Oceans

It is important, vital to the reality of the order that we settle matters with God personally, and thereafter to give directed attention to matters that include our part in the world and its societies.  It is, again, an emphasis of these Pages – the one and the many.  The personal (one person, self) is key to understanding and living with society (many persons).  The individual draws upon divine grace (personal) that includes common grace (social).  Society is dependent upon common grace available to all persons, with the evidence of blessing and cursing within its order, partly built into the natural system of creation – in air, water, earth and life.  This is a creation by God of elements and compounds related to physical life.  It is shared with all life, vegetable or animal.  In right use in common grace the elements and compounds spell life and health – in wrong use suffering and death.  We tend to think the first involvement, the personal, is divine, and the second, the common, is providential.  There is a difference.  Mankind wrestles with both, the divine in personal experience and the providential in social.  Management is so obviously difficult that God offers assistance in the application of either and both in our lives, in our homes and in nations.  God is present in all, but with particular interest in his children holding faith in God – to all of his grace..

I well remember when I was learning about the water and land masses that my teacher one day, in pointing out the largest water bodies in the world referred to the Pacific Ocean.  From that day I always wanted to see the Pacific Ocean and try to perceive what Lewis and Clark felt when they stood on its shore and exulted over the massive display of nature.  The Ocean, our teacher explained, was very calm and magnificent to the person who named it.  It seemed so placid that he named it Pacific (peace).  We know, she quickly posed, that the Pacific Ocean is anything but peaceful.  It happened to be peaceful on the day it was named.

It seemed natural to some societies to name something after the first impression on the admission of the new thing.  One morning a mother in an American Indian tribe saw a cloud moving rather swiftly across the sky, so she named her newborn that afternoon Flying Cloud.  I believe I know what the parents of Sitting Bull saw near the day of the chief’s birth.  Israel, a half world away from America used nature, color and related characteristics to themselves.  We know immediately something of the heritage of a Rosenbloom or a Greenberg.  Names may be used by insightful parents in the education (tradition) of their child.

The oceans of our minds are large and small.  They have their stormy days, and their placid days.  When a person writes about the storms of sex winds blowing this way and that on the ocean of society, we get considerable damage from hypocrisy, sordidness, contradictions, abuse, oddities of various kinds, and stories of lifetimes of ill effects.  We can tell the same stories so that economies are stirred up by greed, by cheating, by various forces that lead to depression and poverty.  This kind of analysis may be found in many of the areas of our lives, as in marriage and the family, as in international relationships, as in the management of nearly any area of life we might discuss.  At this writing the nature in the American west is suffering through the storms of fire that have been among the worst in history touching some of the most beautiful areas of the nation.  The storms will subside, peace will follow, and in the decades ahead the new growth will replace that which was lost.  The darkest part of the story is found in the follies of mankind that include carelessness, sometimes deliberateness, that starts the fires, the holocausts of destruction that deny to the innocent the peace God prefers for us. The storms of warfare are man-made, and defy God by taking his resources for life to destroy life.   One wonders what man will do with the storms of nature in global warmings, which we are told by the experts have been exacerbated through mankind’s conduct.  With proper management, and concern for the good of others, we could do so much better both in the peaceful periods, and management of chaos.  If we were honest in our dealings, do our assignments well, anticipate the requirements of life and nature, rely on the creator to assist us in his call to dress the garden and know it we would make a better world than we have.  There are ways to calm the storms of our lives.  That realization, always a promise on the horizon, ought to be a part of our planning. The wise do their duty.