On Strangers, Love, and Sin

Got some thoughts swirling about how everyone (even those we think we know) is really, when we get right down to it, an utter stranger; but how the miracle of love, which starts with God's love toward us, and rushes out (if we allow it) into all of our other connections, no matter how insignificant, destroys our illusions, and brings us to know and be known in truth, so that we are at once strangers and yet miraculously other-self-beloved (I don't have a word to express what I'm trying to get at here -- so frustrating).

And how this is dynamic, not static, so that it is a constant movement, a dance, a constant refreshing. As C. S. Lewis put it: "Farther up and farther in!"

Then I'm reminded of how I constantly fail to allow this love to flow. Instead, I act like I "know" someone, and treat them according to that illusion, or according to how -I- want them to be, for my own selfish desires, and not according to truth.

In that sense, I am what's wrong with this world.

What am I to do? Despair would say: if you are the problem, then leave!

But that's the worst possible answer! It's so bad, it's not even an answer at all. Leaving aside the stark reality that I can't leave the world — even suicide (which I'm NOT contemplating, by the way, so please don't call me about it...) would not take me out of existence, because I am not my own.

It would simply put me directly in the presence of the One Who sustains my existence. Remember: I am loved, therefore I am. There is NO WAY to sever that, and thus no way to leave the world, even if I wanted to, which I don't.

And there are lesser forms of suicide, which don't involve physical death. None of those would suffice to "fix the problem", either, and for exactly the same reason.

No, the wonderful truth is: I am the only one who can be me, loved of God in exactly the way I am, and returning that love — both upward (back to Him), and outward (loving others) — exactly the way He has called me to. (However much I fail at this return...failure is no reason to quit trying. :) )

So what's the answer? Romans 7-8, that's what. My problem is the same as Paul's:

For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

I suppose if the problem is the same, the answer must be, too:

I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; although with the flesh the law of sin.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, be merciful to me a sinner, and save me!

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