Are we living the life we are called by God to live? Somedays it sure doesn't feel like it...
A few years back while painfully creeping in traffic through a very over developed area - not a park or substantial bunch of trees within miles, just strip malls and asphalt - I noticed out of my passenger window, standing elegantly, not even 20 feet from the street, next to an over-filled dumpster in the parking lot of a convenience store was this beautiful deer, breathing in the fumes from all the traffic and eating the little tuffs of dusty grass that were struggling to break through the cracks in the concrete.
The vision of this deer arrested me. I did a little double-take because it was so out of place. I thought to myself, ‘I bet that deer doesn’t have long to live before she runs into traffic or simply gets sick from the limited, dirty food and stress she is enduring due to living in such an urban area.’ The deer was surviving, but not living the life for which she was created. She was not living the optimal life of a deer. Not living as God intended. So it is I think sometimes with us. We are not living optimally as human beings.
One of our keynote teachings for our kids this year invites us to believe that “In the mind of God there has always been a plan to bring all of life to fulfillment.” That throughout the long 15-billion-year history of our planet, God “created the heaven and the earth” and has been ever so slowly, intentionally, guiding the growth of creation – dividing the water and land, carefully placing each mineral, plant and animal, preparing each one for their special role in this plan of God – so that eventually, when this creative work of love is complete, at the parousia, God will be “all in all.”
This teaching, rooted in our scriptures, says that we humans are distinguished from all the other creatures in our ability to take the earth into our hands and wonder: “Who has made all of this?” We arrived like guests at a banquet to find that everything that we needed (everything that we could even have dreamed of!) had been prepared for us before we arrived. In us, for the first time there was a creature who could be thankful; who could love the creator in return.
The teaching goes on to say that without humanity, creation would have been beautiful and wonderful, but it would have been incomplete. For in this great plan of God is built in a unique role for the work of the human hand, guided by love…that somehow, through the work of OUR hands, creation is to be brought to its fullest potential.
And yet, Jonas Salk, a Medical Researcher most famous for developing the very first successful polio vaccine, once noted “If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. But if all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.” What does this tell us?
For me, this says loud and clear that most of us are not living as we are called or designed by God to live. Many of our hands are not bringing creation to fulfillment through love but rather are pushing and grabbing in greed, fear and hate and bringing destruction.
We desperately need to rethink and contemplate what living as a human being is supposed to look like - by God’s design - because I think we are dangerously off the mark. Let us prayerfully vision together…
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