A Deeper Reflection

As previously noted, it is easy to get practical advice on handling the personal concerns that come and go throughout our lives. But we still haven’t answered the question: Who do we trust when it comes to the consequences of how you live your life and wherein lies your joy in life? That general question has entered our minds throughout the ages. I was seeking an answer to it when I asked my dad, “Why are you a Christian?” He replied, “When you can show me a better way to live, I’ll consider that.”[1]

My particular phrasing of that general question would not have made sense before the followers of Jesus started calling themselves Christians about a decade after the painful and frightening birthing of his expressed spirit on the cross. However we have always been seeking advice in how to handle our personal concerns and, largely unconsciously, seeking guidance in how address our vital concerns for life, disclosure, worthiness, relationships, brokenness, and death.

Our spiritual pathfinders have long known this to be true. Though their embodied spirits are no longer with us, the understandings of their expressed spirits fill our scriptures.  These scriptures are vast. They were first written down in the languages and vernaculars of the times and cultures of their early followers who lived tens of centuries ago. Their understandings until translated into our vernacular. The tome, World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts  edited by Andrew Wilson, gives an engaging glimpse of the both the vast complexity of those scriptures and the commonality in their understandings.

[1] Mark A. Johnson, Encountering God (Oviedo: EA Books Publishing, 2015), 2. ****