Holistic Life

Human life is a complicated journey, an envelope full of many factors that make it up, that influence it, that form it, that give it a body, mystery, consciousness, reflection and emotions.  With understanding that there are those who seek to escape life challenge, the vast majority of persons desire perpetuation of their lives – likely in better context than those pertaining in earth life, even when earth life appears to be pleasant, meaningful, and fulfilling.  Mankind holds dearly to mortal life until illness, mental and physical, has become too unbearable.  Even faith that includes heaven is taken with a heaven-can-wait attitude. The theology of Christianity uses the word Hope to indicate the concept of immortality and assurance in it.

Until that blessed hope is realized there ought to be an effective integrated life for persons.  That takes some doing to move along from birth and innocence to death’s transition terminating mortality and birthing another life context which we may presume is progressive.  Even though the holiness of God is not possible in natural life, it is an ideal that relates to righteousness.  God’s perfection is to be thought of as empowering for an ever growing affirmative context in creation.  As persons a thousand years ago had the same potential as we do currently, but not the context for progress that we enjoy, so we may assume that life, even in the heavenly concept, will progress emanating from the plans of God.  From Scripture we can perceive all this as the mystery of God.  As a toy train reflects to the child the form of a massive train passing over the tracks in town, so this life is supposed to reflect, in its modest way, that life promised to mankind from God.  Mankind so messes with the toy train that it becomes more difficult to discover the reality analogy in the way we believe and act.  The toy broken reflects a broken meaning of immortality.  That which was created in the image of God must be maintained.  That made in God’s image must always have an awareness, in pleasant context or unpleasant.  The creator holds the key to all life. Only God can determine the ultimate residence of it, and that residence is determined by the life-pattern we make.  So it is that God will make final evaluation (judgment).  It will be fair and approved by all. There will be variance.

Our concern is the present, a preparation period, in which we have some time to be formed into a complete spiritual embryo that gains acceptance as a citizen of the heavenly kingdom.  Because we cannot be perfect in this womb of nature, we rely first on the redemptive plan of God who makes up for our inability to gain the status of God’s approval with his provision of justification.  Only God can give the affirmation of his nature to the life he created, a life now passing through natural context in a faulty condition in a troubled mother nature.  That embryo has to be formed so to fit a context outside a womb of nature.  God offers to the embryo of nature, the context of that we call heaven.  Only those justified of God gain citizenship.

God has only affirmations for himself and heaven.  What he cannot affirm is taken as sin (unacceptable), and inadmissible to his kingdom. There is an important understanding in the affirmation concept that God functions in that nature, as he functions in the nature of love, peace, joy, and service.  In this present life, when a person serves others and the general creation, that person is doing, in a modest way, what God does.  The toy train (made in god’s image, a model) is doing what the giant train (the reality for model) is doing. The ideal for the humble Christian is to seek increasingly, to become Christ-like.  In the denouement, the Christian is identified in the process as the bride of Christ.  Christ-likeness has been realized.  God, at the beginning created mankind in his image.  In Jesus Christ he presented himself in man’s image.  To be holistic then is to be both a physical and a spiritual creature, at the height of the possibilities of both in a compound context.  Humanity is unique to nature.  As the child possesses characteristics from the parent, the redeemed person of God reflects some of the characteristics of the nature of God.  When the two are joined and not violated the person can be said to be whole (holistic) fulfilling in all that which God meant for the creation.  In this is the new birth of life and freedom for the individual with the faith to receive it.