Crescendo

I am not my own.  The maker of all things, made me.  My bones have a purpose, my liver and my heart are all meant for a purpose.  My skin houses all of these things, each existing for their own simple purpose.  Simple is the wrong word, the connections and the workings are incredibly complex.  Just think of the circulatory system taking blood to every crevice within you.  Think of the eye or the ear.    Whether you believe in a creator or the unguided Time + Chance model, you must marvel at what is the human body.  What about consciousness. What about the soul?  I can't see the structure of my soul, but I believe that I have one.  The soul precedes the body.  

“Never tell a child,” said George Macdonald, ‘you have a soul. Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.’  

Recently, I have been think of my soul and it's purpose and capacity. Unlike my body, which has been constructed in an observable process, and it now showing the signs of decay, my soul is eternal. It will exist (in a new body) forever, somewhere.  Since my soul lacks the clear structure of our physical body, I imagine it in different ways.  I like to think of it as a great cathedral or cavern that exists within me.  This cathedral is meant as a dwelling place of the most high God.  But for many years I used the space for my own purposes.  I built shabby little structures that clogged up the interior, wrecking the resonance and acoustics.  I flooded the space with unholy things through my eyes and ears.  I crowded it with so much junk that this soul lost its purpose and lost it's capacity to house Christ within me.  Even though the space within our soul was built by God, for God, he does not force himself on us.  This is free will.  He surely calls to us, prods us and overwhelms us, but occupation within us is by invitation only.  We must ask him, invite him in.  If and when we do, the changes we expected him to bring about are small in comparison to what he will do.  He will begin to strip away everything that does not belong there.  He will make the space as it was intended and we will begin to find our true purpose.  We will hope for the first time in something worth hoping for.  

1 Corinthians 19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

The space, my cathedral is more clear and cleaner than ever, but I am constantly bringing in junk.  He is mercifully re-directing me on what stays and what must go.  There are moments when the cathedral is pristine.  In those moments, when I hear the Gospel, or see it play out in someone's life or read stories of sacrifice that mimic the story of Christ it enters into the cavernous spaces and bounces and echoes and reverberates and crescendos gaining enormous power in the perfect acoustics of God's will for my life.  It it is in those sweet and powerful moments that I see God's will for me and I actually have the ability to act on it.  The Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ enters me and pours right back out into a world that desperately needs it.

Galatians 20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God,who loved me and gave himself for me.