Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Change and Presence

The future calls. One thing I learned a very long time ago, was change is a part of being human. Many years ago in a small room I would come to find as a safe comfortable space with a man I looked up to as a mentor; I learned, spoke and breathed philosophy. The stuff of meaning was honey dripping our fingers. I learned how we all exist in relationship with other people and make our lives together and I began to see just how important it is that we human beings have a story to write. We move through time. We have a past, exist in the present, but hear the call of tomorrow. Tomorrow beckons us with it potential creating excitement and it risks and threats creating fear if we let it.
Some things are in our span of control. Some things are shaped by the actions of others. And some are handed to us and change our storyline forever. Some of those things are great and wonderful. And some are not. My cancer is strangely enough... both.

I am blessed in that my form of cancer is controllable, at least with 90+% odds. But the future is now very uncertain and more unpredictable. I must anticipate two ending for my story.; One that is near and more sudden; the other far as hoped for. I am learning to live with uncertainty and that the fact that life is not all that ordered and reasonable in fallen sinful world. Removed from God, to some degree at war with God in rebellion demanding our way and our freedom to be god, how can it be otherwise. God is the source of all life and order. To reject God is to reject life and order. At least that's how I see it.

In the midst of my disorder I find God. I remember the story of the centurion looking at the dead Christ upon the cross and the words of a might Lutheran theologian Dr. Norman Nagel, "Jesus was never more God than when He hung dead on the cross." As the centurion proclaimed, "Surely this man was the Son of God." For myself, Jesus presented the clearest revelation of all that not only was He God in the flesh, but God is a God who suffers with us, cries with us, mourns and wraps His arms around us to be present because sometimes it is presence that we crave.