“5 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. 11 More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” (Rom 5:1-11 ESV)

The capacity to dream meets the “making do” mindset of urgent but not hasty collaboration, coexistence, with the Gospel.  We thought after all of some elegant structure or beauteous arrangement, a satisfying personal sense of having kept the calm, kept the copacetic structural logic and correctness. Only then, Gospel is precisely the opposite. Gospel keeps us reliant post-defeat. It keeps us reliant post-expenditure of our better qualities. We have lost the structural peace and coherence, and found a wartime Making Do mindset.

God can make praise from these very stones. God can beguile us, befuddle us, make spectacle of us, as we try in vain to find a man-made coherence. If your better aesthetic is going to claim top dog role, then He will humble that aesthetic. We learn to act on a trust fall, a leap of faith, despite not seeing how it all “fits together”, architects it all to “come peace”, “come copacetic”, “come stylized” in His ways and His Name.

Because one of the most unformed or illogical Facts is His persistent love for us. Knowing life for what it is, this is perhaps the hardest part of being that father or mother to a child: that they will go right for that jugular of “will you ever abandon me?”. We rebel and gesticulate the most around His simple affection and Determination to go the course with us. We want to know deep questions, we raise awkward new notions of need and questioning precisely because He succeeded in loving us where others went the route of ambition and self-aggrandizement.

For once a faithful lover, and yet we will do all we can to crucify this parent. And the capacity to dream, to make sense of it all in some aesthete, is killing us softly because instead the Call is to go broad and deep on wings and a prayer. Go broad and deep on Certainty not easily accepted on round one. Not easily accepted on round two. Etc.

Therefore we labor in bright sunlight of the broken and utterly compromised Would Be of what we Would Like to see and have come together. We labor because we don’t have all the answers. We labor because something Broke. We labor because we can’t quite stand how much forgiveness and love there is for us coming down from On High. And in all these things our conquering spirit precludes any self-assurance or self-praise. We conquer because He conquered. Conquered in a war that He had won even before the people realized war was looming. We have already won when we go into that barracks post-Crucifixion, post-neatness, post-tidiness. We cannot say why or how we are certain God is for us, only that we know this: He has a plan called Love, live or die, for each of us. And to rise up precisely when our edifices and architected plans fall flat, is to rise up Immune and Impenetrable. This we do, because that gladsome tidings of joy… these come from Experienced Souls, souls Experienced in divine forgiveness, souls Experienced in a Father in Heaven already Himself at war and in wartime getup and wartime sincerity, assuredness, real comprehension.