It is a glorious fall day and my body is screaming to get outside and enjoy it but my Spirit is urging me to sit down and write. I have been dwelling lately on some topics that I want to discuss with myself. I kind of look at it that way....flesh against Spirit. Ever get a phrase or thought going in your mind and find that it surprisingly comes up in conversation, on the T.V. or in something you're reading? Coincidence....maybe but I usually take it as a confirmation of something I need to think about. I say an inner, OK,OK,I see it! Well,this week it has been this notion of "redefining yourself" which I know could be sparked by the dreaded fact that I am getting older and don't like what I see in the mirror. Most people don't have the luxury of picking and choosing the course of life when you're young, you just run as fast as you can to survive. The older years provide time for reflection and a chance to review the question of, "how's that working for you"?
We are bombarded these days with the uneasy feeling of concern for the future. This election that is days away will most assuredly bring a change to our country. I go back and forth with the thought of will it be a positive or negative change? I detest the feeling of living in fear of the unknown but have to admit that I wrestle with it. I'm finding the same fears apply to other parts of my life such as health,aging,finances,relationships. Can we ever get to a point in life where we can honestly say we are comfortable in our skin?? I have been thinking a lot about that lately because I don't think I've ever really been there.
My son and I had the conversation the other day about whether it is true that a person can not be photogenic. He said a photographer friend of his said there is no such thing. A good photograph is a photo of a person who is confident, relaxed and happy and I thought maybe that might be true. There is a hesitant,fearful force inside of us that is at war with the Spirit and that could be what inhibits the reflection. There is an interior life to the physical body and we must get a hold of how powerful and important it is to our well being. Many places in Scripture elude to the fact that our physical body is different from other parts of our human makeup.
"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." (2 Cor.4:16-18)
We have this awesome source of Life inside of us which is Spirit and is not subject to the ways of the world. I'm so glad of that, aren't you?? Living out of it is the secret of Life. The Spirit is what keeps our soul and body alive, not the other way around. When the Spirit leaves the body, you're dead! Remember the story in Luke when Jesus raised Jairus' daughter and it says, "Her Spirit returned and at once she stood up." The important thing to see here is that as Spirit beings, our physical body does not define us. The life that is real life is lived from the INSIDE. We actually are living from the inside out so being comfortable in your own skin is a time of life when you have truly,deeply tapped into God's life in you and you just relax and enjoy the ride.
The opposite which I have seen in so many disturbed people, is a sense of loneliness and despair brought on by a childlike fear of being all alone in the universe which in fact they are. They see nothing other than the decaying,decreasing and declining physical body which shouts to the mind that death is ever approaching.
I have been obsessed the past few months with the crazy,wild,creative and inspiring writers of the 1920's. I'm zipping through biography's at a fast pace. Why I'm on that tangent I don't know, but it's been interesting reading. The common thread that I see is two fold. I envy their brilliance, their talent, their passion, their carefree attitude for love and living and the ability to write what they feel but there is such a cold, irreverent attitude towards God and life beyond the day to day. I am grieved to see how so many of them go stark raving mad. Raging alcoholics,drug addicts and extremely depressed and suicidal people. I guess that is what got me thinking of this charade many people live in.
Came across this fitting little dark poem by Ogden Nash. I love poetry, dark and light. It's such a mirror of the heart.
Listen...
Ogden Nash
There is a knocking in the skull,
An endless silent shout
Of something beating on a wall,
And crying, “Let me out!”
That solitary prisoner
Will never hear reply.
No comrade in eternity
Can hear the frantic cry.
No heart can share the terror
That haunts his monstrous dark.
The light that filters through the chinks
No other eye can mark.
When flesh is linked with eager flesh,
And words run warm and full,
I think that he is loneliest then,
The captive in the skull.
Caught in a mesh of living veins,
In cell of padded bone,
He loneliest is when he pretends
That he is not alone.
We'd free the incarcerate race of man
That such a doom endures
Could only you unlock my skull,
Or I creep into yours.
God says in His word....."Come partake of the life that is real life."
