To Life

"I place before you this day life and death...Choose Life"

-Deuteronomy 30:19

 

Talk about things that go without saying.....this direction seems superfluous in the extreme, a no-brainer extraordinaire, like being told to choose the plane with wings versus the one without.  Do we really need to be told to "choose life" over death?  Rich fulfillment over decay?  Apparently God thought so....

Why this bent in our make up, why this hitch in our mental hardware? 

Perhaps because the choice for life often requires, ironically, a death to oneself, to what one knows, to what one has grown accustomed to and familiar with, and therein lies the rub.

I, like Job, wasn't around when these things were being decided, when this contract was negotiated....

...but I know the One who was.....the One who was willing to die so I would have the choice to live....

I don't pretend to understand it....

 

but I am so very grateful for it.

 

may we all have the grace, courage, and strength to Choose Life.

 

***

 

"For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it"

-Matthew 16:25

Onward

 

 

+++

 

Squinting into the haze ahead

Straining to see a semblance of...something...

Tentative letting go
of threads which tether me to what I know...

 

My once courageous heart recoils

leaning back into a leek and onion legacy...

preferring marginalism to manna

the monotony of the perceivable

to the miracle of parting seas

 

But His unswerving vision

sees the forest in spite of the trees

He knows the way I take

And is determined I should take it

 

For all my looking back
and the lure of illusory retreat

There is nothing now

but a pillar of cloud

and a Red Sea
in which yesterday is drowned

 

The past is no longer a viable port

and so I press on

into Unseen
and Unknown,

Trusting this Hand that Shepherds me on

to one day lead me
Home

 

-E.A.A. "Hindsfeet"  1/11/13

 

+++

 

"I will bring the blind by a way they did not know;
I will lead them in paths they have not known.
I will make darkness light before them,
And crooked places straight.
These things I will do for them,
And not forsake them."

-Isaiah 42:16