A few thoughts

Aptly named I hope, because this shouldn't be an extremely long post.

This past week I had occasion to hear of a young girl who had a child out of wedlock. Now her mother is a grandmother at a very young age. This started me thinking on a rather lengthy and possibly random chain:
This older woman is a grandmother physically. She may or may not have wanted something like this but physically she is. Very similar to this, sometimes people may become grandparents in name and in actuality not be. Something of this nature requires more than just a physical relation.

Very similarly (and this ties back to the marriage study on Wednesday nights), the relationship between a husband and a wife is not purely physical. There cannot be merely a legal agreement or a contract that the two share the house together. That is not what a husband and a wife are supposed to be. For a male and a female to call themselves husband and wife merely on legal terms would be a complete mockery of God's institution of marriage. It goes so much deeper than that! It is indeed a picture of Christ's love for the Church, of God's love for His people, and how that ought to be reciprocated by our people. Christ gave of Himself freely and wholly. His disciples certainly didn't deserve it, they were just previously arguing as to who should be the greatest! Yet Christ never complained but gave Himself. How great a love was this!

It cannot be in name only, there is a bond much deeper than this, to a spiritual level. Oh I know this is not news to anyone but I've been rather saddened by the relations I've seen around.

Just this past week a former classmate of mine was talking to me when he got a text message. He said it was from his girlfriend in China where she was on a study abroad trip and she wanted to know if he could talk to her. He said that he was at school and they didn't have webcams there so he couldn't, besides that, he wanted to get something to eat. He was complaining about it to me and my first reaction was that it sure seemed that he was focusing on himself. True, they are not a husband and wife but there appears to be very little foundation for that to ever occur! My thought was that she was in China, where quite possibly there were very little people of her own language to interact with. His thought was that she was bugging him all the time and he wanted to just live his own life. Relationships require sacrifice and commitment, selfishness only destroys because selfishness is not about the other person, it's about me, and "me" is not part of "us."

Another thought I had this morning. I was thinking of the passage that talks about the wheat that must die before it can come to life and applying that to our spiritual lives. It struck me as quite amazing:

Our earthly bodies, as Henry says, continue to die as soon as we are born. Yet the amazing thing is that our spirits continue to grow in strength. I had this mental poetry of our flesh, or earthly man growing weaker and weaker with the ravages of time. He struggles against the spirit but in the end he must give way and die. The spirit grows stronger through this time, like a bird that is breaking free of its bonds and then soars heavenward. At last, the prison of the earthly man, the flesh, crumbles and the spirit is free and not only that, but because Christ has conquered death, our flesh is made renewed because it has been redeemed. Even our very bodies were purchased by Christ. Oh yes, we grow weaker but for the Christian, it only means that our flesh (and I use that in the biblical sense) is losing the battle! We shall be more than conquerors.

And not to say that the flesh is bad, I'm not proposing gnosticism by any means, but it does afford a spiritual allegory or picture.

That is all.