2024-07-06 A Meditation on Going All In

“6 If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. 7 Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; 8 for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. 9 The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. 10 For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. 11 Command and teach these things. 12 Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. 13 Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. 14 Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. 15 Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress. 16 Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.” (1 Tim 4:6-16 ESV)

Operating at half throttle, at full throttle, at some dire proof of humanity’s resilience: we encounter our finitude in tandem to the encounter with God’s Majesty, the power of His prophetic word, the Reality of spiritual levels, purposeful deeds no strangers even though we feel finite.

But, rested, prayed up, invested: the intangibles remind us to Discover the war within, the war without, the plateau on which we are fighting and scarce to find plain certainty or broad effect: we were rich, now are poor; we were peace, now are war; we are magnanimous, now are scrambling.

Yet in all this we need not bicker nor go back and forth, because we have learnt a New Way of basic Discovery of a Spirit who carries, who nurtures, who entrenches and entreats, who gives that calmness met with duty and honor, to face the half-throttle would-be’s and become Fully On.

Invested, faith-driven, plainspoken, wondrous, in kind responding to duty sent our way, by our own duty and our own love for those wretches we call our community and our cohort. We make mint off of what we have in alabaster jars of Patience and of Gifted procedure. We take up that battle between halfway this direction, halfway that: on one level facing discouragement or trauma or trials, on another Knowing God is for us, is Real and Spiritually Prepared, on the Call, at hand and in those procedurals.

Then to have a Faith how the Possible emerges from the absolute Impossibility: oh, this will never come together; it will never work; I have nothing in mind to say, yet to know: that for some it is a peace-loving reality to be there at the Ready for one another. It is hope-filled and bedrock, to be the Voice of first this one heard, and then that one heard. It is acknowledging the throttled pinch but also the absolute Promise, Bedrock, Urgency of a reality unneedy yet copiously endowed. With prize and pristine dying Vision: what we see in life’s trenches is worthy of a book to be authored, and we wonder at the landscape passing by: remember those Victories we have witnessed, and the aura, the blessedness, the scope and grandeur, of Recollection, of Going back there anew. We are tantric in a Blessedness unheard of, better than the storyline for its marriage to Impossibility.