Jesus-tough

Be cautious of Bumper Sticker solutions wherever you find them. Life is more complicated. It's joyful, painful, stark, ecstatic, twisted. It demands your recognition of your own, special emotional investment to have worth. It sometimes slaps you in the face, knocking you down, but might hug you on the way to the ground. It's Jesus-tough! . . . and very, very hard to comprehend. Your understanding will be warped if you skinny it down to a Bumper Sticker slogan.

My brother-in-law Terry passed away last week. Trying to put their empathy into words, people whispered lovingly, "he's in a better place now." I really have no doubt at all that he is. Nevertheless, my "emotional investment" keeps silently clawing at my gut, and it's somewhere in my grief that I know that my life, and all life, has value and meaning. If such things did not matter, there would surely be no hurt. But, to Bumper-Sticker-it-down to the salve of a "better-place" just doesn't suffice. It's exasperatingly more perplexing. And more important.

That perplexity is what inspires and fills great literature and poetry. We try so diligently to capture in words the worth, the importance, of that emotional investment. Birth, death, love, hate, disappointment, joy---all such deeply emotional moments  where words tend to fail us, that still we desperately need to communicate to/with other people.

Seventy years have not brought me to a culmination. And Biblical truth leads me to accept the Spiritual reality of a Heaven that I only partially comprehend and provides me the Hope that I need to continue living an often disappointing human, earthly life. Many will label me intellectually, scientifically, weak-willed for turning to faith for an answer---but I question their vanity. The human ego is a complicated mechanism that certainly does not necessarily know or represent truth. So, please don't Bumper-Sticker me, and I will give you that same respect. We are marvelous creations each: "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well" ---Psalm 139:13-14. 

I've been occupied away from this blog for quite a while, but intend to post more often. As I draw to the close of this post, I'm thinking: I hope my grand-kids, as adults, may read my blog and know more of who their Grandpa was and aspired for them. Also, I hope, as I stated in an earlier post, that others who read them will find them of some kind of value. I apologize for the rambling nature of the writing, but it's the form that best fits the workings of my aging mind. God bless! Hopefully, we can appreciate the cleverness of Bumper Stickers, but recognize that they serve a limited purpose.