This website is about the journey.
By journey, I don’t mean a sequence of events, or a set of actual places. What I mean to portray is the struggle, the quest for meaning and purpose, in a world beset by darkness and trouble.
About Me
If there was a word I would use first to describe myself, it would be “Christian”. This means I first and foremost find my identity as someone created by God – fallen under sin – and finally, mercifully, bought and paid for by the Savior Jesus Christ. Therefore I am someone who follows Him as faithfully as I can, naming Him as the “worthy” one, in fact, the only worthy one.
What does this mean? And more specifically, what does this mean to you and to me?
Created
What it means, first of all, is that you and I are created. This is a very special thing. It means that we didn’t emerge from the mire of evolutionary tide-pools, and that we are not here by accident, and that we are not the captains of our fate, or the masters of our own destiny. This doesn’t mean we don’t play a part – either in our own destiny, or in the greater destiny of all things – but it does mean that there is another, higher, being – who has made me thus, and who has the inherent right to do as He wills with me and with all things. This person is the Creator, Yawhe, the God of the Christian Bible. What this means for me, is that I don’t go about trying to create a world of my own making, rather I try to find out how the Creator has made this one. Instead of assuming some fact of life is malign or incomplete, I assume that it is entirely intended – and that I simply may not yet see what the intention of it is. This is a far cry from assuming it is unintended, or accidental. This may terrify you, or give you peace, but it is where to start when you start with me.
Fallen
If all things are intended, then what went wrong?! Obviously, things are not ideal. Death, evil, pain, obviously exist. Was this the Creator’s intention? If he was all-knowing and created all things, and has ultimate sovereignty over all things, why are things this way? This is the questions of sin, also known as the problem of pain. It is the central – and the most difficult – question of Christianity (and for that matter, Judaism). How can you resolve a good, perfect, Creator with the malignant stain that is human history? Even if you account for the evil, there is still pain and death, whether inflicted intentionally or not. It is a problem that many have struggled with, in the questions of theodicy, a word meaning essentially the “vindication of God”.
What is sin?
Sin is separation from God – in some manner, or some way. It is a severing of an essential relationship – resulting in a different state of being for creatures. It is not an entire separation, but it is a separation of some sort. Sin means we are cut off from the font of life, from the Creator. We also are cut off from our intended nature, our destiny as the highest creation of God. Enough could be said about sin to fill volumes, but this is enough for now.
Redeemed
Redemption is the answer for sin. Redemption is the path back to our created nature, and to the proper relationship of us as creatures to our Creator. But it is not only a path back, but a path forward. It is a new path, one given to us by the Son of God, the redeemer, the Savior Jesus Christ. It is not the same as the path we left behind in the Fall, the path we would have trod, hypothetically, had the Fall not occurred. Instead, the Redemption in Christ is a new path, one that can be walked as fallen creatures. We are called to “walk as He walked”. This does not mean either that we can be sinless or that He was a sinner – he was a man. Capable of sin, yet not in sin. What the Bible exhorts us to do is to walk as he walked. What is this walk?
The Walk
The walk is to be obedient to God. Christ was innocent, but He always obeyed His Father. He was God, but He submitted to God. We are also called to submit to God, in all things. Only by walking this path, are we able to be set free. One of the things we are called to is to suffer. This can mean many things, but for me it has meant that I must suffer the consequences of sin in my life. This may sound strange, because didn’t Christ come to save us from sin? Actually, no. Not in this life. What Christ did is come to save us from being slaves of sin. So that sin would no longer be our essential nature, that He would become our new head – and Adam would no longer be our father. So what do we do with sin, then? We face it. We repent of it. And we suffer it. And we look forward to the promise of life without sin.
We don’t only suffer our own sin, we suffer one another’s sin. This is where “walking as He walked” comes into focus. We suffer our own temptations, the griefs, the fears, the desires. Christ suffered all these things – but he did not succumb to them. We suffer all these things due to other’s sins as well – and so did Christ. It is my belief that in suffering patiently in this way, sin’s power over us is reduced. In this life, it will never fully heal, or fully depart. But that is not the point. There is a work to be done, and we are called to do it. To “Fill up the sufferings of Christ”, and to walk with Him.
If, after all, sin is merely a separation from God, isn’t redemption a reunification? If sin is, at center, a deep distrust in the character of God, isn’t suffering that sin by faith a sanctification? This sanctification, this trial, is only made possible by Christ’s work in Redemption. If satisfying the demands of sin was our way of being made whole apart from God, and a failing effort at that, wouldn’t the Christian walk be one of finding satisfaction in the relationship with God? I believe the Christian walk is to be satisfied with God, in all things – even and especially in the consequences of sin. Christ promised that the sufferings of this life would not compare to the glory in store for us – therefore we are to wait in hope, and to suffer sin and corruption for a season. In so doing, we complete a work “left behind” for us, a work that God is ordaining for the salvation of souls in this world. This work is the most important, and meaningful, thing we can do. It is not simply a silent suffering, or a suffering that has merit in and of itself. Suffering is of no inherent value. The fire is not the point of the smelter, the gold that is smelted is. The value is in the steadfastness of the sufferer – and the overcoming of evil through the trial of faith. The Son’s triumph was the overcoming of the world, the flesh, and the devil. The trying of our souls works life, and health, and wisdom. It casts out the devil, mortifies the flesh, and judges the world. This is the promise. Justice will be restored, but it starts first in the house of God.
Dyscatastrophe and Eucatastrophe
If the Fall was man’s great dark moment, the coming of Christ was his new dawn. If His death was Christ’s great dark moment, the Resurrection was His new dawn. Everything is about Fall, and Redemption. Every great story, every great struggle. My own struggle is one of Fall, and Redemption – even in microcosm. The Fall was our dyscatastrophe, or great tragedy, and the Cross was Christ’s. The Redemption, in essence, was the eucatastrophe (unexpected miracle) of man, and Christ. The great reversal of all things. In Christ, a course that was set on destruction and ruin, was reversed towards life and hope. In Christ, the back of the devil and death itself was broken. The Devil no longer owns us, our souls are bought with a price. The blood of Christ was innocent, and given freely. This sacrifice is “Old Magic” as C.S. Lewis’s “Aslan” would say. The Devil, though his power is great, cannot break the spell.
“it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality’. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-stories
So Why
So why do I write these things? Because they are the basis for everything else. They are the basis of my writings, my stories, and my personal account in “The Long Dark”. My life was marred by sin, as all of our lives are, and I experienced something that I must record in these words. I would say that I experienced “walking as He walked”, even if unintentionally. I have sinned, and I have been sinned against. But I knew from the time I was a child, that there had to be an answer. The overcoming of evil with good IS that answer – in each of our lives, in each of our souls, beating a hard-won path first laid down by our Savior. We are not natural heroes, being fallen and corrupted as we are. But in Christ, the first and truest of heroes, we have the chance to participate in something truly heroic. We have the chance to encounter evil, and to overcome it through Christ. This is what I am about.
Every person is on a journey – but not all make it to the other side of the darkness. Most don’t even know that it is there. I know that it is there – for I once found myself in a dark wood where the right way was lost. I found myself in darkness, and in doubt. I needed to find the path, and the path found me. There is a way through the dark! There is an answer to the problem of pain! But simple words cannot express this – you have to read on. You cannot simply hear about the Savior, you have to meet him. And in order to meet Him, you have to walk as He walked. Sometimes His path leads into the lower parts of the Earth – but still we must follow.
We must follow if we are ever to be set free.