2024-08-13 A Meditation on Retrospective

“9 And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10 so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; 11 being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; 12 giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. 13 He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Col 1:9-14 ESV)

The question is whether the Christian has a retrospective. Can the Christian look back and say proudly, look at in fact these Christian deeds, mindset, gifts, bequests, that have been part of my later days. See how I have accomplished, checked off, one after another Good Deed to carry me along. Note the patience, the fruit and answer to that strange but right question: how have you been, after all? After all this, have you been any better?

Because every wakeful hour spent contemplating, consciously deciding using one storyline or another (“Bless always…”; “Think from the other person’s perspective…”; “Learn to speak with candor, no matter how difficult the subject…”) also meets the reality that vast movements of the Spirit, life changing Events, Historic Hours: these are come-what-may, completely uninventable by our meager minds, radical and all-encompassing.

We might say, God wants everything. God only coaxes us because it is an Everything to be shared; we must willingly decide for Him and for His receipt of our treasure. After long holding back. After early missteps wherein we forgot or weren’t acclimated to the Gospel Promises, that some Benign Heavenly Figure does in fact plan for us, give us plain orders vis-a-vis being at our personal appropriateness and level of contribution and invention and dreaming-up and sharing. We are inducted so as to be winsome Children of the Crown. Eager and gladsome exchange meets absolute forgiveness of all our hindrances and crippled confidences and embarrassments and truth once told: One Story, not always on, but Once done, and then lived in the shadow of; that these our People will always humble themselves if for once they find a sincere Christian spirit, the spirit of militancy around the Faith, the spirit that gives before it receives, the spirit that doesn’t make plans according to Man’s understanding, but reveals to its querying self: yes, the Guide has been Holy, not my own impetus but something Divine. Yes, good deeds have taken form—if by “good deeds” we count radical upbringing, maturing, all-encompassing, all avenues covered, all secret places worked over and healed, brought to light, each of us startled at the buzz of life in say that near oasis, and puzzled over how to present ourselves until… yes, the gladsome greeting, the opposite of the “down boy” we are so familiar with. “Down lass”. Down anyone.