A Meditation

In reading Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.’s Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be : A Breviary of Sin I came across this passage that I keep going back, reading and meditating on again. You can read it more in context here, but I’m posting to share, and to make sure I can easily access it in the future.

“A spiritually whole person longs in certain classic ways. She longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ and Christlikeness, for the dynamite of the Holy Spirit and spiritual maturity. She longs for spiritual hygiene itself—and not just as a consolation prize when she cannot be rich and envied. She longs for other human beings; she wants to love them and to be loved by them. She hungers for social justice. She longs for nature, for its beauties and graces, for the sheer particularity of the way of a squirrel with a nut. As we might expect, her longings dim from season to season. When they do, she longs to long again.

She is a person of character consistency, a person who rings true wherever you tap her. She keeps promises. She weeps with those who weep and, perhaps more impressively, rejoices with those who rejoice. She does all these things in ways that express her own personality and culture but also a general ‘mind of Christ’ that is cross-culturally unmistakable.

Her motives include faith — a quiet confidence in God and in the mercies of God that radiate from the self-giving work of Jesus Christ. She knows God is good; she also feels assured that God is good to her. Her faith secures her against that ceaseless oscillations of pride and despair familiar to every human being who has taken refuge in the cave of her own being and tried there to bury all her insecurities under a mound of achievements. When her faith slips, she retains faith enough to believe that the Spriti of God, whose presence is her renewable resource, will one day secure her faith again.

Since faith fastens on to God’s benevolence, it yields gratitude, which in turn sponsors risk taking in the service of others. Grateful people want to let themselves go; faithful people dare to do it. People tether to God by faith can let themselves go because they know they will get themselves back.”