See this as a spherical, not linear, existence.
People often think of life as moving in a linear manner, along a path from birth to death, for instance; from morning to night, from start to finish, in a line. Graphically, it can be argued that life moves in a line, but it is a stark and distant way to truly look at existence, and not at all how we experience it. Who actually lives their life in a linear manner?
What if everything we've known in our lives were in that ball, our experiences to come impacted in every way by the moments from the past? What if the pain in a childhood was not three decades past, but a very present and relevant pain? What if those bad things that happened to us, which we tell ourselves we are too far from to still be affected by, are in fact among the strings that are directing everything in our "ball of being"?
I don't think it is a what-if, but I have tried to tell myself as much in the past. I know I am not alone in that. People collapse under the weight of their own lives every day.
People often think of life as moving in a linear manner, along a path from birth to death, for instance; from morning to night, from start to finish, in a line. Graphically, it can be argued that life moves in a line, but it is a stark and distant way to truly look at existence, and not at all how we experience it. Who actually lives their life in a linear manner?
More realistic would be to think of this life, the days we live, as if they were in the shape of a ball. Not in only a general manner, but the elements of life, from birth through death, are not moving along a linear path, or even in a series of linears paths, but are a fluid compound. We live a mix, a blend, not a scribble. There is what we do, where we are, what we are thinking, how we feel, and more, going into a moment. Some greater than others, some more intense, some more sentimental or melancholy, some happier, some quite lonely.
We fight with an idea that we have choices, that our life has an ordained path, that it is not at all preordained, or fully up to us. We fight with the idea of God's plan for us versus our free will. We fight to find that path, we even fight against it, and we are always fighting with our impressions or beliefs about that path versus where we believe we truly are.
We forget, at times, that life can change in an instant. It changes for good and bad, it includes times of seeming little variation, and times of too much happening at once. But it is always our experience of life, in the past, in the present and our ideas or beliefs about our future, that impact us in each moment. Not everything affects us all at once, thank God and our brain chemistry, but there is very little linear happening in life, in our experiences of life.
We forget, at times, that life can change in an instant. It changes for good and bad, it includes times of seeming little variation, and times of too much happening at once. But it is always our experience of life, in the past, in the present and our ideas or beliefs about our future, that impact us in each moment. Not everything affects us all at once, thank God and our brain chemistry, but there is very little linear happening in life, in our experiences of life.
[ref: Pastor Steve and talk about a life as a whole not as a linear experience (God's perspective, and how we feel our lives; Living on the Edge, Chip Ingram, "Finding God When You Need Him Most" series, podcast dated 8/19/2010 called "experiencing God when you feel like a noboday going nowehere".]
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Jonny
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