Thursday, March 01, 2012

Michael's Musings

I got an email from my sister, Rebecca, a couple of days ago.  She wrote to say that Dad was in the hospital.  I contacted the hospital (2AM their time) and was able to talk to the night nurse.  Dad is not doing well.  His 94 years are really catching up with him. 

I began doing some thinking about life, the aging process and death.  For the last ten years or so, the media has been producing a constant mantra saying that death is a natural part of life.  At the same time, the purveyors of this message are fighting like wild men and wild women to not get old.  Therein lies the rub.  If death is so natural, why is this generation paranoid about getting old?  Shouldn't aging be as "natural" as death?  Considering the billions upon billions spent on anti-aging creams, cosmetic surgery, anti-balding cures, hair dyes and etc, etc, etc, there is no way to reconcile the contradiction of aging being bad but death being natural.  If death is truly "natural", aging should also be "natural."  Instead, we are treated to near-hysteria as the world is locked in a perpetual search for the fountain of youth.

As I have been reflecting on this, I am wondering if the real answer lies elsewhere.  According to Genesis 2, we have been created in the image of God.  It was a short time after we were created that we "fell" into sin.  But what happened to the image of God?  Did it suddenly disappear also?  And what exactly was this "image of God?"

As I have considered these questions, I go back to CS Lewis.  Towards the end of the Magician's Nephew, Digory brought back to our world an apple for his ailing mother.  After she had eaten the apple and recovered from her illness, he planted the seeds from the apple in the backyard.  In the story, it said that over the years there were occasions when this tree swayed back and forth on its own accord as if it was swaying in a violent, unseen wind storm.  It was as if the tree never forgot that it was from a different world. 

I think that this is true of us as well.  Somewhere within us, we truthfully find aging revolting and death as something that is actually "unnatural" in spite of being bombarded by the media with a contrary message.  This image of God strives against the fallen world around us.  There must be some latent seeds of immortality within each of us that rightfully is repulsed by the concept of death and, to a certain extent, aging.  Within each of us, is a yearning for immortality because the image of God, buried deep within each of us, will not let us forget that we are immortal beings just like our heavenly Father who made us and placed his image within us.

I was thinking, too, of something written by Philip Yancey.  How is it that an infinite, creative God could be content creating a daffodill over and over and over and never being bored with His creation?  The problem, according to Yancey, is not God; it is us.  Somewhere within a child's nature there is something of God's nature.  You can read a child a favorite story and immediately the child will say, "read it again."  You have already read it; you do not want to read it again, but the child is insistent.  The problem is not the child; it is us.  The child enjoys something in common with God - an unbounding sense of newness and an untainted purity, but we have sinned and grown old...

I do not have anything more to pass along concerning my Father at this time, but your prayers are appreciated as we walk these next weeks and months out.

-Michael

Choosing Joy!
©2012 D.R.G.
~Coram Deo~
Living all of life before the face of God...