Here Lies J. Blow

Life on this earth is one tale of tragedy after another. We comfort ourselves with the illusion that there are still many good things left for our enjoyment, but in the dark hours of the night, we start to fear that nothing we have is worth what we've lost. Deep in the human psyche is an image of a garden, perfect and sheltered, where we can find everything we’ve hoped for. Only thing is, the garden itself is gone, and we are left to ourselves, far from home.

Of all the books ever written, there is one that dares to be honest with us – to tell us that we’re not wayward souls who can redeem ourselves through some spiritual exercise or other. Instead, we’re lost, wandering souls, cut off from paradise, separated from our maker, and doomed to suffer the results of our choices.

Of course, that same book also gives a cure, an unbelievable one because it demands no acts of penance from us, no special religious observances, because it's a rescue and restoration brought about by God himself. This book, the Bible, reveals a plan by our creator to get us back, a scheme that had the creator's own son coming to earth to die for us, then to rise from the dead to lead us into new life. It sounds like a legend as bold as The Lord of the Rings. But it’s more than that.

Bound up in the plan of God himself is a word that perhaps explains it better than any other: the word "Kingdom." When God created us, he intended us to live under his Kingdom, his direction. This was not so he could dominate us but so that we would find pleasure in his world and not fall into the nastiness that independence always seems to bring upon us. And that is why, when Jesus came to earth, he spoke often of “the Kingdom of God,” not a place in the geography of the ancient world but a kingship, the rule of God in the human heart.

How do we get into the Kingdom? By abandoning our independence, by realizing that we've been wrong all our lives in thinking that we could find a destiny separated from our maker. Jesus himself took all the bad baggage we had built up against us, all the penalty and tribulation that running from God adds to our account, and he died in our place to wipe the slate clean and give us a path back to the one who made us. Rising from the dead, he asks nothing more or less from us than that we surrender to his loving rule.

But the Kingdom itself is strange territory for those of us who have lived in Independent World for so long. It means unlearning most of our best notions about the meaning of everything and discovering utterly new ways of thinking. Now instead of filling our conversations with "I," me," and "mine," we discover that the only way to find meaning is within the Maker’s plan for us. His purposes have to come before our own.

Each of us wants to make an impression on the world before we die. We want to know that something we did left a stamp that won't be forgotten even when we are.

None of us wants to see on our tombstone:

HERE LIES J. BLOW
CAME INTO THIS WORLD WITH NOTHING
LEFT THE SAME WAY.
JUST A LEAF BLOWING IN THE WIND