Great trails extend between cities, connecting people, and we drive from here to there traveling the roads. We go from here to there, day in and day out. Trees roll across the horizon. Massive metal cities rise up from the fog of daily life. We move from here to there, wondering at our lives. Or maybe just rolling along completely unaware of anything?
I often wonder what a single day will bring, blessing or disaster? Chaos or cohesion? The light wakes in the morning, the shades are drawn, and I shutter in anticipation. Though not always, some days I wake up and realize I have no control and it doesn't matter anyway. But I'm always slow to rise, and disturbed by reality itself. Yet there are great joys in life, there are so many balancing themes, and so many contrasts in life... it's a consistent state of awe.
Suffering comes, it will in this life. We don't know who we will meet or when. Moments grow beautiful. But not quite perfect. In a beautiful interaction, with a group of people, when the Spirit takes over and synchronicity flows, still, something is missing. And there are those times when we stand alone, lonely, bitterly sorrowful and wish upon wish that someone might come up to us, and tell us: Everything is going to be OK. And you think of how beautiful it would be if that happened, and how it would touch your heart.
But no one ever comes. The dank alley remains dark, a few people pass by, but nothing happens. That hope we hang out, unfortunately falters and disappears. And the heart goes slightly colder, and more distant.
The strongest emotions seem to dwell with family, and with romantic love. And of course with God. Nothing breaks my heart more like a simple infatuation, or an expressed desire left unrequited.
To love at all is to be vulnerable, so said C.S. Lewis. To really live our lives, to not hide away, but really live, and to really be out there doing this life, we must expose ourselves to the possibility of rejection. This is necessary.
These feelings we carry with us, they come to define who we are. And if we've been through a lot of trauma in our lives, they can make us shaky, nervous, depressed, and even self-destructive. Healing is necessary.
I listen to beautiful music. It brings healing to my soul, through identification. Music expresses feelings that our words can't identify. It paints a picture that no brush can describe. It defines emotions that our words can't.
Time passes by and God does beautiful things. He's so mysterious in His actions, to attempt to predict how he'll work, is impossible. To even notice, is astonishing. To contemplate His depth, brings fear. I whisper a question into the simple air of my familiar apartment and He does not answer. So often He does not answer. Yet in the span of a day, He makes himself known. He's great and far above us. Somewhere up there. But we're not up in the clouds overhead, we're in the mud below.
And so often God's plans for us are so bitterly painful. We must embrace the suffering, and suffer daily with a quiet strength. This is nobility, to suffer quietly and bravely.
God made us with the ability to reason, and God loves reason, logic, and science. But there is a variable that affects everything we do, it's emotion. Emotion isn't bad, but it certainly skews what might've been more simple equations. But emotions don't rule us, at least they shouldn't. Then again our current generation seems to do everything on emotion, and the guiding star is whatever feels good, regardless of consequences.
I've gone through the ringer of hedonism, of doing what feels good. It's empty. There's nothing there but madness, depression, and morning after syndrome. It doesn't matter how many packs you smoke, or how many girls you sleep with, the hole keeps getting ripped open wider, it doesn't close and it's never satisfied.
It's so hard to close a new hunger once it's opened. Who can ever satisfy a drug addiction? It's never satisfied. What about pornography? It never ends. And it just keeps getting wider, that hole in our soul, and it needs more and more to satisfy it, until the hole is so large our heart falls out through the opening. It's easy to die with a needle in your arm, stupified and exhausted in putrifaction.
The three day hang over is really the best result of hedonism, because the misery demands our attention, and the suffering and pain demands a change that would've never come in any other way.
You can lay on a highway, you can stand there and hope to be hit by a car, but it's not going to happen if God doesn't want it to happen. You can throw yourself off a bridge, and nothing will happen, unless God wants it to happen.
All our days are in his books. Yet we have free choices to make. The grand paradox of life, it is. God's fingerprint is on reality, it's on our souls, it's written into the code of our matrix. It's the Phi of reality, the golden ratio, the infinity equation written into the substance of reality, replicated on every level from subatomic to galactic. God is love, infinite power, and an expression of glory, a word that depicts a reality beyond our reality, the otherness of God, the dimensions of Him that goes beyond all we can imagine. The fact is God made all these realities, he designed our genome, the laws of mathematics, physics, and the laws that govern space-time.
Yet to feel a sunset, to read a lovely book, to write, to paint a beautiful painting, to consider the state of life, to give birth, to build a city, all of these are expressions of our own sharing in his creative genius. God the creator of space, time, reality, consciousness, also created us His masterpiece with something special: The ability to create creatively. So we build our little wonders, and tragedies, and beauties and mega-weapons on the platform he's created.
He's made a reality for us to play in, but something's gone wrong. It's like a holodeck in Star Trek. But the safety protocols are offline, and the exit won't function. This is our block play-land. This is our minecraft region. And what a mess we've made of it. Yet there is great hope, and future renewal of all things, in Jesus Christ. That's where the revolution begins, and it's end is portrayed in the future, as the total destruction of the current matrix and reboot, no, not a reboot, not an update to the system, but a whole new system, perfect in every way, a preparation for those who reject the matrix and turn to Christ in humble need. Then we know, the future holds a perfect reality beyond this broken one. And that my friends, is the meaning of life.
