A Gorilla’s Extraordinary Journey

Do you know the story of Gargantua the Great? If not, it’s worth learning. Poachers in the Congo left a month-old gorilla for missionaries to nurse and tend. The year was 1929, the onset of the Great Depression. The missionaries passed the entertaining little creature on to an American merchant-ship captain who made him the ship’s mascot under the endearing name Buddy. Perhaps predictably, though, a terrible misfortune befell poor Buddy when a chastened and vengeful seaman threw acid in the growing creature’s face, leaving him badly disfigured in a leering expression. Unable to care for Buddy any longer, the ship’s captain passed him on to a New York socialite whose ministry was tending mistreated animals. There, Buddy grew to his natural but fabulous silverback-gorilla proportions. Realizing that she was no longer able to care for the gentle 400-pound brute, the socialite sold Buddy to the world-famous Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Pulling the Nation Out of Depression

Buddy’s joining the biggest circus in the world may in modern sensibilities have been excruciatingly sad. The life of a disfigured simian sideshow isn’t one of good fortune and glamor. Yet the primate orphan’s detour from the Congo to circus fame was also extraordinarily fortuitous for the circus and America, whether or not also for Buddy. The Depression’s onset had crippled the Ringling circus, which had initially made its founder/owner John Ringling fabulously wealthy (see my account in Fifty Transformative Figures). Heirs to Ringling were struggling to rescue the circus from bankruptcy. Buddy, renamed the fearsome Gargantua after the giant of French literature, billed (exaggeratedly, of course) as the world’s biggest gorilla and most-fearsome animal, and presented on the heels of the hit film King Kong, inside a steel cage as a ferocious man eater, became the circus’ rescuer. Gargantua/Buddy received top billing and attracted huge crowds wherever he went, dragging the circus, entertainment industry, and nation out of the Depression and, through the world war, helping to restore the nation’s confidence and vigor.

Logistics Trigger a Family Connection

The arduous logistics of moving a nearly 500-pound gorilla in an air-conditioned steel cage around the country, as part of a 100-car railroad train, brought the famously fearsome but actually quite tame Gargantua into my family’s story. At the tail end of the Depression, my grandfather owned a hotel (more like a poor man’s boarding house) in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, just outside New York City. One year, when the Ringling circus decamped from its extended Spring series of opening shows at Madison Square Garden to begin its season-long one-night stands down the Eastern Seaboard, circumstances required the circus to put Gargantua up somewhere for the night, off the train. Gargantua thus spent the night, secretly of course, in the garage of my grandfather’s hotel. Whether in or out of his steel cage, I don’t know, but to the awestruck wonder of my mother and her siblings who were then just little children. My family has passed that fabulous lore down through the generations.

Quotidian Brushes with Fame

Have you ever met or seen someone famous, up close in an ordinary setting? Not necessarily a Gargantua but someone nonetheless iconic, world-renowned? Ask your family members and friends who is the most famous person they ever met. Largely if not entirely fortuitously, I’ve met or encountered the golfer Arnold Palmer (who hasn’t, as congenial as he was?!), the basketball player Magic Johnson, and the 1970s singer/television star John Davidson, along with a raft of state supreme court justices, university presidents, and other high-ranking officials, none of whom really count. My story isn’t much. It’s certainly not Gargantua, the Taylor Swift or Elon Musk of his day. But you get the point: we can each have our brushes with famous figures even when not seeking their fame.

Famous Figures as Archetypes

So what to make of those brushes with famous figures? Figures become famous because they serve as archetypes. The film actor Jack Nicholson, for instance, retains his fame as an archetype of the instinctual, unrestrained, original rebel, that animal nature that we each hide as deeply as we can within ourselves. The aforesaid Musk is the archetypical brilliant, calculating, driven, visionary risk taker. Both are heroically independent while also sorts of anti-heroes, cutting sharply against the smothering social and political grain. Importantly, seeing a famous figure up close (imagine bumping into Nicholson on the street or seeing Musk gliding through the airport) doesn’t diminish the archetype. Rather, the mundane encounter of the famous serves to amplify their archetypical character into one’s story, spirit, psyche, self, and soul.

A Gargantuan Character

Gargantua had that magnifying effect on my grandfather’s character, at least to me, his grandchild. In truth, my grandfather was a man-about-town, someone well known among the hardy figures of the heavily industrial but also scenic Perth Amboy, on the Raritan Bay in the towering Manhattan’s shadow. My grandfather not only owned a hotel where hardworking and down-on-their-luck men could get a good bed and two or three square meals. He also owned a coal yard that delivered loads to the residences and businesses around town and a semi-pro baseball team. He also lived next door to his best friend, a major league umpire who shared a generous supply of tickets to Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants games (then the three New York MLB teams). My grandfather, a Polish immigrant married to an Irish immigrant, was all at once gruff, hard-nosed, garrulous, and incredibly generous. Housing Gargantua, even for a night, perfectly suited his larger-than-life, Runyonesque character and story. Gentle inside, fearsome out, and constantly generating a fruitful spectacle, my grandfather mirrored the Gargantua archetype.

