2024-02-23 A Meditation on Reliability

“44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (Matt 13:44 ESV)

On the reliability spectrum it is our plan and duty somehow to advance a front; we are known for a presentation we put forth; we are all of us scampering and adjusting behind the facade, for this much is true: that we invent rules for ourselves, and work ethics, and requirements. Those requirements are a cold judge, yet strange brews and consequences obtain: we are somehow a wearied brand of delightful, after the Main Stage. After life’s main gig, our weariness and our trials somehow bode well for a spirit that celebrates, a spirit that overlooks the accountant’s list of the sins of others, a spirit that despite all curmudgeonly environs, decides and resolves to Celebrate. That life has some contract with its citizens: do this work, and be glad. Do this office or duty, and be made worthy. Be worthy, because it is a wearied and hardworking evangelist who rightly accepts a moments’ downtime or Celebration. A wearied and hardworking Citizen of God’s Kingdom.

Alert, then, to the soldier’s largesse, laboring in order in ultimate things to be freely giving, to be grand and abundant, to be gregarious and highly-minded. All these things and then that contract with ourselves, of just what work and calling we judge ourselves to be suited for. The soldier’s realization that the battle is not to the swift nor the prize to the strong, but that some theological answer beckons to both small and mighty, to Call us to a rather beautiful resignation or rather a Theological platform: where we live being no accident or fate but a Decision. We were honored with the right to Decide. We learned and we bided our time not quite needful but grateful for the strange ways maturity gives both our facade and our helter-skelter backstory a cohesion. We are cohesive around the Call to duty and to work, we are no strangers to the harrowing trials, flatlined and wearied yet that is precisely what our theological toolkit puts forward, via Christ’s Cross, via His servitude, via our harrowing realism, near to something we have posited to be true yet that is no-holds-barred crazy, a madhouse to get near to, a nuclear reactor of stuff we thought was just a signature on the dotted line; we are built up by the mad scramble, what scramble as led to our Lord being crucified. So to the battlelines and to the turrets, a Life unplanned and warring was all we resolutely put forth as our premise, it was all we asked gently that others acknowledge; it was a Plan with built-in time and space for Futility and for harrowing time trials, the teacher’s call to be ready and able, the blindsiding hours of futile empty progress, followed by sincere forgetfulness as to how much work we put in.

In summary, the soldier is no fly-by-night operative, no homeless—at least in the sense of alone—wanderer; not by our own intentions we have earned friendships, a few, a notion at least that people are loaning their time to each other; and that Cross, we mock it at least in its demonic dash, but honor it in the company it chose, our Savior not being too good or holy to abide near to infamy and scourge. Almost too good a backstory, it is nonetheless one we do not tire of reviewing and applying, and no longer lonesome we are all the more Appreciative of what potential friendships are “out there”, all the more painstaking to find that bedrock level, gregarious or wearied, no matter, all in and all told a heightened awareness of Theological Principle in its Divine Ambition.