Me too.

I basically don’t watch the news much anymore because I simply don’t want to know. I’ve been reduced to being a child with my head under the covers, hoping the thunderstorm outside will go away and the monsters underneath my bed will sink back into the floor. Imagine, a grown man afraid of the dark.

Except for one thing. There is an out to all of this, a whiff of fresh air that reveals the other end of the tunnel, a little bit of candle that has survived the wind. I despair of the world at times but I remain convinced that Jesus is who he said he was, did what he did, and because of it all there’s a way through.

Now its not an easy way. We, you, I, everyone, have had our selves, body, mind and soul pounded with a pattern of existence that is anti -human, We’ve been, since the earliest moments of our conciousness, afloat in a sea of anti-culture, a way of life torn from sanity where we’ve been reduced to the basic parts of who we are with no greater whole. Your life is this moment. Your senses are deities. Your thoughts are oracles. Your urges are scripture. You are meant by the fates to crawl to the top of this context and achieve whatever you think the promise is. If a little pain comes up along the way, why we have things for that.

If you open your eyes just for a moment, step out of the matrix, you’ll see, maybe for the first time, how pervasive it all is. We’ve been pathological for so long that we think our sickness is health and our madness is sanity. What we presume to be normal is killing us and its hard to find a way out because our anti-culture preserves itself by blocking all the exits like a police officer walking us by a smoking hole filled with bodies and telling us “Move along people, there’s nothing to see here.”

Yet for those brave souls who do risk popping their head above their cubicle a discovery awaits. At first it doesn’t seem real. It’s so different, so unnatural to our conditioning. It is a voice clear and calm, without anger or fear and full of hope. It is a light piercing even if it can be barely seen and purer than the sun. It is a sense that seems like nonsense at first because it varies so greatly from the normal we’ve constructed, but a sense that once let it becomes the most profound wisdom. It is peace in confusion. It is an alternative to everything.

It is Jesus.

Yes, this crazy world with its crazy people, myself included, have somehow managed to mangle our understanding even of Jesus but that doesn’t mean who he is, what he says, and the way he shows to us isn’t truth. The dead ends don’t mean the journey is useless, and the failures, myself included, don’t mean that it doesn’t work. If you want to escape the maze you’ve got to push to get out. You’ve got to be just desperate enough to try, and hopeful enough to see in a way that others may not. You must pass from life to death and sometimes the passage is a traumatic kind of labor.

Yet even if all you can do is just barely see beyond sight, hope beyonf the moment, and reach out beyond yourself God, in love, will reach out as well and slowly but surely lift you up to what you were designed to be, a creature more than a moment, more than an urge, more than what you own, a being created to transform, transcend, and shine, a being whose destiny is to be linked to God.

For such a purpose God came to us, in Christ, breaking in and through our illusions to join with us and help us find our way. In Christ we have a teacher who provides the most excellent guidance. In him we have a physician for our deepest ills. In him we have the opportunity for a kind of existence that flows in and through this reality but points to something higher and better. In following him we become human in the best sense of the word. In him we see unextinguished light. In him we find the very definition of love. We fail but he remains.

The wise will see and understand.