The Path of Life

Today I did something that no self-respecting, detail-oriented, neurotic, Type A auditor with tendencies toward OCD would ever do.  It’s taken three years and four months, but I finally left for a job only to arrive at the bank and realize my audit bag (containing my laptop) did not accompany me on the journey.  Ugh.

So the person who despises driving had to re-enter the vehicle and head straight back from whence she had just cometh.  With illumination of the gas pump idiot icon imminent, according to the gauge’s needle.  And this on the heels of my contemplation about when I would squish the oil change that had just come due into my schedule.  Add to the day’s agenda an hour of sheer nothingness but seeming waste and exasperation.

There’s just one word for this.  Life.

There’s not a person living who can deny that life can be riddled with the mundane and sometimes inane.  This is a universal human experience.  Holla! if you can relate.  Yep.

You know, then there’s the stuff that kinda kicks life up a notch.  Take, for example, something that happened to me on this very day exactly 25 years ago.  You see, on that day… Well, on that day, I had the in explicable privilege of giving birth to my firstborn son.  Now that’s an event that almost transcends reality.  It doesn’t happen every day.  Well, at least not to me, anyway.  An event like that makes you feel stuff you never had the capacity to feel before and makes you think things previously un-pondered.  Suddenly, there is a bigger picture.  And somehow, meaning.

And that makes me think of the birth of another baby.  It’s that time of year when, amidst strife and the hustle and bustle, we start to prepare for celebration.  King David, a forerunner of Messiah, sings in Psalm 16:11, “You will make known to me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy; In Your right hand there are pleasures forever.”  Wowzers.  And, yes, please!

Do you realize that on one day in history, Almighty God split the cosmos and entered our world in the most vulnerable of forms?  He came as we came, birthed of a female, and quickly grew acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3).  And why?  Because of an unfathomable love beyond all human comprehension that looked upon us in our lowly state and could do nothing in His perfection but come down and rescue us.

It’s personal to our God.  His desire for you and me is to walk with Him moment by moment on the path of life so extraordinary that it is “exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20).  In His presence we have full joy.  The tank’s overflowing, spilling over the side, when we truly know Him.  Understand that the Maker of the universe’s desire is for you to have pleasure forever; and He paid the ultimate price for you to have it.

As we begin the Advent Season, if you do not know the God of the Bible personally, I challenge you to do so.  He wants you to know Him.  Open the book and ask Him to make His presence known to you.  C.S Lewis once wrote in defense of amateurs reading ancient books in lieu of modern commentaries that “the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.”  (Think Plato.)  His endeavor was to “to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”  I agree and urge you to apply that philosophy to your search for Truth.  Remember, God took the first step in reaching out to us, and His modus operandi suggests nothing short of wanting to fully relate to His creation.  Today, thoughtfully consider taking Him up on His offer.