2023-04-05 A Meditation on Odd Ones
““See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Mt 18:10 ESV)
Why characters, why peculiar people, why wild-eyed adherents? If ever we were a success story, it was in spite of ourselves. We whitewash the storyline, forgetting that there were both good days and bad days, forgetting the horrific sense of impossibility met with the divine sense of accomplishment: to learn is to overcome.
Look at what a degree of blood the Savior shed for us. See how we immediately bargain towards earning our own keep. Any honest self-appraisal walks us through an ingesting or imbibing reality, perhaps. Or through a wild escapism. We underappreciate the days of calm, God’s gift of reasoned and reasonable life only good insofar as it avoids being an illusion: we remember we are unkempt and illogical at times. We put our faith in other things besides just that dynamic of impossibility becoming possibility, the learning, the gratitude for space and time to uncover God’s solution to the problem of just who we are.
To have this side hustle, for that is what—if we’re honest—our “main thing” is, is to address red hot knowledge, knowledge of a God and of a relevance and of a company. Side hustle, lopsided towards healing, adjudicating the inner woman or man unto perfectionism. The inner man or woman talked down from a ledge. The inner woman or man keeping the broader person honest, to have these checks in life is to take life seriously, which is to ease off of the empty habits and need fulfillment.
One day we shall overcome. One day an honest self-appraisal will give pause to the old self, in light of the new self. One day we will be content with what we are given, no vain pursuit after accolades. One day we will be the panoply of duties, the multitude of labors, the enabled formerly weaker self now dedicated and purposeful, joyous in discovering, plain in intent, multitudinous in discovery, wide in certainty. Certain that the labors are divvied up and others are keeping the watch. Taking many things to the altar. Accepting that healing blood shed as something greater than to be built up on our own initiatives. It is a deeper sense of belonging. It is a wider latitude of vision. It is inductive: you have loved me, and I in turn pass on that love. God has loved us, and we learn and overcome and are inspired away from those emptinesses. We are colorful and characters, we are fun and odd, we are simply beseeching God and man or woman in all their variety, to accept us in our misshapen, playful way.