Potholes

"Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion in vice." - Cicero

Nothing is like a friend. A friend who knows where I am and is able to speak to my situation at the moment, with clarity and conviction, is like a fine mist in a desert place. I had the chance to talk to a friend of mine Friday. I was calling to share in a recent, great happiness of his. Instead I had the opportunity to be encouraged by his wisdom. He told me of a major lessons which God had taught to him, which helped him to become more self-aware. The lesson concerned awareness of his tendencies to give in to temptation, and of the steps that he could develop to fight the sin that would so easily entangle him.

This particular lesson is exactly what I am learning at the moment. You know, I must be honest with you: I have had the tendency, when I have convinced myself that sinning is inevitable, to just go ahead and and fall/jump into temptation. After all, it _is_ just _one_ sin. How displeasing could God possibly be?? I have been serving him for a long time, as best I can. One little bump in the road cannot make the whole trip impossible!

Numbers 20:8, 11-12 Take the rod, you and Aaron, your brother, and make all the people come together, and before their eyes give orders to the rock to give out its water; and so make water come out of the rock for them, and give the people and their cattle drink.
And lifting up his hand, Moses gave the rock two blows with his rod: and water came streaming out, and the people and their cattle had drink enough.
Then the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Because you had not enough faith in me to keep my name holy before the children of Israel, you will not take this people into the land which I have given them.

All it took for Moses was a bump in the road, and that after a long stretch of paved goodness.

Because of my friend, I have been challenged to take a stand. He admonished me, that I should take firm hold of God's word that, according to Ephesians 3:20, he is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us. So, I will ask to become all that my Lord has called me to be, and I think that Christ has placed holiness within my grasp. I have made resolutions in the past, the vast majority of which were based on willpower, and only after I had engaged in deliberate sin. This time, I resolve to fight from a pure heart, not a guilty one. I will be present one day before God, and in exceeding, great joy.

Jude 1:24-25 Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy,
To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.

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Longing

(Yes this is a phone post. It is lengthy because I copied and pasted it from the old computadora.)


We long for God, not because goodness is God; as if the concept of Good were our ultimate object of desire. It is not goodness to which we aspire. If it is, we should cease our pursuit thereof. Goodness - even goodness - cannot fulfill the deepest soul-longings. This is because goodness is not sufficient upon itself; goodness is not its own foundation. If we would draw from it, we would find finitude, even as we are finite. So would be our dissatisfying realization should we seek solace at the feet of this and all virtues in and of themselves, for so they are.

We long for goodness because God is goodness; that is to say,
we seek all of God, wherever we may find him, and goodness is part of the fullness of God. Thus we seek all virtues, because each of them finds their "enspiritment", if you will, in God, for God is spirit. The quintessence of virtues, and of Virtue, is to be discovered in and as part of and proceeding from the nature of God. In seeking any and all Good, therefore, we seek to glimpse at the fullness of God from our perspective. So, then, we long for God because God is goodness; since it is God who is our ultimate object of desire. At this point, where we have obtained but the slightest of the Source, something happens which we, perhaps, might not have forseen.

The finite is but a segment, in the mathematical sense. It exists in its quadrant, fixed between its own beginning and end. It will remain until done away with. There have been attempts by the segment to transcend itself, but they have been frail at best, failing to imprint the least parabolic mark on what has been set in place as inherently limited, and then self-limited. The infinite also is, existing on a plane, and planes, above, beyond, around, and through that of the finite. The infinite is not self-seeking, as if parsimony were ideal. Instead, infinity invites and subsumes and transforms the segment, such that the two become one. The process is sloppy and seems unnecessary, until one comes to understand that the line segment was part of the plane at one time. This process, then, is reunion; the molding of inadequacy into that of sufficiency, unto overflow.

God takes us up into his nature, invited into the totality of the Godhead. The journey is messy, painful, and illogical, but there is no other way by which humanity might be saved. He is the new, and thusly does away with the old. We are the new, by virtue of being found in him. In its pursuit of infinity, the finite is covered and purged by the infinite, and so becomes like the infinite.

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