2023-08-31 A Meditation on Longing for Answers

“7 Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. 8 At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.” (1 Jn 2:7–8 ESV)

To allow oneself to be hurt, disappointed, flawed, imperfect, is somehow our march and trial of the Christian walk. That is, on one level we have turned aside in conversion from the death march, from the cynical and criminal mindset, yet for all our benevolence and good wishes to our fellow man, for all that we now tend to imagine of good in others, we get in a rut of longing for something—anything—to break the mold, whether it be curiously looking for illicit images to having an extra cookie, or anything that, in our obsessive stride suddenly begins to take on the character of our entire life on trial. And if: if we indulge, it is unforgivable; it is breakage; it is proof positive of a cauldron of strange brew. Somehow we pattern our self-image after the desire never accurate or honest, as to a noble set of habits, which set and encouragement do subtle things to our self-confidence, healthsome things, benign self-image things, as we ricochet from high to low and everything in-between, during the day’s labors.

Now to the immediate need for pastoral care, the soldier brought to mind of the flipside of a faith wondrous and new. That faith, when we forget it concerns all things, is easy to forget and to focus only on the breakage, the trial, the temptation. New things, new temptation, new expectations, for all that we give thanks as to our time of fellowship growing up, others have better: bred in the Good Name, assured by the Good Word, learned by the Good Book. Yet today we say “no matter”; “let them be”; “as for us, we shall be happy campers with what morsels fall our cogitating way”. We cogitate. We delve into. We think through. We are strangely free marketable as those with a working man’s classy education, with a laborer’s purity of soul, with a downtrodden one’s meek suggestion that God it is who saves.

Therefore at some times past we relish the honesty, the things that the Spirit was doing to our hubris and “normal” levels of pride. We are touched and healed by our own flaws, with the knowledge that God saw us through the escapades. If we differ from a peer down the aisle of church from us, so let it be. Let it be time to reflect that as they lift up holy hands in worship, we too lift up souls possessed of the same Lord. Perhaps we have hit rock bottom, and in this way—a way and path that never would we choose for ourselves—we keep the light on for these our potential new peers. Perhaps we feel foolish, yet it is cathartic and therapeutic, the gentle firm hands of a professional therapist. Who puts on display man’s humility, calling each no longer to be yes-men, but to inadvertently arrive at today with a point of disputation.

No, we wanted it just to be a concession to God, and to be the end of our “rebel”, “self-directed”, “flawed” and “pained” life. But instead we were born again, given over to a vast new scope and landscape. We had to fight. We had to marvel, for He made us capable both of benevolence while also of knowledge: we know the sin, the truth of another man’s motives not always being all peace and uplifted life. We know this about ourselves, first of all, for our religion holds things in tension: good deeds, versus total depravity.