What We're Looking For?

"What if I stake everything I am on a dream, and it's counterfeit?"
Natasha Bedingfield - from the song, Pirate Bones.

What would it be like to live in a world where everyone you ever met was a friend, where you could enjoy all the astonishing wonders of the natural world without any fear of pain or suffering, and where that world was adorned with a symmetry and entirely gratifying fellowship that would never tarnish or age? I think that's part of the reason behind why Jesus began His three years with the disciples by taking them to a feast (John 2). It's so easy for us to forget that the very first miracle that Jesus performed was not a physical healing or a stilling of the storm - it was to provide the best wine at a wedding.

I often wonder how much of our prescribed spirituality would have stood up to the 'test' of the wedding of Cana? A celebration of this nature powerfully affirms the fact that true godliness is in fact essentially bound up with the goodness of creation itself, not cut off from it.

That is the true tragedy of the world we now inhabit. The legacy of the Eden exodus is an order lacerated by alienation - torn from God, from ourselves, from each other, and from a genuine relationship to creation, but the Cana feast crushes that division. God is with us, there, in the very midst of our joys and pains, allowing us to taste of a vintage that makes us thirsty for the wonder that is to come.

When we speak of God being in Christ, reconciling this world to Himself, we need to understand that that is something we can know now, in all of our living. Creation itself is yearning for that resurrection morning when that truth will be fully expressed through the body of Christ, so begin to see, as is often the case in the Psalms, the weave of Creation and Redemption in all that is here. When we taste of that wine, we will escape the mirage of life without God.