2023-08-22 A Meditation on Divine Parent

“3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7 so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” (1 Pe 1:3–9 ESV)

Patient through the growing pains, alert to rebellion fomenting yet also to star-struck and amazed reciprocal service, the Lord is our heavyset cauldron of amazement; we are amazed, new this day for service, not cause for the Lord to be embarrassed or glance away from us His beloved children. No dignities done without, yet patient as risk upon risk, life and limb, are taken in order to teach a deeper Principle. To teach to cope, embedded and tried, at times ungrateful as it were, if only we were ungrateful in fact: the fact is, a winning Father does not subtract any of His own issues; gone, self-doubt; gone, antagonism; gone, ingratitude; gone, grandstanding and the peddling of a cheaper brand of life upon life.

Cheaper digs, cheaper society, cheaper haunts, cheaper places of locating ourselves in this world; all this we disavow, and fight under a banner wondrous, beckoning, undepressive and resolute. To imitate One Love—that of a Father for a Son, for sons, for daughters—is no cheap or insufficient brand of love, but is what the world needs now.

So to the races, modest in our hopes, meek in our reliance, unapologetic, however, in our sufficiency: we are sufficient in the Lord, who does not wear the kid gloves, who holds us to high accord and in fine esteem, knowing us self-flagellant like the monks of old, perhaps, yet responding to this by asking us to hold up a higher mettle and composure. He disciplines, in true love and true determined parenting. You are not your thoughts, you are instead what you are for the sake of My Love.

Then to the barracks and to the embedded treacherous sojourns, alongside people wide and broad in their own sense of Calling. We are not hypocrites for the sake of holding out a conceit: that God loves us, that a Father Above cares for us, that we have Ministry and Mission underway. Yet too we long for companionship, briefly, because perhaps of our going long seasons seeming alone. However, we think it through and conclude that the soldier is longing for serial relationships, one upon another, just as much as she or he is longing for solitude. We have that mettle in us, to be hands and feet of a God who does not use the kid gloves, who does not worry that we might be in too deep, a little spoilt, turned worldly, compromised. O God, we languish; O God, we are ruined; O God, we were doing so well…

In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us (Ro 8:37). Safe on patrol, safe in the homestead, an enemy is unable to merge with the neighbors and friends who surround us. Somehow and in some wise we dwell secure precisely because we have rid ourselves of all comfort zones of recollection; too many the errors made, yet know this O child, that God is banking on being God of the good memories and the loving substratum that lasts years and complements the tears for fears and droplets of solitude.

In all these things we dwell near to a loving Lord whom, we acknowledge to friend and neighbor, has made of us a trinitarian new creation. In this Trinity, we have just begun to believe: that parents can be good; that good men and good women can rule in the midst of their enemies (Ps 110:2) and doubts that plague, that interrupt, that ridicule and make exasperated, frustrated, settlements, lesser arrangements, simpler petulances, can be grasped and overcome by mind and heart; that all things are possible through Him who loved us.