Felled But Not Diminished by Stroke

By around 1949, Gargantua had reached his physical if not spiritual or psychic demise (archetypes never dim but instead grow greater with the passage of time). So, too, did my grandfather, first slowed and then felled by stroke. My parents, brother, and I lived by then in the Midwest. My brother and I visited my grandparents only once a year, if that. I barely knew my grandfather other than as a legendarily fearsome figure. When his first stroke disabled him in his late fifties, though, my parents built him and my grandmother a cabin a couple hours away from us in the peaceful woods up North. There, my brother and I visited often, prospering under the devoted and fun-loving care of my lively Irish grandmother while keeping wary eyes on the fearsome legend. My grandfather barely spoke. He mostly just sat stone-faced, waiting for my grandmother to wait on him hand and foot in what must have been a painful dependence for his Gargantuan spirit.

A Shared Story

I am my grandfather’s grandson. We never quite escape family ties, whether we wish to do so or not. And so predictably from the basic genetics of it, I (like my grandfather) recently suffered a stroke, despite my otherwise good fitness, diet, medical monitoring, and general health. My stroke wasn’t nearly so bad as my grandfather’s disabling or fatal ones, perhaps because of the swift clot-busting drug with which an excited small-town medical team infused me. (I think I might have been one of their first.) Indeed curiously, the stroke has had the wondrous effect of turning me resolutely inward to the great archetypes including the greatest of all archetypes the Savior Jesus Christ. I now commune among those archetypes, more connected with their interiority, divinity, and grand narrative than with my outward world.

A Silent Tear Framing a Gentle Touch

So it was in the middle of a recent night that the wisdom archetype Sophia whispered to me a reminder of my grandfather and his Gargantuan nature, huge and fearsome on the outside but an endearing and orphaned Buddy on the inside. And what returned to me on Sophia’s breath was the lost memory of my grandfather’s trembling hand reaching with too much difficulty into his pocket to withdraw a silver dollar to press into my small hand, as my brother and I bid him goodbye on one of our visits, probably the last one. I recalled him seated as always but reaching forward to draw me to him to hug me, which he had never done. Pressed to his breast, I recalled the smell of beer on his breath and cigar smoke on his tweed jacket, and the scratch on my cheek of his two days’ growth of beard. Gargantua and his mirror in my grandfather are among those archetypes with whom I now richly live. Live, friends. Live.

Rethinking Who a Friend Can Be

I’ve had a few friends over my nearly seventy years of life, good friends who have been far kinder to me and much more generous with me than I deserved. Recently, though, another friend came along at just the right moment with just the right heart, compassion, and skills to teach just who a friend can truly be. May you have that experience of being an extraordinary friend to another in need or receiving an extraordinary friend when you are in need.

Awaking to a Peculiar Need

I in no sense expected to have the peculiar need for a special friend that I recently did. After careers as a lawyer and law professor and dean, I had retired to a sound and secure life in which I occupied my ridiculously overactive mind by writing legal web content for a national law firm, while writing guidebooks on law, faith, finances, family, and other life subjects on the side. But then I had a stroke that, together with a severe bout of radiculopathy, ended those pastimes. My abundant mental energy and passion for mentoring had nowhere left to go.

Realizing What a Friend Can Do

And that was when an extraordinary friend stepped in. He is in mid-career with a very active family life and personal pastimes and ministries. Yet he very kindly stayed in touch with me through my unexpected medical issues. More so, he picked up a project that we had been discussing for around a year. He had learned that I was writing those couple of dozen guidebooks addressing life’s big subjects. And he had mused how much more powerful they could be as an app that harvested and offered their advice instantly, answering user questions using an AI function. During my stroke recovery, that’s what he did for me, creating that tool.

Filling a Need for Curated Advice

A problem that we both discerned with AI is that unless you are skilled at designing the query, you can get responses that draw their material from anything online, no matter its quality. For instance, I use AI tools to do legal reviews of draft web content. While the AI tools speed my work evaluating the accuracy of the legal premises that the drafts assert, the AI tools often widely or entirely miss the mark, producing their own rank errors despite our efforts to restrict their research to authoritative sources. AI isn’t perfect. Not even close. So why trust it for common-sense advice?

Knowing Your Curator Counts

Of course, the million words of advice that I wrote last year to compose my twenty-one guidebooks may not be any better than a random AI source. Personally, I think it is, even if any other author would think the same thing of their own work. Yet what you know that you’re getting with this new AI advice tool is my own life-informed thoughts. One lone real person who is a son, husband, father, licensed lawyer with a lifetime of practice, educator, author, business owner, nonprofit and board leader, and professing and practicing Christian wrote every word from which the AI tool draws its answers. I promise that I didn’t use AI to write the advice, even if AI helps you get instant answers drawn from what I wrote. In short, trust that you have a real, caring, committed, and compassionate curator of the tool’s advice.

In Friendship, Timing Is Everything

Recovering from a stroke complicated by a painful cervical-spine condition isn’t easy. The stroke didn’t fell me for more than a few hours plus a couple of days in ICU. But it slowed or worsened my recovery from the radiculopathy, taking away significant use of my right hand. This article is the first semi-substantial thing that I’ve written in months, and I’m laboriously hunting and pecking at the keyboard rather than flying fluently along at hare’s pace. It’s been a frustrating time trying to slow, still, or at least somewhat entertain my overactive mind, even if also a time of wondrous internal growth. My friend’s timely and frankly brilliant work, though, put a perfect capstone on my professional, if not also my personal, life. Try our free curated AI tool. It’s a gift to you from an extraordinary friend who above all shares my passion to help others make a better life.

