August 04, 2010
Those Were the Days
We can look back to our younger years - sometimes with regret, embarrassment or prowess – and think ‘ah, the days of my youth’. The writer of Hebrews says, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.” (Hebrews 5:7 ESV) Someday we will be 100% spiritual beings, thankfully we won’t have to be looking back to the days of our flesh.
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Gail;
-----We are smoldering wicks and bruised reeds. We have all gone astray, and not one of us is righteous; our best righteousness is dirty rags; our clearest vision is as through a dim mirror. For our very survival we must kill and eat other creatures. In our clothes and houses, in our cars for transportation, and even in our TV’s, movies, and music for relaxation is the work of other people, for we can not provide for ourselves the simplest of things. We enjoy what we have at the expense of others; we contemplate what is good and mutually beneficial in opposition to that of others; we even envision God and His righteousness independently and inharmoniously. Our memories are a hodgepodge of despair and happiness, of processes that work for this but fail for that, because our minds are too small and our lives too short even to begin knowing all there is to know, let alone to understand it.
-----So we must cope with the brokenness of the world and the mistakes of our past. Our righteousness can not be in ourselves today, so it is in that to which we look forward as we are now clothed in a righteousness not our own. For its sake we gaze as intently as we can, acknowledging we see clearly enough to survive physically and to know the lifeline we must tightly grasp for eternal survival, but not enough to alleviate all the deceit, mayhem, and destruction of this world. We thank God for the food He gives and for His merciful allowance of our eating His other creatures. We compensate others the best we can for their expenses in contributing to our needs and enjoyment. We constrain our perception of what we know about good, mutual benefit, God, and His righteousness to the small basics that we can actually know, so we can fellowship and interact with others. Our limited minds and short lives are as much a blessing as God’s grace, otherwise I think we could have found smarter ways to mess up worse and would accumulate more despair than we could endure.
-----This world is full of terrible stories, but it is full of beautiful ones as well. Yet we can not forget the one to be deluded by the other. Every thought and memory has its place and time and purpose. Wisdom is built from interrelating them all in the constraint of truth and foolishness from interrelating them without constraint. Jesus was a man of wisdom, therefore He must of looked back upon His youth and experiences with careful constraint. For the time being we must do the same the best we can with the limited capacity we have. And the fact that we can not even do this near perfectly indicates how much by His hand will be the perfecting of us and how relieving will be the escape from our troubled memories of a mixed up world.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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