Sponge Paint This Page with Your Heart and Brain

[Tracing the Seams]

Let the thoughts, emotions, and entrails flow through your fingertips across the keys, so that we may all gain further insight into the complexities of this life. For we have each received life (existence) without our consent, and now we find ourselves within a contained expanse. The expanse between life and death measured by "time". How should this "time" be spent or invested? What shall we deem worthy of our "time" and why? Are not all pursuits, although often vastly different in method, made with the goal to reach a place of further completion or satisfaction? And doesn't the chase and anticipation usually end in disappointment and discontentment even if the goal is achieved? Why do we choose these cyclical pursuits? Please ponder and share your thoughts. I appreciate any and all feedback.

[Kolbitar]

::Let the thoughts, emotions, and entrails flow through your fingertips across the keys, so that we may all gain further insight into the complexities of this life. For we have each received life (existence) without our consent, and now we find ourselves within a contained expanse. The expanse between life and death measured by "time". How should this "time" be spent or invested? What shall we deem worthy of our "time" and why? Are not all pursuits, although often vastly different in method, made with the goal to reach a place of further completion or satisfaction? And doesn't the chase and anticipation usually end in disappointment and discontentment even if the goal is achieved? Why do we choose these cyclical pursuits? Please ponder and share your thoughts. I appreciate any and all feedback.

Those are beautifully asked questions; the kind where you really don't know where to start answering, and once you do you feel, who am I to answer, can I live up to that billing?

I don't think I'll do justice to your questions but I'll nonetheless try to answer from my experience...

Life and death and time and human experience all subtly and silently imply to us the need for eternity: the eternal now of being, bliss, awareness; of God.

"God," the Thou to my I, "our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee". God the "I Am". God the eternal Beauty, God the "wilder [B]eauty than this world supplies". God the blessed trinity in whom love is eternal. God the self expression to man in Jesus Christ, the way, the truth and the life; the self expression with whom, in whom and by whom we are made partakers of divine life, are made adopted sons and daughters of the Most High God, and in this way granted Beatitude...

Beatitude, Felicity; "man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." But, as Thomas Traherne said (which I make into a generalized observation), "There was never a [professor] that did professly teach Felicity, though that be the mistress of all other sciences... We studied to inform our knowledge, but knew not for what end we studied. And for lack of aiming at a certain end, we erred in the manner."

We're born into this world naturally choosing ourselves as god over the One, true God. We do not walk with God as our first parents did. Our mother and father lost our natural beatitude through sin, allowed by God to bring about the possibility of a new and greater Beatitude. Evil thus arises from a deprivation, the absence of God from our midst. And this, I think, can only make sense in an eternity in which we'd say "I'd do it all (all our suffering) over and over again, for indeed Paul was right when he said (Romans 8:18), 'For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.'"

Jesse