God can seem grossly distant. He is, after all, God and thus omniscient, omnipotent, sovereign, uncreated, and, yes, distant. And so our efforts to draw as close to him as we may wish, to feel his intimacy and draw on his life, can be illusory. We must resort to acts of the imagination that leave one with a sort of cardboard cutout of what should be the glorious divine. For years, decades really, I have been seeking mental and spiritual stances and other ways to walk with God, to reduce the seeming distance in order to receive and embrace a clearer view of God. Moses expressed that same desire, asking God to show himself.

Clues from God’s Psychology

Strangely, numinously, God refused to show Moses his face but instead only his back, and only after he had placed Moses in a protective cleft of a rock, if you will, in the arms of the rock Christ. Yet to see another’s back can be precisely the way to get to know them best, as God surely knew. We project, hide, and manipulate, for better or worse, with the face. To instead see another’s back is to look behind that mask of the face. To see another’s back is, in other words, to take a deeper psychological view. Could God have offered Moses permission to explore God’s own psychology, the depths of his consciousness and unconsciousness, in order to know him better?

Humanizing the Divine

In his small work Answer to Job, the eminent psychologist Carl Jung did just that, making a psychological study of the inestimable creator, savior, and judge. Theologians, psychologists, and philosophers of course disagree over what Jung accomplished. He knew that his views would be controversial. He even referred to his book as a particular poison, although of the sort to bring about new life in rebirth. For me, though, the effect of reading Answer to Job has been not to lower God but to humanize God, in the peculiar way that God humanized himself in the incarnated Christ who is both fully human while still fully divine. To imagine a psychology of God may do more for your approach to him than imagining his glowing face or piercing eyes. God invited Moses to look not at his face but at his back, depths, or psychology.

Exercising and Withholding Attributes

For one, in the Book of Job, Jung saw God both exercising and withholding his attributes. God enters into a bet with the adversary Satan, still then a member of God’s own court, over whether Job will retain his righteousness in the face of extreme loss. Of course, God could in his omniscience have known that Job would persist, as Job fortunately did. God nonetheless let Satan kill God’s slaves, livestock, and children, and bring Job to within an inch of his own life, in the course of their horrible gamble, ostensibly to find out what God could in his omniscience have already seen. In treating the blameless Job in such tortuous fashion, while letting Satan get away with murder (as far as the account itself goes), God withheld rather than exercised his justice. God possesses attributes in both ideal and absolute, including pure love, goodness, righteousness, and justice. Yet he exercises and withholds those attributes as he alone sees fit, in his sovereignty and wisdom.

Consciousness and Unconsciousness

In Answer to Job, Jung had his own psychoanalytic way of characterizing God’s strange if not also awful exercising and withholding of divine attributes, at unfathomable cost to the blameless Job. Among Jung’s great contributions to psychology was his belief in the presence and power of the unconscious. We are conscious beings, aware of ourselves and our thinking, while able to reflect and reason, in order to project outward our persona to navigate social settings. Beneath that consciousness, though, lurks an immense and ancient reservoir of emotion, instinct, images, myths, and archetypes. Call it the soul, spirit, psyche, or self, or call it what you will, but there’s more to us than meets the conscious mind. We are aware of only a sliver or veneer of our deeper, more-authentic, and more real soul, spirit, or self. And that’s what Jung concluded God was doing in the Book of Job, acting out of a consciousness of only a sliver of his full unconscious attributes. In his pitiful but still-respectful mewling, the blameless Job was, one could say, more conscious than God of the full picture of things. After all, God, not Job, entered into a blind gamble with Satan. And Job lost everything but his life for it.

Holding Opposites Together

Jung also proposed in Answer to Job how a thoroughly divine and righteous divinity could exercise and withhold his attributes in such strange if not also awful fashion, without sullying the divine character. Antinomies, referring to moral or logical contradictions or opposites, exist in all of us, indeed in creation and reality themselves. For instance, as humans, we balance a necessary selfishness against a valued sacrifice. We are sometimes merciful and forgiving while other times discerning and self-protecting. We permit some incursions and transgressions but other times draw boundaries. The narrow way of balance between extremes is our lot and path in life. God, though, possesses and at times exhibits these attributes in absolute. Indeed, God brings and holds all opposites together, illustrated symbolically in the cross and demonstrated historically in Christ’s crucifixion, itself an event imbued with extreme opposites.

Development Versus Display

Jung also suggested that God’s mistreatment of Job, and Job’s extraordinary and unintended moral elevation over God by simply putting up with it while remaining devoted to the divinity, paved the way for Christ’s advent. Jung saw God as developing an increasing consciousness, spurred by the higher awareness of Job, culminated by God acquiring the full consciousness of mankind when taking on the life and human limitations of Christ. That view of God’s psychological development is likely heresy and may be dangerous heresy, at that. Yet the sense of God displaying a broader consciousness, if not developing it, can make good sense. Christians have long sensed a shift between the Old Testament and New Testament God. A shift from unconscious emoting (fire and brimstone) to conscious self-awareness (the sensitivity of Christ) may be a useful alternative way of thinking about it. Call it the humanization of God in Jesus Christ. Isn’t that the gospel’s arc?

