Life is a tool that teaches. Time is a construct for learning. Each conscious moment; opportunities to live or die, by success or failure, and neither is the end, nor is bliss or humiliation.
Bad Things
Life is about reconfiguring thought for bad things.
We struggle with bad things. We attach ourselves to the badness because we hate pain. We think, in our human perception, that life should not be bad, hard, painful, or unjust.
But, life is life: it is all things.
It’s hard for us to think in these ways. With so many distractions in life our focus is diluted, when all along we just need an answer for the question: “How can I be me?”
Bad things threaten to take us further than ever from that question. Just as equally, though, these same bad things can take us deeper than ever into the heart of that question.
Like, “What is this situation saying about me, where I’m at, who I’m becoming, and who I’ve yet to become?”
Bad things stir us toward learning in an otherwise comfortable life opposed to learning. Learning is effort; our human default is to shirk the work, unless a passion drives it.
And, what about the goodness in life that is forgotten when the bad thing occurs? The good things still exist, though we have forgotten them, and wisdom has us again reaching out for them in the midst of the pain, senselessness, and confusion.
Good things
Good things are always good, just as bad things are designed to enhance goodness, giving true meaning to life and the good.
Bad things can be seen as good—if we have, what some might say, a ‘perverted’ sense of truth. Yes, it is perverted—contorted from the world’s way back to God’s; the way things should be. The world’s way is comfort always, with no pain; God’s way is pain as a lever to growth. Badness is twisted back to wisdom in thought for, “What’s this about?”
The Lord gets his own back, and so do we when we tackle life this way.
All things can be seen as good, though they were not always initially good.
Making Good from Bad
Making good from bad is the interesting part. It restores the rationale that all things should be right and just and fair. Suddenly, through faith, a Jesus-faith no less and no more, making good from bad is the truthful purpose of life.
Such a faith makes a science of learning for life: to grow and, therefore, conquer.
Nothing can beat us when we only have purpose to learn.
Nothing is shameful, nothing’s debilitating, and nothing’s ultimately fatal in life—not when there’s a purpose beyond the shame, the debilitation, and the feeling of death. Life goes on when the purpose is to learn, adapt, and conquer.
© 2011 S. J. Wickham.
No comments:
Post a Comment