“For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.”
~ James 4:14
In the vernacular, “you are here for a hot minute.”
If you’re 20, you don’t believe this, not really. If you’re 60, you can sing Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game song with earnestness. “It won’t be long now, till you drag your feet just to slow the circles down...”
Partly because of the brief nature of human existence, it is impossible to get a larger view of life without outside help. People everywhere are grasping for some small bit of happiness in their minuscule time span. Meaning and purpose are elusive when you look for them within your drop of mist, a drop that’s ironically on fire with rage, fear, violence and selfishness. (The old fashioned, offensive word for all of this is Sin). And when you look within yourself, the droplet within the drop, things are no better.
It is unpopular in this particular droplet of time to look to something ancient or large or most un-vapor like as a possible source of wisdom and practical help for the freaking mess we are in. But many, many before us, those pre-modern, unsophisticated folks who managed to get far enough to keep the world populated, thought it wise to look outside of their mist bubble. And though “we didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning” to quote Billy Joel, the majority of people in those unsophisticated times believed in something larger than themselves. They attributed the ordered world to something or someone that was NOT them. And maybe because hauling water and chopping wood and manually editing a book with a pen made room for undistracted thought, it was easier for people to transcend their droplet and get a view of the wide wonder of it all.
Whatever the reason, the further we moderns seem to get away from validating anything thought or written before the 20th century, the worse our interior lives become. There have always been sad people, suicidal people, anxious people, angry people. But just look up the suicide rate graphs by year on the internet, and I’ll rest my case.
Anyone who knows me also knows that I am a follower of Jesus Christ, although a stumbling, bumbling one with a great deal of forgiven sin in my rear view mirror, including from this morning. So you already know where I’m going with this. We need something solid. Something non-misty, something like a rock and refuge and lighthouse at the same time to navigate and understand our place in this long running story of here today, gone tomorrow. Or, better said, someONE. It is absolutely critical that we put down our phones and go chop some wood or haul some water, or whatever it takes to stop being distracted long enough to grab hold of what’s true and lasting. We’re not meant to be spectators in the mist, tossed about in a meaningless fog until we die.
When God in a jaw dropping display of humility sent Jesus to this sorry planet, just about every human being on earth believed in something bigger than themselves. And knew something was wrong with the world. And with themselves. They mostly feared some kind of god, because they saw the bigness and scariness and sublime beauty of the world they lived in. Jesus shocked (and appalled) the people of 1st century Palestine by saying that he was indeed God, the exact representation of the Father, and that he cares about all the misty little creatures he thought up and created, and in fact loves them. And He said there’s a solid place to stand, and He’s the solid place. And then he proved His love by dying and taking all the sin of the misty world on Himself. He actually became a mist. But then the mist got back up out of the tomb. And the world has never been the same hopeless place because hope became Someone solid if we would only believe it.
This truth has been relegated to fairy tales by many clever modern people. In the 21st century, education is the answer, funding is the answer, the answer is to be found in the midst of the mist. And we are free to believe the words of whosoever we choose in a vaporous world. Freedom is the great gift of course, because without it love is impossible. And the whole point of this affair from God’s point of view is to love a people, and have that people love Him in return. But that’s another post...
When Jesus rose from the dead, Thomas the disciple wasn’t there at His first appearance. But later, Jesus appeared again to His followers. And Thomas, who doubted the reality of the resurrection, was met with something solid, something outside himself, someONE made of flesh and blood that did not ultimately succumb to here today, gone tomorrow. Christian tradition has it that Thomas was eventually martyred for his faith. But not before he and a small group of others started a fire of love that is still changing mists like me thousands of years later.
Find out what’s true in your hot minute. It matters more than anything else.
Your friend on the pilgrim road,
LS
