Dave Brisbin 7.12.26
If God were sitting next to you right now and you could ask one question, what would it be?

Puts a pretty fine point on it, yes? To stop the ever-running assembly line of questions forming in your mind and pick just one… For adults, the questions were predictable: Why do you allow suffering? Don’t all religions lead to you? How can I trust the bible? If you’re really there, why don’t you prove it? Children’s responses were predictably less heady: How are you doing? Are you happy? And…

If God was sitting next to me, I’d just like to give him a hug.

Gotta love kids. That last one really points in the right direction. Adults have to face the fact that the most important questions in life don’t have answers. Only the experience of asking. Life isn’t answered and resolved rationally. Only lived. We can keep asking questions, but using our minds to navigate a spiritual journey is like bringing a knife to a gunfight…the mind is not the vehicle for such a journey.

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Even so, there is one question Jesus is asked that rises above the rest. What must I do to obtain eternal life? Two thousand years ago, yesterday, today, isn’t that the question? Is what we see around us all there is to life or is there more? All other questions are just variants of this one, but Jesus doesn’t answer except to say, if you’ve done all you can do to be certain and want to fill that place that is still lacking, then sell all you think you know and come give me a hug.

We think of eternal life as a long time, life going on forever, an eternal future granted by God in exchange for believing the right things. But all of time is just one moment, eternally. And in Aramaic, eternal life is not life that goes on eternally, but life that is eternally alive—new, fresh, fulfilling, complete, abundant. Not then. Now. Not there. Here.

Life only becomes eternal the moment we become present to the life that is now.

We are not saved by the mind. By thinking, our minds separate us from this moment, from eternal life. To obtain that life is to stop thinking and start hugging. The hugging, embracing now as just enough is the eternal aliveness we seek.

 

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