I miss coming home from work during daylight. Chowon has worked 4-8 for the past few months, picking me up from work afterwards, and now I'm at a client site where I'm working long days. The sun's warmth is a commodity I can't purchase with the payment that this job provides.
Today I was struck with a sort of epiphany. Nothing I write here will likely communicate the weight that it carried for me when I received it, and my readers will probably be like, "I knew that 10 years ago". This is basic Bible stuff... also, I don't think I can do better than explaining it in terms of general principles.
Adventure is both a gift from God and a desire of the flesh: to see a treasure and lust after it, to fall in love with a jewel without knowing its quality, or to imagine an alternate life which is impossible to achieve by any moral means, are things which tempt us to say, "God, why did you give me the ability to desire those things which I should not have? Isn't the ability to experience pleasure a great gift you've given me? Didn't you handcraft our desires to be for things which would enable us to glorify you just by doing those things which we, your image bearers, would want naturally? But it is clear that you want me to strangle my own heart; to deprive it of the nourishment in good feelings that you enabled me to desire and long after. Why did you pave the path to happiness with heartache?"
It is rather the case that God has established right means to satisfy each desire, but that those means are not easily intuitive, requiring us to exercise all of our faculties to both discover them and then acquire them, therefore best glorifying God by achieving satisfaction by necessary means of every single power of which we are capable. I earn my wine with the sweat on my back, which I only have because God protects my health; I protect my marriage with every Fruit of the Spirit, which I am not capable of in myself but can only exercise because the spirit grows a fruit-bearing vine within me. These days I feel like those two things are all I do at all. I sacrifice sleep here and there when I feel like I can, in order to squeak out things like this blog. The other day I made time and carved some pumpkins at like midnight, because holidays are a gift from God, and my thoughts on Halloween are a whole other topic (but in short, I think it's a Christian holiday which we took from pagans, and whenever we fail to acknowledge that part of its history we give it back to them).
All that to say that searching and knowing God is the method by which we can actually satisfy those longings and desires, but in the meantime we do have to shut down the easy path to immediate, empty, and temporary fulfillment by defeating our flesh. What is it that I want when I see that thing, except for the joy of the adventure and the discovery of unknown pleasures? God is infinite, infinitely mysterious, infinitely joyous, and infinitely beautiful, but he has made himself discoverable; how can I look to any other source of beauty for fulfillment? He is capable of satisfying the desire for struggle and discovery, but I have to focus all my faculties in order to even turn my heart towards that thus-far only-hoped-for, only-promised outcome.
As I write, I'm remembering atheists who I've spoken to. I imagine, because they have expressed as much, them reading this and saying, "how pathetic that he needs a god in order to justify resisting immoral means to pleasure". How foolish that the atheist would hesitate or blush because of purely imagined and non-imminent moral convictions; you deny your nature by denying your flesh, and you ignore the gifts that evolution has supposedly given you by denying your nature. How arrogant that the atheist would hope to achieve greater happiness later by denying his/herself now, when we have no control over the random-chance environment about which we understand so little, ignoring the constant threat of cosmic death looming in every corner of the nothingness about which we have subjected our inexplicable and perhaps entirely unaccompanied consciousness. To now think "but nobody can live that way" is to make my point exactly. To otherwise think, "but life is more beautiful that way" is a wishful and subjective assertion in the godless universe. I believe in truly objective standards of beauty, a consistent atheist cannot.
"He's by the librarian"
No comments:
Post a Comment