all our life nothing compared to that experience. We rightly give thanks that we could so experience, even as the braced-for impact looms. No matter! In the trenches we remember our Beloved. In the mess and shrapnel we gladly lift up in prayer those we serve for, to whom we are duty bound. Our nation and our clan, our school of thought and our rather denuded appearances in a broader, newly learned-of, situation. People from across the aisle. People speaking a stranger language. People who call on us to meet at a common ground, a level nurturing Place. For some unknown life quality or experience has prepared us to make the right gestures, of affection, of stoic getting-along, of the finer qualities discovered amidst life run rampant over ambition and self-centered goals.

We gesture and we Serve, newly minted as straddlers of Divine Worlds newly found. What a gift, to have the Christian Promises that all shall be copacetic or rather excited and warm, the Encounter and the things we unknowingly were preparing for. We come prepared and we come servant-minded, to the Fellowship, to the city, to the Church. And it is in deep conversation with those of a different tongue. It calls on some mystical Gift that perhaps even derives from habit and routine, custom and rule, that seemed non-essential. So who knows just how and why the Man in his or her state of motoring along, will be blessed this day to have made the right preparations for what is alighting upon us. It is a joyous gift, constantly to take humbling experiences and give thanks that our misshapenness is another’s reassurance, or our faultlines are another’s state of mutual comprehension, getting along, dying even to elevate and to love on these peers, new peers, old peers, people we should look up, and people we were tidily prevented from knowing the existence of, in our preparatory stage of life and our cocoon.

If we put our dollar into the ante we learn to defend and steward any and all aspects of our lives, if they be a boast then rather to transfer them to Christ, and if they be a liability then rather to let them do their Divine Work of humbling us.