Anyway, I thought I'd just take this opportunity to ramble a little bit. I've been thinking a lot lately about the transience and transparency of life. If you think about it, we're never really conscious. And by conscious, I mean actualized. Think about when you were in middle school or some awkward place in your past. You were "fully engaged". You were "present". You were "with it". Now, where are you? Are you fully engaged with your younger self? Of course not. Perhaps being actualized never really happens because we are constantly subject to the whims of time. We never really have time to be realized. Life is so transient. It moves, It never stops. I, You, We are always in some sort of flux. There really is no stability here in Earth, if that makes any sense. In the words of the poet Robert Frost, "Nothing gold can stay".
So naturally, I've been trying to apply this concept to my life now. And everybody knows that hindsight is 20/20 vision. But is it really? There are plenty of things in my past that I look back on but some situations and emotions still don't make much sense to me. But maybe I just need more life experience before I can look back and actually make some sort of sense to it. I don't know. Sometimes, we attack problems that really are so much bigger than we are. I think that's my problem. I think that I am so much bigger than my body will allow. Honestly, I just forget who I really am and succumb to this ideal that i've created . (sigh)
I've got to learn to stop doing that.
Music Recommendation:
Slovo - "Whisper"
I like this post.... one of my favorite author philosophers is Ravi Zacharias and two of his most recent books have touched on this a little. In one, "The Grand Weaver" he uses the illustration (made all the more unique in it's traditional Indian context since Mr. Zacharias was born in India) of a tapestry being woven by a grand master weaver. The father holds all of the threads together and simply nods his head every few seconds. This nod is the signal to his son, sitting at his feet, to move the shuttle of the loom back and forth, which locks in the next layer of the weaving that the father has laid down. The son cannot see the pattern in the father's mind, he simply obediently slides the shuttle back and forth and over time the masterful tapestry of the father's design begins to emerge and take shape. At times I find life is like this quite a bit. We can't see the entire tapestry until after it has been woven, and it's not our job to weave it either. We are simply called to obediently trust in the designs of our father. The fact that we are permitted to play a role by sliding the shuttle is honor enough. We only see each disjointed piece of the design as it is woven, but our Father has the entire pattern in mind long before he even begins weaving... that truth brings both comfort and mystery as we long to see the final design.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, in his book "Walking From East to West: God in the Shadows" he tells his own life story of growing up in India and migrating to Canada, then America. Along the way he encountered exhilarating highs and devastating lows, and all the while he uses the illustration of "God in the shadows" or "God hiding in the scaffolding" It's only through hindsight that we can clearly see the paths God took to get our attention, to steer us to where we are now. Even then, there may always be parts of our past where God still appears to be hidden in the shadows or behind the scaffolding of our lives. It doesn't mean we've done something terribly wrong or screwed anything up, but perhaps we must resign ourselves to the idea that God's ways may not always be known to us in hindsight, much like they seldom seem clear in the present. Once again, the fact that any of God's reasons and timing are seemingly known to us are already an extension of his grace that we're not ever entitled to but by His own sheer goodness and will. I'm rambling now, but yeah... you get the idea. Hindsight may not always be 20/20, but perhaps that's the point... life would lose some of it's mystery if it always was.