(I asked a friend what they wanted for Christmas. I jokingly laughed, "D
o you want a thing or an experience?" "you know what? i want an idea please." so here is the idea i gifted him, alongside the artwork, where I pasted my idea fully on the back.)
Stop. For just one second just stop and take it all in. everything. We move and work and create and build and expand every border, boundary, edge, craft, and skill. Whoever told us that life insisted on constant progress
exponentially rising? I had this idea that there is a balance- yes, I know please laugh, but it is a fine line of two extremes that verge on sin every time we cross: the first side consists of shallow acceptance. This side is splashing in puddles and could go down for miles. Whereas the other is one far scarier:
Captain Naaman couldn’t believe his luck as he reached the prophet’s home and awaited instruction for how to cleanse his disease. “Go wash in the Jordan seven times says the Lord.” Naaman turns around to head home. Absolutely offended at this request. Not because it was too grand, but because it was so stupid. The Jordan? That stinking slow meandering muck? And seven times? Was this some kind of sick joke? Naaman strained to comprehend.
“But if God had asked you to do some big thing, wouldn’t you have done it? Why not this small thing?”
See this idea is rather funny. It is the idea that not everything is quite so complicated. Yes, yes, of course everything can be infinitely dissected. A good story can be understood through plot, character, foil, postmodern dissection, a feminist critique, author bias. Every hobby has five million more skills to learn, people who are better, tools that are finer, techniques that can be mastered. Are you understanding this point? The sea has indefinite depth and for some people that is far more tempting to explore than the known surface. This idea is for those people: sometimes to simply exist is enough. Complicated suddenly looks like a pretty shell to hide a fear of getting something wrong. Missing something important. And messing everything up. Its an attempt pull everything as closely to ourselves as possible, and forget that sometimes we need to zoom back out and see the simplicity of it.
Men like woman.
Men want to impress woman.
Men build roads and speed down those roads and forget to look in the ditches at the side of the road.
Those ditches are full of wildflowers, but you can’t see them if you speed down those roads so fast.
And forget that woman love flowers and love when the men pick them flowers
And grow tired of reminding the men who are always busy making them more roads to speed past
That what they really want is the flowers in the ditches at the side of the roads that the men don’t see
And so, everyone gets angry,
No one feels appreciated because the men are actually making the roads for the woman who aren’t impressed anymore, even though maybe they were with the first one.
But they never asked for the roads, they asked for the flowers at the side of the road. But that was too simple.
This is not an idea about merely existing. It is not asking that we give up all depth, but rather that sometimes we need to turn off the formulas. Sometimes it’s not important that a person knows how everything operates, how our heads work, how the world works. Because we weren’t called to understand. Instead, to help others. We gain knowledge of others not to tell them how they should change, but that we change to be more understanding of them. More empathetic of them. More like Christ to them. Israel no longer knew their God in their three hundred years of slavery. Yet they cried out for deliverance, and he heard them. Moses asked God what name he should give his people when they asked which God heard their cry.
“Who,” Moses wanted to know, “Are you, God.”
“I am who I am.”
– it was a refusal to be reduced. A refusal to be understood. He is and remains and we need only marvel. The intentionality of existence is to look and exist and deeply observe all, and not try to comprehend or understand. Only to wonder and hold it loosely. To see and hold lightly, like a moth lighting on a hand with a whisper. Lightly like the fragility of life, like love, like small people, like time. All so intricate it cannot endure the heavy blows of our clumsy attempts to claim to understand. And so, my idea is: learn enough to understand. Read enough to become empathetic. Speak enough to reach. Teach enough to touch. The rest is enveloped by Him who fills the gaps of our knowledge and chasms of doubt.
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