Restoration

"The Christian ideal changed and reversed everything so that, as the gospel puts it, 'That which was exalted among men has become an abomination in the sight of God.' The ideal is no longer the greatness of Pharaoh or of a Roman emperor, not the beauty of a Greek nor the wealth of Phoenicia, but humility, purity, compassion, love. The hero is no longer Dives, but Lazarus the beggar; not Mary Magdalene in the day of her beauty, but the day of her repentance."

~ Leo Tolstoy


There's room for all of us. There's room for all of me, for my wounds and all the chinks in the chain, the deeply held shames that redden my face at the thought of their revealing - not that there's a great many of those left these days! What an egalitarian God! And yet we cast him as one who would be king, a giant man on a giant power trip. But he was the one who told his people he didn't want them to have a king, that to do so would bring unintended consequences. But, like the amazing parent he is, he let them go, to suffer and learn the lesson themselves, the way he does with us. God doesn't fear the way we do, does he? He lets us go into the great beyond, into the terror, to learn what we need to learn because God isn't all that into puppets.

We - we grab everything we can and categorise it. We can't handle the freedom. The wide, wide, agoraphobia of living this life and making our own choices, knowing that we are blind.

(But maybe each choice gets bathed in grace anyway, somehow, in the future. Maybe every choice we make, no matter how wrong or how dire the consequences, will be made into a thing of beauty somehow, somewhere ... somewhere not here, anyway, or at least not with the eyes that we have now. Maybe someday God will turn the tapestry around, and we'll see that we've been looking at the back of it all these years).