The Road Not Taken...Yet

How often have I wished I didn’t have to talk with a sales rep?  Not yesterday.  Victoria and her assistant (I made up Victoria’s name) found me even though they tried to come in through the wrong door.  Victoria’s father is a Hindu priest and her mother converted to Hinduism from Christianity.  As the Lord opened the way for us to discuss religion, I fumbled about for a while trying to make it reasonable for a bright, charming, educated, lovely, young woman see that she should at least give Christianity a good look before she walked away from it.  Later I wondered how our conversation would have turned if I was her uncle or professor rather than a potential customer for her company.  Perhaps not any better or worse but I know how I would have proceeded.  I would have explained to her as our great friend C.S. Lewis has noted that there really are only two strands of religion in the world and every other one is merely a warping of one or the other.  Hinduism is the first strand but not in terms of time or priority, only as it comes around for discussion.  With Hinduism, there are many, many gods and goddesses all with their own distinct personalities and corruptions.  Some are wickedly good and others are deceptively bad.  They weave in and out of rightness and selfishness and moral depravity.  The universe is built upon the foundation of justice only and every bit of badness gets squeezed out of the soul until there is nothing left to it…even if it takes thousands of reincarnations to get it done.

Christianity is the second strand but not in terms of time or priority.  There is only one Christian God who is perfectly moral and full of kindness and love.  The universe is built upon the foundations of righteousness and mercy and badness is not whipped out of us by our own suffering; it is wooed out of us by the suffering of God who loves us.  We live not to die and live and die and live until we dissolve but we live to live and to know the God who loves us like a bride in a love marriage that always boils with rising heat and desire.  Suffering does come to us as a result of badness we do but it is God Himself who suffers the pain our badness set in motion.  Rather than paying us back for what we have done, God is paid back for what we have done.  Whipped and beaten and broken by the people He came to rescue from eternal death, He died with the sins of us all buried in His own body.  And then, only then Jesus Christ, God in flesh and blood rose from the dead, eternally our only way to eternal life.  It is with this God, this God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit that we find our way and make it home, always alive, always the one who is beloved and known and never oblivion.  

The truth is I might even now be botching it trying to get the truth squared away for my friend.  In the end, it really boils down to this one verse.  For God so loved the world that He gave His one of a kind Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.  I hope Victoria finds it.  She at least got to the right door.

What If There Were No Longer Any Conservatives?

What if there were no longer any conservatives in the world?  Would it end all political, moral and cultural debating?  Would it change the way social structures operate?  Would it make things better for us?  What if there were no liberals left?  How would it shift the moral compass?  Where would the economy skew?  If libertarians became extinct, would it matter?  Could we see a difference in the world?

Labels are more than just markers, they are checks and even funnels that position the ebb and flow of things.  Labels give us parameters but more than that they take us out of other parameters, they stonewall shifting matrices.  If you think I am a conservative, then you have made not an analysis but a comparative determination.  I am more of something than someone else or less of that same thing than another but it doesn't say who I am.  I am no longer a morphing living being if I really am a "conservative" or more so, a "liberal"; I am a snapshot of one.  Rather than video, I am now a single frame.  Conservatives are never completely conservative and Russians are never completely Russian.  There is a spark in us that keeps us from crystallizing.  That spark prevents the label from really fitting.  There is not a perfect or even an imperfect match with that spark shaking up the drink.  No person is a Smith or a White or a Protestant or a Democrat and that is that.  In the picture we have of people, it is never quite right or in focus.  We can't "get it" about people because we are not two-dimensional or three-dimensional or a billion-dimensional.  

Each one of us is in the image of God and that jack-knifes all label marking.  If God would not and perhaps even due to the shallowness of our perception could not give us a sturdy label to mark Himself, why would we think any one of us could be boxed into a label.  YHWH is not in any real sense a name or even an identifier, it is more a signifier.  YHWH, which we really don't even know what it means and probably Moses didn't either, simply gives us a glimpse into the Presence of God rather than a box where we can store Him for analysis at future dates.  All we know from the Name is that God lives.  And that is the problem with every label we use for any image of God.  We live but we are more than alive, we are living within the unbounded dimension of our Creator and so only He can know us in any real sense.  The more we look into a person, the more there is to her, the more astounding she is.  We are wrecked when we stop to mark someone...whether that mark is "stupid", "talented", "funny", "Hindu", "Japanese" or "Conservative".  We can never be the sum of our parts because the infinity of God living within us will not stand for it.  You are not the combination of your potential and accomplishments.  You are the image of God and that strips away the boundaries of even a billion labels.  Live within the Kingdom of God and you are the most you will ever be...Free.