Picture: Rich Cook, istockphoto.com "I think the word imagine has implications of distance. The distance between the present and the desired - imagined - outcome. Within this distance lies a journey. In order to begin this journey successfully, I need to operate within the paradigm that until I meet God, I will never actually arrive at a destination. I must continue to travel along this restless life."

31st May, 2004
ADAM KELSALL

"If humankind could have known God without the world, God would never have created the world"

                                           - Meister Eckhart

Imagine.

I think the word imagine has implications of distance. The distance between the present and the desired - imagined - outcome. Within this distance lies a journey. In order to begin this journey successfully, I need to operate within the paradigm that until I meet God, I will never actually arrive at a destination. I must continue to travel along this restless life.

Like a train trip, life takes me to many different stations along the way. Stations where I experience the gut-wrenching joy of love. I learn that love isn’t about me and my needs, it's actually about everyone else and everyone else’s needs. Love is about releasing people to have the freedom to do everything it is I fear they will do and loving them even more when they do it. Like a mother giving her child away on the first day of school or Jesus dying on a cross, loving me so much that He leaves it up to me whether I choose his way or not.

Some experience the station of depression. Having to travel through dark parts of their existence, they wonder if God is playing hide and seek with them. Sometimes His light shines with the clarity of a long-deliberated decision; other times there is no light at all.

Some only know the thinnest threads of humanity. Food, shelter and water are like gold. The lack is the only thing there is lots of. Others walk in wealth: consuming is life; dollars bring smiles, status, identity, power, toys for the boys, pearls for the girls.

Some live in the station of fear: fear of spaces, fear of love, fear of life, fear of death, fear of loss or gain, routine or randomness, terrorism, anxiety, knowledge.

So how do I do this God? How do I keep journeying through life’s misunderstandings, misdirections and miscalculations? How do I sustain myself when life’s little needles prick me in an effort to slowly deflate my soul?

As I journey, I need to look at the small beauties you have created and webbed together in a pattern so intricate and complex that it cannot be explained apart from you.

Beauty that lies in the uniqueness of hearts that beat at a rhythm exclusive of anyone else’s, and when that heart beat is gone, no-one's heart will ever beat the same again. This uniqueness reflects the love you have for every single cell of every single one of our beings.

Laughter ringing with the truth of connection and community that facilitates a transaction of oneness between two people or one hundred people. Laughter reminds us of the joy that we know when you walk beside us. We walk holding hands with you and you teach us to reach out and take hold of others. They experience a physical connection with us and a spiritual connection through us to you and we become a family under one father.

Sunrises and sunsets that are a vivid canvas of precision brushstrokes that spoil us in their seeming purposelessness. Yet remind us this day is new and different and at the end of the day that it will never be lived again.

Through this we can know that you are a forgiving God. A God that when we wrong you and say sorry, the wrong is gone like air that can never be breathed again.

I am so thankful to you, God, for revealing the most intricate and personal details of your character through the creation of this world.

Thank you to friends who showed me the beauty in the simplicity of our external world, and unknowingly, took me on a journey deep inside.