Life, Discontent, Fullness

I was talking with someone last night. She said she has a hard time believing that all this god-stuff isn't just something made up to make people happy. I won't go into what I told her last night but I want to use her as an example of not reaching quite far enough. She is reaching out for life and love but she was stopping at doubt and discontent.

We all have cracks and distress in our goblets. But that doesn't mean it's time to pour out the wine, nope it just means it's time to pour up to the brim.
We need more...more sweet hugs from babies, more little girls on the beach who smile up at me seeing my smile and say, "Hi!" as if we were friends forever! We need to dance more and sing more, paint and see, and Love more.

When hopelessness comes, when doubts, and oppression sneak in or roar in, we need to live. Let discontent spur us on to seek more strength to fight, more of God in us. God has an unlimited bounty for those who seek Him. He can fill us to overflowing despite the cracks and shortcomings of our being. He can give us moments in life, in worship, in dreams, fill us with possibilities of wonder and the incredible joy of His Presence. God's desire is to lift us up as his own little children and fill us with the amazing Ecstasy of Oneness with Him.

This is what we were made for, to abide with the Eternal, with the Author of Life and Love. That Life, that true Eternal life is knowing God, being One with His Fullness. Finding that what we called life, what we called love, was a small step towards this unspeakable, universal, Love. There can be no unbelief in His Presence, once found there is fullness that floods our hearts with Delight.


My friend looked at me with confusion as a spoke to her of Delight. She wanted facts, I spoke to her of a Person. The facts are there, they can be found and digested, and forgotten when the next time of doubting and discontent comes. But this Love, this amazing Presence, this Joy that exceeds all earthly ecstasy, fills the heart and overflows with life and love to others. That is what I urged her to seek.



Here's a sermon from George MacDonald that I sort of paraphrased to write this blog. I wanted to really understand it and make it my own. C. S. Lewis said he never wrote anything that he didn't take something from MacDonald....




We are vessels of life, not yet full of the wine of life; where the wine does not reach, there the clay cracks, and aches, and is distressed. Who would therefore pour out the wine that is there, instead of filling to the brim with more wine! All the being must partake of essential being; life must be assisted, upheld, comforted, every part, with life. Life is the law, the food, the necessity of life. Life is everything.Let us in all the troubles of life remember-that our one lack is life-that what we need is more life-more of the life-making presence in us making us more, and more largely, alive. When most oppressed, when most weary of life, as our unbelief would phrase it, let us bethink ourselves that it is in truth the inroad and presence of death we are weary of. When most inclined to sleep, let us rouse ourselves to live. Of all things let us avoid the false refuge of a weary collapse, a hopeless yielding to things as they are. It is the life in us that is discontented; we need more of what is discontented, not more of the cause of its discontent. Discontent, I repeat, is the life in us that has not enough of itself, is not enough to itself, so calls for more. He has the victory who, in the midst of pain and weakness, cries out, not for death, not for the repose of forgetfulness, but for strength to fight; for more power, more consciousness of being, more God in him.If we will but let our God and Father work his will with us, there can be no limit to his enlargement of our existence, to the flood of life with which he will overflow our consciousness. We have no conception of what life might be, of how vast the consciousness of which we could be made capable. Many can recall some moment in which life seemed richer and fuller than ever before; to some, such moments arrive mostly in dreams: shall soul, awake or asleep, infold a bliss greater than its Life, the living God, can seal, perpetuate, enlarge? Can the human twilight of a dream be capable of generating or holding a fuller life than the morning of divine activity? Surely God could at any moment give to a soul, by a word to that soul, by breathing afresh into the secret caves of its being, a sense of life before which the most exultant ecstasy of earthly triumph would pale to ashes! If ever sunlit, sail-crowded sea, under blue heaven flecked with wind-chased white, filled your soul as with a new gift of life, think what sense of existence must be yours, if he whose thought has but fringed its garment with the outburst of such a show, take his abode with you, and while thinking the gladness of a God inside your being, let you know and feel that he is carrying you as a father in his bosom!There is nothing for man worthy to be called life, but the life eternal-God's life, that is, after his degree shared by the man made to be eternal also. For he is in the image of God, intended to partake of the life of the most high, to be alive as he is alive. Of this life the outcome and the light is righteousness, love, grace, truth; but the life itself is a thing that will not be defined, even as God will not be defined.This life, this eternal life, consists for man in absolute oneness with God and all divine modes of being, oneness with every phase of right and harmony. It consists in a love as deep as it is universal, as conscious as it is unspeakable; a love that can no more be reasoned about than life itself-a love whose presence is its all-sufficing proof and justification, whose absence is an annihilating defect: he who has it not cannot believe in it: how should death believe in life, though all the birds of God are singing jubilant over the empty tomb! The delight of such a being, the splendour of a consciousness rushing from the wide open doors of the fountain of existence, the ecstasy of the spiritual sense into which the surge of life essential, immortal, increate, flows in silent fullness from the heart of hearts-what may it, what must it not be, in the great day of God and the individual soul!