Valuing Most what is typically Valued Least

MYSTERIES prevail in life. To be confounded is to be wrestled down with a liberating truth: an invitation to the Something Else.

There is always Something Else; the thing we’re missing, everything we do not see, and that which God would have us know if only we were to will our will away.

As I write, I’m listening to music that has been slowed down. 800 percent. It is marketed as angelic. It does sound angelic. But it isn’t angelic. But it influences my thinking as I’m cajoled into a sense of shalom, yes, even as I press these keys, as my mindset is challenged and invigorated.

If only we could see what we ordinarily do not see.

Enter grief. As a for instance.

Loss takes us into a realm of pain, which by function, is an area of experience replete with newness. Nothing bad per se. (If we could be free of reacting to judge the pain.) But everything is new and foreign. Everything. And all this newness is frightening, and the soul imagines how vulnerable it is; anxiety is felt.

Little wonder grief feels like we’re regularly blindsided by overwhelming emotions.

Through grief God shows us how potent the Kingdom is for realising spiritual peace that confounds what would ordinarily confound us. See the mastery of God in that? God giving us access to rethink the unthinkable.

The Spirit within us reigns when we secede our will. And then suddenly God gives to us the powering of seeing; not a strictly or purely visual phenomenon. Of seeing something the prophets of old might see. God speaking through our experience.

We might see some of the following:

ü the wisdom within someone with an intellectual disability.

ü the possibility of unknowable dimensions within our present-day experience.

ü the riches of experience in a homeless person.

ü the pain behind a person’s smile.

ü the folly in material wealth gained inappropriately.

ü a range of possible decisions instead of just one or two.

ü the prevalence of suffering in the world and a way of entering into it.

ü the obviousness of one’s imminent demise (yes, death) and the choice to order life in accordance with such a resounding truth.

ü the importance (and acceptance) of difficulty as a proving ground for character.

ü the vision and hope resplendent in children.

ü the ‘Lux’ soap bar (pictured above) one’s son gives to his father with great joy on Father’s Day.

Jesus’ Kingdom is home most within us when we learn to value most what the world typically values least.

Peace has a way of being hidden. We find it when we let go of what we deem as valuable.

We can find peace when our hearts are open amid confusion. Only when the Kingdom is home in us can we understand that through experience.