God sightings are a thing in Christian circles, as well they should be. The practice usually involves sharing with one another, in large and small groups, how God recently moved and acted in one’s life. God does move. Christian groups honor God when sharing those sightings. Sharing also stimulates one another to keep on the lookout for further God movements. Make sharing God sightings a practice, joy, and discipline in your interactions with other Christians. Whether Sunday morning or Wednesday night, honor God in your quiet conversations. And try doing the same now and then with your non-Christian acquaintances. It’ll be good for them, too. For one week, count each day how many times you honored God in conversation, and you’ll notice your count going up day to day simply from the counting.

At the same time, though, be a little cautious when choosing and framing these God sightings. God doesn’t drop into a life once a year solely to create a little convenience. Nor does he drop into a life once a season solely to provide a small or big miracle healing. God does create conveniences. He also brings small and big miracle healings. And we should definitely share and celebrate both. But God also acts in between what we notice as God sightings. An intimate life with God may be more like an immersion, like wading into and then floating within a great warm pool, where at every moment God is supporting, healing, nudging, inspiring. We live in Christ and Christ in us. He’s not a helicopter God dropping down base camp care packages. He’s along with us, and we’re along with him, for the journey.

Sharing stories is a big part of a good life in Christ. And that doesn’t mean telling stories. Telling stories is one thing, sharing stories another. To share a story is to create something new with another that one could not create on one’s own. We each make our own little story. Having a story to tell is good. But the better stories tend to be ones that we create with others so that two or more can tell. Sharing a story is a mark of maturity, an ability that psychologists say we acquire at age three. That’s around the age and stage at which we begin to coordinate our play with others, inviting them in as they invite us in. We then continue to share stories throughout a lifetime, always with family members, sometimes with friends or co-workers, and sometimes with enemies. The scriptures ask how two can walk together except that they agree. Even with enemies, those with whom we struggle, we share a story.

A life in Christ lends design, continuity, and connectivity to those stories. Everyone has stories. A life in Christ enables the believer to integrate the believer’s stories into ever larger accounts, all the way to the greatest account of the world rescued and reordered in Christ. For the active believer, that integration of stories takes place in hierarchical order. The believer’s stories with closest family members and friends connect with the stories experienced within small groups. Those stories then assemble into the stories experienced with larger groups until the experiences become ones of the whole body in Christ. The experience of the body in Christ also connects with prior accounts while creating histories and legacies that connect with future accounts. The story one experiences at any one moment moves easily up and down the hierarchy of stories, leaving one constantly connected and richly informed. Share your experiences in the body of Christ. Hold fast to the great story of Christ.

Morality is self-mastery, not a legal code. Truly, we tend to think of morality as a strict set of do’s and don’ts, rules largely divorced from their context. But look at virtually any such rule, and you’ll see more questions than answers, especially when one begins to think of all the different contexts in which the rule might apply. And even if we were able to reduce morality to a set of rules, the presence of rules implies the ability to carry them out, when our ability is precisely the problem. We generally know the rules in any given situation. Our problem generally isn’t knowing the rules. Our problem is instead having the desire, ability, and discipline to carry them out.

And that problem is precisely why morality is much more a matter of self mastery than a matter of rules. Discerning, disciplined, and transformed Christians are those who hear and follow the Spirit in his strength, not in their own strength. Christians aren’t moral because they know a secret moral code that others don’t know. Nearly everyone knows the moral content of the Ten Commandments, even if relatively few know the Commandments in detail and order in themselves. Instead, Christians are moral because they have crucified the self’s desire. They desire instead to follow the Spirit’s desires more so than their own.

Cain didn’t kill Abel because he didn’t know the rules or momentarily forgot the rules. Cain killed Abel, the scriptures suggest, in some way connected with Cain’s anger and the sin that crouched in wait to destroy Cain out of his anger. The moral code isn’t generally a secret. The secret, if there is one, is self mastery, although we know that secret, too. In its natural state, the self’s every desire is evil all the time, not because the self doesn’t know the moral code but because the natural self doesn’t know the Lord. Receive the Lord’s Spirit, and you’ll not only know the moral code but also have the Lord’s desire to fulfill it.

When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, unsanctioned knowledge opened their eyes to their shame. We learn from this spare but profound and pivotal account that sight apart from God, outside of God’s plan and sanction, lacking its divine element, is distorted sight. Adam and Eve weren’t blind before grasping forbidden fruit for unsanctioned knowledge. They had the sight that God intended. They were naked and yet felt no shame. Only when they sought sight for knowledge that God had forbidden did they feel shame, a shame that they otherwise need not have felt.

The lesson may thus include not just that disobeying God is a bad thing but also that looks deceive. Yet it’s not just the look of a thing that deceives but also, or more so, the unauthorized looking at a thing. In other words, pursuing knowledge can deceive, especially when the knowledge we pursue doesn’t bear God’s sanction. Be careful where you look. Be even more careful why you are looking. And be most careful to ensure that God sanctions the knowledge you seek by looking. Indeed, turn your gaze toward him, not toward your desires outside of him. God offers many wonders to investigate. He gives us many profoundly beautiful and satisfying things after which to look. We need not look for other things where we lack his authority and affirming sanction.

