This is the first blog I have ever written. Honestly, it's new to me. I have to admit I'm old enough to feel as if the world is now undergoing changes more rapidly than I can absorb them, and blogs are one of them. Alvin Toffler once coined the phrase "future shock" to explain this: new situations roll at us faster than we can tolerate them, like ocean waves that hit us and knock us down before we've managed to regain our balance from the last one.
I don't want to knock change, though. It has always been the order of things. Nature doesn't permit anything except maybe rocks to stay as they are, and I'm pretty sure a geologist would say even rocks mutate a lot faster than the human eye can tell. We would be dead if we didn't change. Everything would.
Some people say that at least God doesn't change. I'm not so sure. I think I'm actually on the side of the theologians who believe that even God is affected by change—that he/she keeps ingesting the changes in creation occurring in everything, that the divine being triumphs over all stasis, sameness, and boredom.
Maybe, at the deepest level, that's what Jesus' death and resurrection were really about. The Jesus of Nazareth everybody knew was cruelly and deliberately killed, snuffed out, annihilated. But within the greater being of God he came out on the other side of death with vaster power, scope and presence than he would ever have attained without dying. It's staggering to think about how many lives he has touched and transformed, how many churches have grown up in his wake, how totally different the world is because he came among us, died, and was raised again.
It was all about divine change—the alchemy of God that transmutes the basest elements of human experience into unimaginably transcendent reality. And now, by the grace of God, even blogs are caught up in that same reality. It's truly amazing, isn't it? |