This thought popped into my mind when I awoke this morning. A quite chilling one, at that. Strange, I know. It seemed that I had a dream of dying repeatedly but without anyone caring. And even as I write this, I realize that it’s not the selfish interpretation I had at first.
(Isn’t it strange how an “original” thought can reveal even more meaning to the thinker as one ponders it?)
If you’ll bear with me, I’ll explain.
I’ve begun reading again, this time Agatha Christie. Last night I finished a novel she wrote under her pen name of Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring. It wasn’t quite the romance novel I had assumed it to be, which was a relief. I don’t really go for those kind of drippy, woeful love stories that always have the same story line.
This novel was quite the opposite. It was the tale of a woman remarkably and uncomfortably like myself: A woman who filled her time with the mundane but prided herself on her propriety and her blessings. Although happily married with three grown children, she was utterly alone, although she herself doesn’t know this. Throughout the novel, the reader can tell that Joan is disconnected from whomever she comes into contact. However, while stranded at a train station in the desert on her journey home, she has nothing to occupy her mind and is soon forced to come to this conclusion after much reluctant contemplation. It shakes her to her very core. It’s at that moment that the train arrives to bear her home. She had determined to be a different person, but the further the train takes her from that redemption in the desert, the more convinced she is that it was all a mirage, a dream, a heat fantasy.
Once home, she changes nothing.
I think this is perhaps one of the scariest choices a person can make: To be faced with reality, to have it stare you in the face and dare you to change, and yet to be complacent and continue in the same dream-like naivete.
I feel as though I do this far too often, but lately I’ve been feeling convicted, which may have been the inspiration for the aforementioned thought: How many times do I have to die before you’ll take notice? For, you see, this thought is not about my languishing, my human struggles. I think it may be what Christ thinks every time I am faced with the choice to change and choose to default to going on my merry carnal way.
Every time I take the easy way out, I am merely driving the nails deeper into Christ’s hands. Yet, I am shamefully amazed at how often I choose this. The terrible and frightening beauty of our humanity is that we always have a choice. Only I can decide how to live my life. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get carried away with this intoxicating power and live in a selfish, delirious stupor, ignorant of how I represent my Saviour.
Choose.
Choice.
Decision.
Decide.
How will I live today?
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