The scriptures describe God and what we receive from God in various ways. God himself and how we sense or what we receive from God are, variously, light or fire, breath or wind, and word or logos. God can reveal himself and his desires in people, events, circumstances, seasons, ages, and times. Yet one of the most powerful images of God and the way that God works in us and through us is as the seed. The seed is that dying little thing that somehow falls into the right soil, receives the water of life, and grows into very big things sheltering other important things. No matter how big the tree, no matter what community of living things it shelters, no matter how strong its timber or how abundant its fruit, the tree began with the seed. Indeed, you, too, like other living things, began as a seed, the tiniest yet most consequential thing.

What makes a seed so special is the potential it holds for the soil on which it lands. Nothing grows from nothing. Everything must grow from some form of seed. Everything results from seed. Thus seed has the potential for everything. When God drops a seed into you, into your life and circumstances, he offers potential you cannot imagine. Your seed may be an urging, idea, glimpse, vision, or dream. Or your seed may be a companion, community, or competitor. The size and form of the seed don’t matter because the seed isn’t the thing. The potential is the thing. Your seed may be the smallest and dullest looking thing. But your seed may lead to a marriage, family, education, job, business, charity, or legacy. Your seed may lead to a ministry, sacrifice, insight, or new and deeper relationship with Christ.

Whatever potential your seed carries, though, it carries more than just energy. Indeed, its energy is a very small thing, consumed long before it bears fruit. The critical element your seed carries isn’t energy but information conveying identity. When you receive a word, so little as a single word, from God, that word contains more information than a thousand reference works, a million encyclopedias. Who, after all, did God tell Moses to tell his nation Israel he was? “Am.” Being. God delivers himself when he delivers a word. God’s presence in that tiny seed carries all the information necessary for the seed to grow into its full form and bear its full fruit. And that’s God. That’s the word and logos of God, the light and fire of God, the breath and wind of God. The seed. The tiny seed that died to carry into each person who accepts the seed the fullness of eternal life.

You probably knew, but sea monsters are a thing in the scriptures. Sea monsters, dragons, serpents, and leviathan color the scriptures from the first chapter of Genesis, where God creates the great sea creatures, through Job, Psalms, and Isaiah, all the way to Revelation. Sea monsters, dragons, great serpents, and leviathan don’t make the scriptures quaint, though. You’re reading the scriptures wrong if you think so. Nothing’s quaint about the scriptures. The scriptures’ authors had good reason to include sea monsters in their creation accounts, for instance, considering that their neighboring ancient Babylonians credited a sea monster’s body with heaven and earth. The scriptures’ God not only ruled but also created sea monsters.

Yet sea monsters can have a broader connotation in the scriptures’ powerful symbology. Hurricanes and tsunamis still prove today that flooding waters are chaos agents. We get the picture. Things that suddenly emerge from turbulent waters can be destructive, disastrous, even deadly. Try taming the hurricane or tsunami. And waters are only an image or symbol, too. It doesn’t take literal water to damage and destroy. Cancer, auto accident, job loss, or relationship loss, each their own kind of flooding waters, will also do. Those things that emerge from chaotic waters can be especially catastrophic when they are huge rather than small things, figurative monsters. The bigger the hurricane, the bigger the disaster.

One can even take the scriptures’ lesson further. Big things disconnected from God, operating as their own ravenous entities, are always hazardous. Figurative sea monsters, whether godless governments, armies, agencies, industries, or corporations, or godless greed or pride, lurk just below the surface, waiting for a weakness to expose itself. Then everything breaks loose as the monster rises. Thinking of it that way, it’s not hard to see large monsters on the loose. That’s why they’re in the scriptures. The scriptures put the monsters under God. And the way to keep them there is to understand and follow God’s word. No, the scriptures aren’t quaint. The scriptures offer incredibly rich insight and great power to take on the monsters.

Christ followers know what salvation means: to live eternally in a transformed body in God’s reconstituted kingdom on his redeemed earth. Christian salvation isn’t some death-hastened disembodied incorporation into a formless universal force. Salvation isn’t boring, dull, uniform, faceless, or aimless. Salvation is instead personal, purposeful, rewarding, even creative and adventurous. Salvation fulfills everything God meant for our life. Christ followers know and seek the glory of salvation. The problem, though, is to assure oneself of being on salvation’s path. Are we missing something in our salvation?

Fortunately, the scriptures address the assurance of salvation directly. The apostle John disclosed in his first letter that he was writing so that we may know that we have eternal life. The scriptures want us to know our salvation, not just to speculate or hope. And what we know is that God has given us eternal life in his Son Jesus Christ. As John wrote, we who have the Son have life. Those who do not have the Son do not have life. So how do we know we have eternal life? We believe in the name Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Jesus himself said, “I give them eternal life so they may never perish.”

So, salvation’s path isn’t in what we do. The sin we avoid and the good works we do may be evidence of our salvation. One hopes to see much evidence. Salvation’s evidence can make for a much better life. But evidence tends to be circumstantial. And difficult circumstances can conceal salvation’s evidence. Hard times don’t leave much evidence. In those hard times that invite doubt, don’t trust in the evidence. Instead, trust in what we know: Jesus died to pay the due penalty for our many and enormously serious, indeed deadly, sins. And when he rose, he brought with him our eternal life. When all else fails, as it inevitably must, hold fast to that one, eternal truth. Don’t attempt to find your assurance within your own reach. Find your assurance in the very Word of God. We tell ourselves lies. God never lies. God speaks the gospel truth.

