Thoughts to Words

I wrote this below several years ago in a stream of words on paper torn out of a notebook and ran across it this morning. A little indulgent in tone, but my beliefs have not changed since then, and I still feel the same frustration at not being able to align my life with my priorities. At times when I find myself aggravated that I haven't made my life into some efficient, Eden-like ideal, and I sit there thinking It wasn't supposed to be this hard, it's is good to remind myself that yes, it was. Easy is doing everything the same way everyone does. Looking at life a little differently is an invitation to be challenged, whether in faith, lifestyle, or ideology.

Often, I wonder at how everything is corrupted. It seems as if all things that are created by anyone other than God, and His inspiration, conspire to draw us away from Him. All He made is good. All He inspired to be made is good. The intents and creations of all, apart from that, are evil. They vex the soul, distract the mind, and pollute desire. Modernism wants a man to be working, never surfacing from debt, so that he can afford his own distractions. Distractions that serve to occupy his thoughts that might otherwise discern their value and purpose. A man is born, spends his youth learning a curriculum, devoted to education so that he can continue on, get a job, buy a home, marry, grow wealthy, be promoted in a direction that appears to be higher, indenture himself to afford the insurance, cars, and style of living that working also requires of him. At the end, the vision of retirement and enjoying the twilight seems a false hope - to work long enough to finally earn a moment to look back and see his life in retrospect, so largely wasted. A collection of a few valuable actions and creations surrounded by years of vain efforts at status and accumulation. Progress and ambition are not his hopes. In fact, the truth is in other things which are too often the trampled victims - friendship, time, freedom, blood, creation and Creation, hope, history, and grace. 

This house is not the place I rest. My place of rest is in tall grass and thick woods. This house is a collection of nature's artifacts, nailed together to insulate from the world that God made good. God gave us what we need, but we hate it. Hate the cold, hunger, thirst, sadness, and struggle that come too. But is comfort, happiness? Is laziness and ease the same as pleasure? Is empty and rude humor, joy? Do wealth and success and the pleasure they afford lead to contentment? Do we accept only good things from the hand of God, and never bad? John in the wilderness says that shouldn't be so. David in a cave, Esau on the wilds, Jesus in the desert, Joshua in battle, Peter on the water, even God as he blew life into the dirt. His hand was in our making, and he both made and gave the soul that squirms under the immortality and imperfection of it's nature. Memories inherited and experienced remind us of what was given and what has been lost. If my life were to be assessed by the One whose opinion matters, I hope it is characterized  at the end by an always diminishing concern with worthless distractions and a sharpening focus and effort at the things in life that matter.