2023-01-27 A Meditation on Using Our Time Well
“For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” (1 Co 1:17 ESV)
Some of the most puzzling questions attend to the Christian’s use of time. The Christian believes in a fount of insight gifted them; the Christian believes in a capacity for patience with whomsoever and whatsoever is thrust their way; the Christian answers to a higher authority and understands the reassurance such structural enactment, such submission, entails. People are comforted, just perhaps, by the parented, Father/son/daughter, Mother/son/daughter, presence in their lives. We do believe in a certain real presence, that may speak to others who sense it relationally, intrinsically.
Yet the Christian also is personally perhaps most needy or unfortunate among a crowd, that is, the crowd generally does have internal strength for some season or two, secular humanistic couched reassurance, all those traits that elevate the Man, the Woman as somehow divine and somehow agent of innovation and of security. The Christian may be more flawed, on paper, than the confident and self-composed. Yet we do believe all can reach conversion, only, what licenses us to think our sad repentance somehow makes us reliable members of the community and spokespeople, idea bearers?
The Christian finds therefore a boon deriving from sincere and at times frustrated pursuit of simple Religious unction, fastedness, sincere repentance, wrestling with demons internal and goons external. The gleanings seem nonexistent, until a personage appears for whom life is a bundle of needs and doubts; then to this one we can minister. The gleanings inspire self-effacing humility, until a personage appears for whom life has not granted them such avenues of exploration, and is simply patient and eager to hear these our conclusions; then we race. What is our conclusion about this strife life? What is our conclusion about this Gospel of pairs, us with Deity, us with Jesus?
Therefore a great chasm has formed, and sometimes thinkers in one field are suddenly capable of rattling off relevance to adherents of another field; philosophy, education, law, banking, sociology, business, governance, community development, each having a watershed moment, a bounty, a harvest of magnificent proportions. And the people: God leads with leaders. God moves with movers. God heals with healers. The Christ is a real phenomenon, for any community to ask and seek their genius ones who are leagues ahead. And to find these on the flipside of what would be the greatest sinners.
Therefore constantly Christians have their debts and duties reappraised; never do we get far from the Cross that says, “yesterday I was slow; today I may have thought farther or seen deeper than certain of these my interlocutors, but still I am just as much in danger of spiritual damnation if I were to forget it is God who forgives, God who perfects our use of time, God who handles the cozy pride of place or rote laziness”. God causes us to be content simply to minister to a few. God causes us to be content to own up our Religion’s Main Claim, that Man is flawed and sinful, but that God became like us to show us the way of servanthood, dying rightly and properly, unto a better Resurrection. So we are members of the community, never forgetting the sad fact about ourself now made worthy of boasting by Christ.
As members we are distinctive and not perfect, that is, no argument can prove our ascendancy over any type of peer. Maybe our religion is a gesture towards goodness, but the true goodness is something deeper. Maybe our religion is good for us, but not the ticket for our neighbor. Each wrestles around simple factual conversion as the thing we have infinite confidence in; our souls truly denied themselves in order to adopt the living God. And our Created status gives us abundant fields of ecstatic employment here in this life. We have healthy memories. God redeems. God calls.