Scripture gives us at least two forms of sacrifice. One form places the sins of the individual or community on the sacrificed thing and sends the sacrifice to its destruction. The scapegoat was that form of sacrifice, sent to Satan in the wilderness for wild animals to consume, with the community’s sins on its head. The scapegoat sacrifice is a horizontal sacrifice, shifting sin from us to the thing banished from us. Culture today is much about the scapegoat sacrifice, although with a twist. We are very good today at pointing to others whom we blame for our own sins, scapegoating them into the canceled wilderness. It’s the scapegoat sacrifice, although we blame the goat rather than ourselves, in whom we find only virtue.

The other kind of sacrifice is the sacrifice not of our sins but of our best, sacrificed not out into the wilderness but up to God. This sacrifice is of the perfect goat, not the scapegoat sent into the wilderness but the other goat killed on the altar to atone for the community’s sins. The scapegoat carries the sins back to the deceiver who desired them, while the perfect goat’s sacrifice carries us back to God who desires us holy. Uniquely, though, Jesus was both the sacrifice of the perfect goat and of the scapegoat. His death of course worked our atonement, bringing us back into the presence of God. Yet his death also carried our sins into the wilderness, where the deceiver tried to take hold of him as the deceiver destroyed the scapegoat. But the deceiver had no hold over Christ. Jesus not only cleansed us for his Father but also destroyed sin’s grip on us. The complete lesson: we shouldn’t be scapegoating any more.

You wonder why video games are so popular? Designers of video games, whether the smartphone kind or the more-elaborate game-controller type, know the formula. Whether in video games or real life, we crave two things: rules and narrative. Good video games, the kind that absorb endless hours of devotion from their players, provide both.

We need a world with rules, indeed a particular kind of rules that give us goals and hope. A world that operates with possibility, rewarding participant striving, is a world that attracts players, those who voluntarily and regularly engage with focus and energy. A world without ordered rules, one that treats its inhabitants arbitrarily, is a world without hope, one in which inhabitants have no point in either hoping or striving. Video games give their players attractive targets, goals players can reach when they focus on applying their burgeoning skills. Those games also reward their players for striving, not just with more and more points but with levels up into new worlds. We need not only to compete with purpose but also to transcend our prior experience. Games give their players levels up to satisfy our desire for transcendence.

Games, though, also need narratives. To attract ardent players, a video game must generally include some sense of the participant becoming part of a story. The stories are as diverse as the affinities and interests of game players: castles for some, candies for others. But the story elements are there, either patent or latent. And the games that only hint at the story, allowing the player to imagine and project in ways that resonate with the player’s character and desires, can offer some of the more powerful gaming experiences. Rules and narrative; narrative and rules. Video games are such powerful tonics today because they offer both.

The most powerfully resonant experience, though, isn’t a video game. It is instead Christ’s offer of eternal glory. Christianity offers both rules and narrative, but it doesn’t do so like a video game. Video games are virtual escapes from reality. Christianity, by contrast, is reality. Christianity isn’t merely a set of powerful guiding rules and a powerfully resonant narrative. Christianity is the real game of life, indeed the experience of eternal life. Help your gamer friends turn to the author of life.

People invest a lot in their local church. We spend much time together expending much energy enjoying much fellowship and celebrating much worship. We take communion together remembering the Lord’s body and blood. We also pray, profess faith, baptize, marry, and memorialize together in our local church. In the local church, we study God’s word, hold one another accountable in close relationships, keep up with one another’s health and interests, serve in outreach ministries, and even enjoy recreation together. In many ways, indeed in the most fundamental of ways, we center our lives on our local church.

The local church returns our investment with abundant interest added on top. The local church eases our pain, comforts our loss, and solves our loneliness. The local church gives us instant fellowship with others of all ages, without requiring that we first find them to be a worthy friend. Or perhaps more to the point, the local church gives us friends when we are not especially worthy of being counted as another’s friend. The local church also gives us a song, rhyme, reason, and rhythm for living. The local church is our daily and weekly lifeblood, without which, but for family, we might feel desperately alone on a desperate planet. The local church even gives us family when we have none or when the one we have no longer wants us. The local church is a hospital for the soul and a shelter for the spiritually homeless.

Yet for all of that rich return on our investment in our local church, we often miss one enormous dimension of the local church. The church, any church, isn’t just an island of meaning in a sea of irrelevance. The church is also a river, one that started its irresistible flow with Christ’s cross and resurrection, and Pentecost’s celebrant outpouring of the beloved Holy Spirit. When you set foot in your local church, you are standing once again in that great holy river. You aren’t simply meeting your friends and going through your happy moments. You are immersing yourself in a current so powerful that it carries your soul eternally aloft. Your church isn’t simply a local church born of restless souls a few decades ago. Every local church is instead another joyful eddy in that great current we know as the life of Jesus Christ.

