January 10, 2011
Retirement
We just had the funeral for a member of our church family and I’ve been lamenting his untimely passing. Sixty-three year-old Ken really didn’t get to enjoy the fruits of retirement (fishing, camping and traveling) because he began his battle with cancer just a few short months after retiring. While I was telling another believer, ‘What a bummer’, they were quick to remind me that Ken has a better retirement package now than he had a week ago.
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4 comments:
Gail;
-----I have always loved the term “reality”. The intellectual push over the last few decades has been to fill that term with whatever you desire it to mean. But any choice of such subjective reality, if you honestly think about it, is both a surrender to ignorance and a proclamation of arrogance. Reality does not need the knowledge of any man or the collective knowledge of all men to be what it is. It is what it is, regardless of what any one thinks it is.
-----I am neither willing to surrender to ignorance nor to arrogantly proclaim what is or is not real. My love for the term has been a mission to find what is real, not amongst books and musings of men, but amongst the facts and information that are its footprints. The Word of God is embedded everywhere in and amongst those footprints at the level of information that is all mutually supportive of a common reality without contrivance, twist, or filtering by men. The Word of God is absolutely clear about our reality’s being a cross section of a physical dimension and a spiritual dimension.
-----We live in physical bodies for sure, and we deal with life predominantly through our five senses. But the reality is, the physical aspect of life is quite smaller than the always present spiritual aspect. In fact, it is the physical aspect which is soon to be set aside like an old garment (Ps 102:26), to melt away in fervent heat (II Pet 3:10), and will flee from His face (Rev 20:11). There is coming a prescribed time when the cross section will be undone, and the two will no longer cross. Before the coming of that time, it is important to have been given to the spiritual aspect by having given yourself to the God of that aspect.
-----We do not know for sure when that uncrossing will come. I tend to believe it is at the door-step now. But I know for certain it is at the doorstep for me and everyone alive today. Ken has already crossed the threshold. I figure I have fifty years at most before the physical aspect of life drops away from me. Considering I am fifty-six, I know how short a period of time fifty years is. A child born today has maybe few more than a hundred years before it drops away from his existence.
-----We are each no more than a spirit clothed with a physical body for interacting with the physical aspect of this cross section. But the necessity of that interaction does not negate the reality of our spirit’s interaction with the spiritual existence. For us who know the Lord, that interaction has the accompaniment of the Holy Spirit and what our hearts and minds can feed it from obedience to the Word of God. So it is that Jesus entreated us to seek first the kingdom heaven and taught us to pray in acknowledgment of the coming of that kingdom. Paul entreats us to pray constantly (I Thess 5:17). Prayer frames our minds in the reality that life extends far beyond the physics we experience through our five senses. Even while our awareness is constrained by our five senses, we are being much more deeply involved in God’s spiritual dimension.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
This reminds me of a Facebook post from a friends son, "Why is it everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die."
I am currently 63. I expect to have another 20 years but if I don't, I am ready to go. The kids I work with at school don't understand how I can say that. Death leaves a hole for those of us left behind but opens a door to those who are in Jesus.
I feel for the hole you have but rejoice that you know about the door.
Grace and peace.
Lisa S;
-----Our hearts and minds are complex. Our desires, aspirations, plans, and goals are affected by the fears and hopes of emotions and the knowledge and calculations of the mind alike. We would be lost in the vastness of it all if there were not some constraining force within it maintaining for us a focus on what we have been relative to what we are and what is possible for us to become. Our consciousness is in a very real way a coherent path of the understandable past leading through a relevant present into a foreseeable future. Your friend’s son generalizes a point true to most, but not to everyone. Each person is personally unique in the cohesive focus of their consciousness, yet everyone can be sorted into one of several categories relative to whether or not heaven is acknowledged and whether or not death is desired.
-----Concerning those who acknowledge heaven but disdain death (which I believe is the larger portion of people) more assumptions have to be made about ideas and beliefs than would allow for any simple understanding of how they are this way. But I see a reasonable attitude for the spiritually healthy consciousness promoted in the Word, which I think Pumice’s comment intersects. Even Jesus demonstrated some aversion to His approaching time on the cross when He asked if that cup could pass from Him. But His acceptance of the approaching event was made by the reconciliation of His heart and mind to the reality of His Father’s will.
-----Our lives are processes requiring a great deal of interplay between our past and our present to enable for us a future, let alone to enable any consistency within that future. Our awareness of what we are rises in a large part from these processes and includes a vivid imagination of a distinct future circumstance. This imagination is as much an appendage of our self awareness as are our memories and the thoughts and sensations in the present moment. We grieve the loss of that appendage’s distinction when the present time becomes tumultuous or our memories confusing to the point we can not reasonably imagine our next moment. The thought of death is the total lopping off of that appendage.
-----But those who acknowledge heaven and are completely comfortable with the possibility of death in the present moment have made a more complete mental address of reality. In a real way the template of the Lord’s prayer has become a pattern for their thought as the numerous moments of their lives attest to God’s part in them, for the present moment never quite becomes what the next moment was imagined to be. The reality is that His kingdom coming involves even the mundane minutia of our lives, and it comes more according to His will than to ours. Therefore, they perceive this physical life as merely one of two places they can be in His kingdom in the next moment such that their present thoughts and feelings systemically build into their imagination the possibility of being in that other place instantaneously. It is not that they expect or desire it. They simply acknowledge it. Then it becomes a part of the conscious awareness of who they are. Then the thought of death is no longer the threat of a lopped off mental appendage, since it has become a part of that appendage.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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