waiting to live

The daily reading from Ransomed Heart today was entitled Eternal Life. When I stop my madness, pull over and watch the world go by, I realize that life is not only what I want...it's all I want.

But what is life?

And what is eternal life?

And what does it mean to cross over from death to life, to be saved from death?

Christianity hasn't been very useful here. I say that because whoever it is in the back room making up the talking points has decided that how people need to view eternal life is this. It's "going to heaven when you die". Another image is "not going to hell when you die". Salvation then is being ear-marked for heaven when you die, wherever that is. Nothing more. When someone tells you "I got saved" this is what they mean. It's what we were all told happens to us and how to view what happens to us.

It reminds me of the bulls my dad and I used to castrate, vaccinate, spray for ticks, brand, and pierce their ears with these plastic tags. But what are the (former) bulls supposed to do then? Stand around, eat grass, get fat, and wait for the slaughter? Apparently so.

There has to be more to life than this.

What Dallas Willard wrote in The Divine Conspiracy is intriguing to me.

Jesus offers himself as God’s doorway into the life that is truly life. Confidence in him leads us today, as in other times, to become his apprentices in eternal living. “Those who come through me will be safe,” he said. “They will go in and out and find all they need. I have come into their world that they may have life, and life to the limit.”

Could it be that salvation is being made an apprentice, rather than a fatted calf?

And what's all the business about going in and going out? I thought the goal was to get in and stay in.

Apparently, when you forfeit "eternal living" for "eternal life" you have to figure out what to do in the mean time.

I'm looking for a Way of Life that is not about learning where the fences are, not about learning how the grass really isn't greener on the other side, not about learning how to be fat and happy, not about learning how to convince other people to come into the safe pasture where all the rest of us saved creatures wait for our death so we can finally get started doing something besides waiting, not about learning how to keep from thinking about what's on the other side of the fence, not about learning how to figure out where the invisible fences within the fence are, not about learning how to argue about fence lines (invisible or otherwise) with other creatures who are outside or inside one or more fences.

Unfortunately, the pickins are slim. Judging from the sermons, magazines, Bible studies, and letters thanking me in advance for being a "friend of the ministry", I'm going to have to look somewhere besides Christianity.

I'm tired of waiting. Very tired.

I have to find the other way Jesus talked about.