The Spirit helps us turn from both sins of the right hand and sins of the left hand. The right hand is the dominant hand for most of us. With the right hand, we shoot straight and write within the lines as strict order requires. The concept of being right similarly denotes correctness and order. By contrast, the left hand is generally the non-dominant hand. With the left hand, we shoot crooked, missing the mark, just as our left hand writes outside the lines, out of strict order. The concept of being left similarly connotes remainder or anomaly. In spiritual terms, Peter stands figuratively at the right hand of Jesus, as the apostle to the chosen people of righteousness, the Jews. Paul, though, stands figuratively at the left hand of Jesus, as the apostle to the Gentile remainder, the people who stand outside the strict religious order.

Right-handed sins are thus sins of too strict an order. Greed in harvesting all the way to every field corner, hard judgment against every sinner, and the exclusion of the different or anomalous are right-handed sins, crushing the souls of the lost, adventuresome, and outsider. So, too, are disciplining a child to exasperation and treating the immigrant less favorably than the citizen, against which the scriptures warn. Left-handed sins, though, are sins of insufficient order. Sloth or sloppiness in work, disrespect for rules, and disobedience toward authority are left-handed sins, discouraging the faithful and burdening the diligent. So, too, are unhealthy indulgence of a child’s misbehavior and treating the criminal wrongdoer too leniently.

The Spirit helps us distinguish right- and left-handed sins from their proper balance. Sins are not always rank departures from the path of righteousness, like running into the woods for a little fling of some sort. Sometimes, sins are hewing to the path too rigidly when God would have us pause, refresh, and invite along an outsider. Watch your left hand, yes. But watch your right hand also. Let one hand balance the other. Both the right hand and left hand are important.

Returning is just as important as ascending. We strive to mount the path up God’s mountain, to attain the heights of knowledge and insight. We want the next inspiration, the next special revelation. We love to scale the heights. We wish to be like Moses walking into the cloud on Mount Sinai in the expectation of meeting God and receiving from him the design of his temple, the way of living close to him. We rightly fix our gaze upward, looking to the mountain from which our help comes. Yet what about our descent from the mountain, where we rediscover our golden-calf chaos? Do we shatter in rage the tablets by which we remember what we learned on the mountain?

The descent is just as important as the ascent. God did not create us to dwell alone with him on the mountaintop. God made us mediators of heaven and earth, not purely divine beings but instead divinity imbued in the dust of the earth. God does not intend us to cloister ourselves, to rid ourselves of as many earthly conditions and relationships as possible, avoiding all descent as far as we are able. God made the earth good, commanding us to steward, work, and harvest the earth. That care, labor, and curation means we must return down the mountain, indeed must stoop so low as to get ourselves dirty in the soil.

Pastors properly conclude their sermons with takeaways, with applications, which are simply paths back down the mountain and into the earthly chaos. They are principles etched on tablets that we are not to break in rage at what we rediscover of our earthly nature. They are instead for us to carry into the chaos out of which to make God’s rich order, the marriage of heaven and earth within our souls, as God’s Son did in his own complete humanity and perfect divinity. We follow the Son who came down the mountain. Jesus did so not to sequester himself in an abbey or hide within palace walls but to get his sandals dirty, healing, teaching, and feeding the masses. Let’s climb the mountain often to see and hear God. But let’s pay just as much attention to what we carry in descent on our God-given mission.

Rest? Who are we kidding? That’s the attitude that today’s fast-paced culture conveys. Resting is impossible, isn’t it? Or if not impossible, then immoral, right? And we’ll miss out on something if we rest, won’t we? The culture, together with our own crazy habits, seem to drive us ever forward at breakneck speed. But rest, we know, is essential. Endless restlessness builds nothing but toxic stress. If we never stop, we soon find ourselves racing through life with a weariness that robs us of joy. No amount of adventure or accomplishment can satisfy when the body has no rest. Rest doesn’t just recharge batteries for the next go round. Rest lends depth and meaning to life.

The scriptures give even deeper meaning to rest. We all know that God worked six days before spending the seventh day in rest. But did you know that we are still in his seventh day of rest? God finished his creation work on the seventh day. He didn’t start over again. And Christ finished his greatest work of redemption on the cross. We already live in God’s kingdom, his Eden garden opened to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paradoxically, while we dwell already in his garden, we also work in his will while awaiting the earth’s full restoration. Come to Christ, all whom life burdens and wearies. He shepherds us into laying down in green and restful pastures. Walk in his ancient paths, where you will find rest.

And so while we have work and many other things to do, we trust that God has already accomplished what we most need. He has rescued us from the brokenness of endless wearying activity. We trust God to provide, while we walk confidently, assuredly, and restfully with him. We do not race through life, building our own castles. We instead lean on him, marveling at what he is constructing in these temples we call bodies. We then move with grace and creativity, in his vitality, doing his work, proclaiming the glory of his Son. Work, indeed all holy activity, means resting and reveling in him.

Who do we think we are? Moderns generally judge the ancients harshly. Not just modern scholars but everyone, wise or not, generally presumes the ancients to be simple-minded, fearful, superstitious people. We venerate our modern intellectuals, peculiar thinkers like Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, and Foucault, while disparaging and ignoring the wisdom of the ancients like the apostle Paul and the church fathers Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Papias, Ephrem, Dionysius, Maximus, Gregory, Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, and, later, Aquinas. Again, who do we think we are?

