Fresh Brewed Cups of Meaning for a Meathead (Meathead = My Ongoing Place of Befuddled Introspection)

Note: My comment on Miriam's post rambled way beyond typical comment length so I put it in this post. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS! 

Love this post.  Definitely relate to it.

Just finished chapter 30 this morning where Bailey uses the parable of Lazarus and the Rich guy to wrestle, like you, with the concept of justice.  Your post brought to mind two of the points in his summary. 

He writes, “The focus of the parable is not on a form of justice that evens the score, but is found in discovering the ways in which meaning is created by our responses to the good gifts and the suffering that life brings to everyone.” 

Another point earlier in the summary that reminds of your post is: “The events of our lives have meaning. We access or fail to access that meaning by the way in which we respond to those events.  What we do with the good gifts and the pain of life is what matters.”

Ultimately your thoughts and Baileys thoughts dropped me on a beach of befuddled introspection.  As I looked out over God’s ocean of truth before me

Deep from the sea
What called to me
(starting to wax poetic here….. easy Steve)

Restart…

Deep from the sea, what called to me were these words from our staff devotional…..

If Christ is the life, then this world is a constant, ongoing spiral of death.  Pause for a moment and picture for yourself a cherished memory – perhaps a holiday, a lover, a fun date, a retreat.  We often refer to these moments that we keep in our minds and hearts as nostalgia.  Nostalgia can pry the corners of a mouth to smile but it can also clinch them in grief.  What are you grieving in your cherished memories?  You’re grieving the death of that moment.  We often contextualize death as the final surrender of breath.  Instead death is ongoing as is the grieving that accompanies death.   Our days are constantly drenched with death and grief for every moment is fleeting and momentary.  Through Christ the death trap becomes a love trap.  God has consigned creation to futility and decay to constantly bid all creation to surrender their prison of death to His prison of love.  Solomon says that God has hardwired “eternity” into our hearts.   Through the cross, our pretty but fading cut flowers of date nights, passionate worship, joy-filled celebrations, are grafted into the eternal root of Jesse.  Through His root, dead flowers become eternally sustained.  Our moments are not fleeting. Our moments are not empty but instead pregnant with Christ, the Logos, the eternal meaning that floods our dead hearts and dead moments with faith, hope, and love which remain. . . .eternally.

Thanks Miriam for leading me to Kingdom shores where Jesus reminds me that He is my life long (and eternal life long) friend who uses hostility and injustice in this cosmos to deliver me a freshly brewed cup of meaning from His heaving ocean of truth.