2024-03-06 A Meditation on the Second Edition

“17 Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. 18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. 19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Eph 4:17-24 ESV)

Personhood two-point-oh, (2.0), recalls to us that nothing in life has come easily; time was needed to shake ourselves out of the illusions and come to terms with life as it actually works, as people like us are actually valued, as just-in-time coming to the cross meets just-enough time allotted for what good things the Father has for us.

For, the Christian is a strange resurrected life form, body showing the desiccated and dried out wounds, limber and lean, possessed of a Holy type of spirit and influence and rejoinder; to pity a fellow believer is to doubt: God has called her or him to life on a strange and almost encumbered, wounded, hard-up level, were it not for the exuberant Joy around trysts of health, possessions of holiness, influence of the stars, hope in a Hereafter.

For, the Christian is joy and peace in believing, because the limber lifeform, the alien intervention, the hands-off manhandling, the worked-over fact of the matter, calls each of us to exercise an outlay finally mature, finally presentable, no illusions or fantasies around one career choice or another; to long to be of pastoral usefulness, eventually confronts each of us with that as a practical aspect of whatsoever we do, the full-time office of pastor being reserved for those nice souls who have the time to die daily, to be humored, to check in on the needy and under-resourced, resource requiring, simple needs and surface injuries of the Body. It can be exasperating. It is not merely, “do this because you can’t do anything else”, but rather, “choose the higher route because it is of value to your fellow, your gal, to play the helpful hand”. We each of us are some result of utter ruin and despair and being hated or unloved (which is almost worse, to be ignored). We are each of us mocked by the amount of the mountain to climb, and the coming-to-terms with a career that will always leave us asking for more hours in the day.