The Fourth of Three Thoughts on Significance: a Brief Conclusion to Issue 001 of Thinking Aloud
For Issue 001 of my occasional Journal, Thinking Aloud, I've drawn together three previous posts written at different times, with different things on my mind, but along a similar theme: Significance.
In the first I was thinking about this:
The situations that surround us often tend to be left over from the situations that came before.
That means that what we're faced with — in this moment — may actually be about us finally having to deal with the very thing that held us back all along.
That's different from an entirely new scenario, isn't it?
Just when you think you're entering a new scenario — bam.
It's the old one.
In a way.
A different camera angle on it, maybe.
Or, like one of those old platform games where you celebrate the appearance of the exit door at last, only to find you've entered another room, where the pizzas are already flying at you, and you have to catch them in your net while leaping over radioactive snowballs.
Now, as someone who draws a lot from Biblical reference points, my mind goes naturally to that long story of Moses and the people in the wilderness, leaving Egypt, walking toward a promise that not even Moses seems to arrive at in the end.
Why did that get me thinking about stockbrokers in a lift?
Who knows.
But it gave me a way to recreate how we tend to get fixated on things we don't have. And in fact the references to cheese, pastrami and tomatoes could just as easily have been the meat and cucumbers that the weary desert travellers were craving.
You see, relatable!
Stockpiling manna that went mouldy after a few days.
You see what I did there? (Sandwiches being kept for a kind of corridor-based black market trade that quickly proves unworkable.)
Mostly what intrigued me in this metaphor was how we so easily find ourselves hankering after things from the past as if they were heaven, and things we can't have as the only thing that would make us happy.
In the second post I wondered about who gets to say what counts.
And this got me thinking about what happens when you hit a major crisis, and systems at scale step in to offer help.
Those systems (welfare, for example) have to pick where to start.
In your crisis you might be wondering about your longterm future, or even the meaning of life. But the NHS probably won't start with your spiritual wellbeing. Although, it may draw on things like mindfulness — but by making it more about measurable outcomes from stopping and taking your mind off things, rather than the inexpressible depths that cannot be measured, and ultimate meaning…
Yet — again, as someone who draws from the Bible — I can't help wondering, along the lines of CS Lewis (in his famous megaphone reference), whether times of crisis are times for noticing something about ourselves that usually gets hidden.
Things like —
what we cling to,
what we're running from,
what we're blocking our eyes and ears to avoid.
In the wilderness, the people leaving Egypt had uncanny benefits, even though they felt like they had nothing.
Shoes that didn't wear out. Manna from heaven.
Guidance in the form of fire and cloud — now, that would be useful!
So finally, the third post.
This one was about guidance — or rather, about signs. I look at the word 'significance' and see the word 'sign' right there at the beginning.
And it got me thinking about what a sign is and isn't.
How much evidence is enough.
And what would proof even look like.
When people in the Old Testament needed a sign, their promise was given to them in the shape of a coming Messiah.
When the Messiah was there staring them in the face, they STILL asked for a sign. And He (Jesus) gave them what I think must be the litmus test for anyone staring at a sign and still not seeing it.
Jonah.
A story about a prophet who God allowed to make a mistake, and to turn around, and still to bear the grudge of someone who refuses to see what — Who — he (surely) knew was there in front of him.
At some level.
I think so.
Three posts. All told, what am I saying?
Perhaps this:
Life feels dependent on strategies for staying significant and satisfied, when we view it all as — survival.
But viewed as a gift, from Significance Himself,
what it feels like in the moment is part of the wake-up call.
Speaking deeply to us.
Asking us to notice.
What do you think?
