"I like monotony" C.S. Lewis

The title I've given to this blog says a lot about me. I haven't always been so boring, or Have I? Oh well, I guess the older you get the less energy you have for exciting new experiences that challenge the order and tranquility of your life. I love my family, my home, my community and my church. I like chicken, potatoes( or is it potatos , where is Dan Quayle these days?) and diet coke. I like the school my daughter attends. I like the sky over Midlothian and Maypearl. I like spring, summer, fall and winter. I like living in a free society. I have never liked having to move. After years in the same place, driving through the same fast food places, paying overdrafts to the same bank, and driving the same roads, life becomes predictable and little creativity and energy are required to live it. You might say we become embedded in place and space.

I spent 28 years of my life as a teacher and administrator for the Center for Christian Education. We closed our doors in June of 2005. For weeks, months and even years I dreamed about my work at the Center. My identity, my ministry and my life was embedded in an entity that no longer existed. I was blessed beyond measure to be able to relocate in ministry with the Maypearl Church of Christ. In a sense I was going home for I grew up in Maypearl. The names, faces and homes had changed. The house I grew up in 50+ years ago has been gone for decades. The terrain doesn't even look the same. There was once a train track not far from our house, but it has been gone for half a century. Yet, I can't drive by the hill where I grew up without thinking about my roots. I still remember events and relationships with family and friends that helped shape my life. Now 50 years later I still on occasion dream about the house where I lived as a child.

When my mom died I thought my heart died. When my dad died, I dreamed for years that he was still alive and I would wake up to the disappointing reality that such was not the case.

What is life and the life of those we love, "it is a vapor that appears for a little while and then fades away".

We take roots but circumstances uproot us and our loved ones. The very ones who bring us joy will bring us sadness. The only alternative to such existence is to refuse to love or enjoy life, place or space.

We become attached even to things and experience sadness when we lose them. It may be a house, a car, a job, or a pair of shoes. When I moved my office to Maypearl, I realized that I needed to downsize my library, so I sold or gave away several hundred books. The Maypearl church graciously gave my two rooms to house my library, but my books are still double decked and stacked in every nook and cranny of my office. Of course some of that is simply that I'm messy. My point is that giving up any of my books is hard. I have about 8,000 books and they are part of my monotony. I hope there wll be a reading room in my corner of the New Jerusalem. For I still have a lot of books that I haven't read from cover to cover.

Having emphasized how embedded I am and how much I like it, I realize that all that I have is temporary, but anticipatory of something permanent. The need to belong is a part of what it means to be human. However, we are saddened by the lack of permanence that characterizes our lives and those of our family and friends. The same lack of permanence is featured throughout the cosmos. Our world and ourselves are destined to pass away, but both are on a journey toward an embedded eternity.

Listen to Paul:

"I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us; For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God: for the creation was subjected to futility..." that is all of this present life and world is subject to decay and death. Yet " the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God". Cosmic and personal redemption and renewal are waiting in the wings.

In Revelation 21: 1ff. John envisions a "new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and first earth had passed away...And I saw the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'See, the home of God is among humans. He will dwell with them as their God...He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more...See, I am making all things new."

We will be embodied in a new body and embedded in a new world and will have fulfilled our long ing experienced now. Our longing for permanence in relationships and places. No matter where we travel in the new world we will always be home. No enemy threats from terrorists or no domestic threats from the economy will threaten our well being. We will experience excitement that will exceed anything Nascar can offer and yet not be threatened by a disastrous crash. We won't have to lock our doors at night or spend money for alarm systems. There will no employers calling us into the office to give us a pink slip. We will finally be rooted in permanence.

Until then we will long for permanence more and more as years go by while becoming more and more aware that such will always elude us as long as we seek to be rooted in the old world.