2024-01-31 A Meditation on Life Together

“5 Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. 2 For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. 3 While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. 4 But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. 5 For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. 6 So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. 7 For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. 8 But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. 9 For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. 11 Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” (1 Thess 5:1-11 ESV)

Worlds collide, not between churched life and secular life, but in the momentous Encounter between varying stages of amenability. We are varied in our availability. We are motoring along, but called to go low. Not to make a totem or an idol of any simple tasks we might be using to structure our days, but complete inoffensive shared Reality; the obstacles to feeling productive or dutiful by great Giftedness do become innocuously enchanting in themselves, and yet we are Available as people who in fact do Care, who in fact do Situate their person around urgent needs, needs of a friend, low points around Real Life. Because anything else we might put our trust in, mocks us. Anything else we use to account for our worth or our time does disappoint us.

It is no catch-all blank slate that faith affords us, but rather an invite personally, individually, comprehensively really to Absorb, Adopt, Intake an amount of cruciform living, our own failures being confronted, our own urgent Love for the brethren and sistren bringing us to ask Divine Aid. Smug in no way, we neither discount our duty to be respectable and uphold a workplace code of honor, not wasting anyone’s time with the secular parallel of incomplete thoughts. Our thoughts are complete in Christ, because He not only loves but equips and mentors us to rediscover an ambient Reality, comprehensive, patient, full and burgeoning. Of a prior era in our life or a forgotten former set of expectations; we were certain life owed us this much or that, our reasoning being capable of unbinding any platform or ethic put our way. And then the Consuming war, the state of alert, the cautious rest, the heightened urgency. We are urgent and we are war-weary, because of simply how our brains are wired: the sought-out simpler times or explanatory devices instead meeting an even simpler platform, Christ and His sacrifice being all anyone needs to focus on. His sacrifice being all anyone can explain away or make placid.

If it heals us, it heals others as well, to be helpful or simply to allow others to love on us. This is cruciform living, neighborly beginning and first intimations of Awaking to a time long gone or less ridiculed, less denied, less cruelly mocking. Who knows if we will have the strength for the Journey, a journey spacious and letting each Noah-like prudent one to think outside the box, strange new days upon us, a Tomorrow strangely intimate or focused on basic cruciform living. It will both be more benign, and be more harrowing, than anything we contemplate; our biggest fears or boasts or needs or omissions meeting the Cross where they dissipate and become so much dry wood for the fire. And living there is not our choice any longer, it is Gifted and Assigned to us by one who never imposes nor intimidates, but who is a patient friend in prayer, a warrior of mutual self-care. The gallons imbibed or the drugs ingested or the humble coping so faulty and pain-ridden, masks itself in each person in a variant way, as so much entrenched pride or greedy hoarding. The need for the Cross is bigger than we imagine, and it is simpler than we imagine; today, take yourself out of your comfort zone. Today, let yourself be interrupted even at the loss of so much hard work. This day, know it was a simple dotted line on which we signed, yet it was His decision not ours thus respectfully to invite and bless us. An invitation, that is, that we would never imagine, only that He takes pains to ensure is never compulsory or imposing.

The times they will be benign, more, comically fitted to each individual person’s new discovery: I matter; God loves even simple me, yes me! No one who once has tasted the fruit of salacious, unlugubrious, real live fruit will fail to chirp up and grin, to delight at the New Labors, or the New Puzzles, things that cause immediately us to say, “Sign me up!” Yes sir, yes ma’am: see what fruit is borne out of a simple quiet good deed done a neighbor. To have eyes opened unto the potential if only for a precious span of time our attention be focused: I saw something… it was substance and light, not imagination but actual Fact. And it changed my whole background or setting. It revised my sense of each day’s intake and outtake. It healed and enlightened and put paid even to the correct cynical voice out there, that says the burden is too great, the obstacles too heavy. In our flawed society there are little oases of free choice and lightened gait, places where we can with good humor love and be loved.