Try reading these incredible saintly figures from long ago. Their writings aren’t extraordinary simply because of their sacrifices, things like being burned at the stake. Their writings are extraordinary because of the insights they reveal. Their writings show how deeply they were reaching into the bottomless well of Christ’s water of life. The challenge that their writings present is not that they exhibit any simple-minded or backward superstition. Instead, we are too simple, distracted, and depleted to even comprehend the depth and richness of their thoughts. Again, who do we think we are?

We moderns tend to read backward, treating the latest interpretations, especially those of our own generation, as the deepest, richest, most accurate, and most valuable. We watch and listen to the latest preacher tickling the algorithm and topping the charts of the tech company profiting from our curiosity, as if that preacher were opening new worlds of wisdom–until that preacher’s fall from grace, when we promptly turn to the next latest thing. In doing so, we treat the latter as superior to the earlier, reading backward from today into the ancient scriptures, while skipping over their earliest interpreters.

To gain the most from scripture, though, we should instead be reading forward from the ancient texts. Instead of treating the latest interpretation as the most valuable and reliable, though untested by time, we should treat the earliest writings, those of the Old Testament and New Testament, then those of the church fathers and councils, as the more reliable. Scholars and preachers today have many good things to share with us. Yet Christ’s waters of life, pouring out at his crucifixion-marked feet, have run incredibly deep from the earliest times. The deepest waters are those of the scriptures themselves, depths that the earliest writers plumbed for us without modern distractions. Know who we are. Read forward, not backward.

We have two ways of looking at the current time when it feels so easy to have lost faith in so many institutions. Think of it. In the past few years, we have witnessed an accelerating pattern of public disclosures suggesting serious breaches of trust in, you name it but the candidates surely include, media, medicine, public health, science, education, higher education, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, the military, the judiciary, the legislature, governments at all levels, financial institutions, regulators, corporations, big pharma, politicians and political parties, and yes, even preachers, denominations, and churches. Each of us has our favorite culprits. And many of us have our favorite theories as to the cause for our widespread and growing mistrust. Yet no matter the culprit or cause, something feels seriously amiss with our public institutions, those systems and entities that once held us together and protected us but now seem instead to threaten us and pull us apart.

Again, we have two ways of looking at this disintegration in public trust. One is to decry the culprits while working hard to set them right. Vote someone out of office, and run for office yourself. Refuse to buy a certain company’s product, and start a replacement business yourself. Send your children to a different school, or school them at home yourself. And make sure your preacher, teacher, and church are holding fast to God’s word apart from a crazed world rather than contributing to a crazed world’s distortions. Those approaches are all good, necessary, worthwhile, and right.

Yet Christians can have another, broader way of countenancing an accelerating pattern of deterioration in public institutions. Cultures, societies, institutions, and ages all mature, ripen, and rot, requiring renewal. God’s story is one of frequent regeneration. God isn’t going to wash the lands again with Noah’s flood. His rainbow promises us that. But the flooding of public institutions with so many and such egregious disruptions, exposed so resolutely for such private and public condemnation, augurs an impending regeneration. God doesn’t abandon us. Yet he regenerates through the flood. Thus, even as you work diligently for needed institutional reforms wherever your heart, skill, and discernment guide you, look up and forward with hope and resoluteness. Now is an especially exciting time of anticipation. It may be hard getting there, but a new day will soon come.

God forms and blesses us in ways we hardly realize. The very fact that we can intelligibly perceive things around us is itself a miracle of astounding proportion. We have little clue of the source, other than our maker God, of our consciousness, that strange ability we carry to conceive of ourselves while considering things around us. But never mind the mystery of consciousness. Consider the mystery of our making meaning from those things we see, hear, and feel, constantly bombarding our senses.

Your field of vision alone contains an infinity of colors, forms, and details, out of which you somehow choose particular patterns to identify as worthy of your attention. And it’s not like you really choose. You aren’t generally thinking about looking at this or that, except perhaps when you’ve lost your keys. Instead, your eyes just generally focus here or there, seizing on this pattern or that pattern for your mind to then identify as a certain kind of object with a certain kind of useful purpose. And somehow, your eyes and mind together choose to identify worthy objects, like an onrushing car or an approaching friend. Cognitive scientists call it “relevance realization,” and its physiological operation is mostly a mystery even to them.

But relevance realization is no mystery to God. Quite the contrary: God imbued us each with this mystery of attention and prioritization. Where should we look, and for what should we look? To whom should we listen, and for what should we listen? What should we touch, and for what should we feel? Most of the time, we don’t ask ourselves these questions. We just somehow move effectively through our world, navigating largely without thought.

Yet some of the time, we get to make a choice. We get to consider this instead of that, look up instead of down, and turn right instead of left. Incredibly, mysteriously, God has made us active agents in this wholly immersive world. We don’t just react, like lizards with hardly a brain. We instead think, reflect, and choose. Indeed, God has given us not just a rational, reasoning brain but also a heart to desire and value this over that. God has formed and blessed us in ways that we may attend to him, desire him, and pursue him if we wish to enjoy his presence. God has even given us his identity, offering to adopt us into his family, becoming like him. Thank God for relevance realization. And may God give us the heart to desire him.