Sunday 22 February 2009

Fit for Purpose?

"Every time we make a choice, we are 'turning' the central part of us into something a little different to what it was before". C S Lewis - Mere Christianity

How would you feel behind the wheel of a formula 1 racing car,
or an armored vehicle,
or an articulated lorry?

For most of us, such an experience would be totally out of our depth
(if it isn't for you personally, just 'up' the example - a captain of a super tanker... an astronaut of a space shuttle...a pilot of an huge airliner).
The fact is that we all face experiences, often in our daily lives, which totally overwhelm us, and they can be in very ordinary moments - starting a new job, dealing with a family crisis, the experience of getting older.
Usually, we just sigh and seek to do the best in these moments, but we often feel deeply 'out of step' with the frustration such points of change - often painful or very difficult moments - bring upon us. We sense a real and deep lack or 'rightness' about all this, as if something is seriously out of step, leading to such events.

Christianity teaches that the reason such 'indecency' constantly breaks in upon us at every level of life is because life itself now has been twisted by a malady, so that whilst we recognize within that things shouldn't be this way, we are also chained to this labyrinth of futility.

Some of my recent postings here have looked at the reasons behind this state - that real people, in real events, set things in motion that have impacted upon us all,
but the good news is that because of the life and work of Jesus Christ, a resolution to this has been put into motion, and the day will come when we're no longer living chained to futility.

We all encounter the trails of this life,
but God wants us to know there is an answer!

The day approaches when we'll once again be able to live, to work and play, without feeling the pinch of a world imprisoned by fear, pain, misery and death.
That certainly brings hope in the days when we're just trying to keep above the waves!

2 comments:

Steve said...

That is a Word of hope that I need to hear day in and day out!

There is great futility in this world and the complete comfort of an orderly world with orderly inhabitants was lost a long tome ago.

We have the hope of Christ Jesus. He has promised to make all things new. And those of faith will be included in that number.

Thanks Howard!

Ike said...

This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.

We don't "apply this to our lives." It's too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace.