Friday, April 30, 2010

Feeling Blah

This morning at work I was feeling blah. Blah for me, is a mild form of existential lostness - a flailing in nothingness. I am rethinking Christian doctrine and I am not real sure what is staying and what is going. So I dip in and out of existential lostness. But I have purposed in my heart to till the soil of the lives of the people that are around me, in season and and out of season - feeling blah is out of season for me.

So I asked myself as I was heaving boxes onto the conveyor belt at UPS, "As you are tilling the soil of the people that are around you, what is it that you are going to tell them?" And I answered myself, "That they are special and wonderful and worthy of being enjoyed." And as I'm sure you can see where I am going, I told myself, "Well then, why don't you tell yourself that?" And because I have done decades of work on my own soil, it no longer rejects happy truths - immediately the blahs went as I thought, "that's right, regardless of doctrine, I am special and wonderful and worthy of being enjoyed!" [I think that is what is called a (Divine) set-up!]

Monday, April 12, 2010

Mistaken Longings

Our pastor said today that the spiritual practice of going to church helps us access the longings that we have for the Transcendent, the Divine, the Eternal. I think that one of the ways the church does this is by helping us realize what the longings in our hearts are. We are like babies who do not know what the signals mean that their bodies are giving them. Even if babies could talk, they still would not know what to tell us. That is why parents put babies on schedules - all the basics get covered without the parents having to correctly discern the haphazard attempts at communicating by the baby. Likewise, we do not recognize the signals from our spirits and mistake the longings that we have as longings for success or spouses or money and don't recognize that the longings are for God. So when church is "done right" it helps us sort out our longings and like salt, increases/magnifies our longings/thirsts, in order that we might direct our longings in a direction that yields satisfaction.