Sparkling Life

Here we moderate attitudes to a kind of playfulness that seems, at their best, the joys of a child – moderated only with the maturity that includes more than current events.  Maturity guides even the feelings of innocence that we knew in the first years of our lives.  We can capture that beautiful context even when we are old.  Recently a lady in her nineties and bed-ridden was shown a long-lost film of her in a participation in some acting role when she was young and energetic.  She had never seen the film that had been taken by a family member.  She brightened, sat up, smiled and her eyes glistened.  She snapped her fingers, and quietly said – she could only speak quietly – that she was warmed by the showing, and wished she could do that again.  She showed a spirit that must have made contribution to the fact that she had lived into the tenth decade of her life.  The attitude is a free gift to all who will take it. 

To be a fan of life is to relate to the joy of God in the gift of life.  The gift of life in our imaginations is forever young (timeless) which offers energy, joy, peace, acceptance to who and what we are with an overflow to others that can set aside the demands of nature that serve to age us.  That age thing takes away energy, health, future, activity, recognition and all that occupies us during the contributing years of our lives.  Life’s memories, especially the better ones, the most beautiful ones, can take over and animate us even to the lifting of younger generations looking on, generations who may not yet have the perception of the miracle of life with its invitations to joy and love.  Heaven is innocent so taken with joy and love.

Without deliberation to find the dimension of joy in life, we fall to lesser attitudes.  It is well known that an old person who is a grump was likely a young grumpy person.  Unless addressed to the matter and doing that necessary to achieve change, a young person taken with carnality will become an old person taken with carnality.  The patterning of lives ought to be the first concern of all persons – before accenting education, profession, health or any other factor of our lives.  To make it meaningful it must become a part of the spiritual factor.  God is interested in the joy of his children.  Joy is spoken of as readily in the accent of love, or service, or righteousness.  In matter of wholeness, joy relates to righteousness.  It carries through even when there is suffering, injustice, poor conditions, or anything that could take over and make us negative about our circumstances of any other factor in the context of our lives.  In the course of life the counselor finds persons more influenced by negative circumstances, never knowing there are personal resources of spirit that lift us above the circumstances.  We hear someone say: Under the circumstances, and they follow with whatever it is (or was) that caused some declension, something less than normal expectations – if it weren’t for the circumstances.  The point is so common that when some persons are asked how they are they may reply: I’m under the weather today.  It is a standard remark, even when the weather has nothing to do with the somewhat depressed situation.  The weather may have something to do with the context today, but with the choice of inner resource we might find relief and live life over the weather.  (I make it a cozy day in: Dad’s Den.)  My response is that I cannot fault God for the weather.  This is the weather he has given me for today.  I wish I had the skill to change the idiom to: Like the airplane I have the resources to fly my life above the weather.  I might say: Like the eagle, on bad days I find my place in the cleft of the rock, in the coziness of my home.  I might say with the Apostle Paul from prison: Bring me the parchments that I may catch up on my reading.  I might feel, as the Apostle John must have felt from the cave on Patmos: If I were not here God would not give me The Revelation.

Why did King David gain so much attention from God, and admiration from people?  That he was a gifted man in several contexts there is no doubt, but his flaws would have done in most persons to anonymity.  There seems to be few sins he did not commit, which would invite the disgust of God, and removal of some graces if not all.  Even in old age, and after long tutoring from God, he sinned in pride by numbering the people, not for guidance to future policy but to note the success of his reign.  I am a bit stunned that Christ was born of the line of David, until I discover David’s affirmatives that led him to the truth of himself.