Episode 290 - Christmas Day

About this Episode

A few words about faith, and the future -- and your future, in particular, in individual terms.

I was struck recently by a meme I read on Instagram. It read like this:
"Stop focusing on what 'wasn't'
And start focusing on what will be!"

What struck one about the meme was its departure from what one would almost always and everywhere (semper ubique) hear:
Stop focusing on what 'wasn't'
And start focusing on what is!'

From the mid-1960s, when I first started harkening to the main-line Christian thinkers around me, right down to the exact present day,
I would hear the second, corrected version of the meme:
And start focusing on what is!

The mindfulness people would tell me that, the MSW people would tell me that, the self-people would almost all tell me that, the therapists would tell me that, the trained priests and pastors would tell me that, the movies and television would tell me that, Mom and Dad would tell me that, probably PZ would have told me that. And it's true and right so far as it goes. But it's also worldly wisdom, having almost nothing to contribute to the underlying question of life: What happens to me when I die? As well as, what happens to me when I make the biggest mistake of my life -- whatever that is -- and have to start over? "Where are you going? Can you take me with you?" (Godspell, 1973).

That is why I was startled by the counter-intuitive meme:
Start focusing on what will be!

It's a better emphasis. It's an emphasis that can only fuel one, and nerve one, and give me hope. It's manna from heaven and balm in Gilead. Without it, one's all in for... P.(Physician) A.(Assisted) S.(Suicide). With it, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" (M. Gaye/T. Terrell, 1967). LUV U.