It's in the Cards
Between the eyes again this morning from Evelyn Underhill, A Spiritual Life, in Readings for Reflection in A Guide to Prayer:Osuna says that God plays a game with the soul called "the loser wins;" a game in which the one who holds the poorest cards does best.Not sure who Osuna is; a town in Spain a cursory Googling says.
Toil and Suffering
And Fanny Crosby's hymn, Close to Thee, is the hymn for the week:Not for ease or worldly pleasure,I may not be praying for it, but the inclination to ease, pleasure and fame is in there. Toiling and suffering! Well…
Not for fame my prayer shall be;
Gladly will I toil and suffer,
Only let me walk with thee.
Winning by Losing
So Kingdom success is winning by losing.It brings the Stephen Ministry training material to mind: focus on process, not results. So, if we want to be fishers of men and women, we begin by following Jesus (process). Follow me, he said, and I will make you fishers of men (results).
I know, I know. Some folk in our parish (including my wife) will be saying, "See, see! Don't worry about growth. You can't make it happen. God gives the growth. It says so right in the Bible."
I'm trying. I need Jesus to wield more of that mud I mentioned in the previous post.
I don't like Osuna's idea that we are the subject of God's little game. If we lend ourselves to that kind of thinking, we strip from our lives any possibility of our lives having meaning - or else any meanng that matters. There are few things more disheartening than the thought that we are mere entertainment for our creator. We were born to be loved. That is the point. God hopes we will also learn to love well in all the ways we can. He also hopes we can learn to be loved. He also hopes that we come to a place where we seek him out and acknowledge him as the source of all love. If there are any games being played, we are the game masters, not God. We play the game where we turn out ritual and out deeds and our goodness into a spiritual kind of currency. It's a great game because it just goes on and on and you can't really ever win.
ReplyDeleteIf you really loved someone, would you sentence the ones you love to a lifelong game where failure was the point? Furthermore would you put everything in the ones you love to make them want to improve, understand, acheive, and do well? Finally would you call the players into supernatural giftings where they get a taste of what's it's like to be like the game master only to then in-call them and the reward them for failure instead. That doesn't seem like love to me.
So what of the "first will be last" and all that? Well I think that's more about God not favoring or using the "first" any more than anyone else. If you aren't first, know that God can use you. If you are first, know that God may choose someone else instead an also know that God likely had a hand in bringing the blessings that made you first. Or maybe take a look and maybe you'll find you aren't first at all.
Could it be that, God being love, is merely doing what you described in your final paragraph?
ReplyDeleteAnd isn't it all about "worldly" failure, not failing with God? To win in the worldly sense is to lose in the spiritual sense and vice versa?