Feed Your Soul

            My phone is a distraction.  I’m not sure (just kidding, I’m pretty sure) that a lot of people feel the same.  Facebook, Instagram, etc., are seemingly omnipresent in our day to day lives.  I feel an almost palpable sense of “static” or fuzziness in my mind and heart when I indulge too much in this form of media.  It’s like I previously had a sharp knife to cut through life’s obstacles with and discern God's voice.  But as I see and hear the opinions, images, and memes of other people, my own sense of being present in the moment wavers and thins out.  I think by nature human beings are “reflectors” of what reality we see.  We see someone intriguing and captivating and we long to be as powerful, beautiful, and happy as they seem to us.  We aren’t sure if what we are seeing is real or not, frankly reality is something we try to escape when we throw ourselves into media (not just social but all types), and ignore for a moment the pain, boredom, the feelings of inadequacy and futility.  Sometimes we just want to see what other people we know are up to.  Often enough the friends and acquaintances on social media are wanting you to think they are living their “best life”, whatever that means anymore.  In the real-world gravity of Covid-19, financial struggle, and global instability, “best life” means very little.  I’m not trying to be a bummer, it’s something that I can’t un-see. 

            In this struggling and turbulent age we have to ask ourselves, “what is reality, really?” and “what do I seek?”  When we turn the gaze at other people’s lives back to ourselves, we are obliged to ask these deeper questions.  As followers of Jesus we have a calling and responsibility to ask these things in the mirror of our own reflection before we begin to turn the gaze back towards the world around us.  “What am I doing? What am I seeking?”, these questions become so much more tangible.  My soul feels starved with these questions, and in this realization I ask, “who am I really?”.  Like the social media I indulge in, I long to project to myself and others that I have it all under control and have it all figured out.  But beyond this veneer lies a heart that is scared, scarred, and looking for identity.  When we come to this reflection, the American dream is just that, a dream, a phantom that lies to us.  With every success shown in film, internet, and TV there are millions of broken lives, shattered mirrors who do not reflect this image at all.

            And yes, “image” is a key concept.  We who follow The Christ have always believed we were created to bear someone’s image: the good, and loving God who made us.  We derive our identity from our Father.  We are individuals with unique talents, passions, and processes, but derive the essential element of our humanity from the beautiful One whom we come from.  This is in sharp contrast to the nihilism and pessimism of our culture.  Where the deconstruction of beauty is all around us and even in us.  We lost the focus on beauty as coming from transcendence and objectivity in a Creator/Redeemer, to one of subjectivity and projection.  We project that we have all the answers and we honestly don’t.  This causes a rootlessness in us and deep confusion.  The anxiety that results from it creates chasms of despair at the heart of popular culture.  The modern idols and statues of success, beauty, and power create a people grasping desperately to be gods but fall into depression as we fall backwards off Olympus. Further and further we tumble down.

            That is why these moments of sober reflection are so crucial.  In the face of reality, we realize that we need to commune with the beautiful One.  In this we have a security and hope that the anxiety of our culture cannot flatten.  Where there is subjectivity, it is the unwavering objective beauty in the crucified Lord that holds the tensions and despair of life and holds them in His hands, redeeming them.  Chaos is not the master here; chaos and uncertainty are defeated by the crucified heart that is turning ashes and destruction into trees of hope and forests of righteousness.  It isn’t a type of hope that parallels to modernity.  It is an expectant hope that embraces tension between the poles of “redeemed” and “still redeeming”.  In other words; we; our world, our future have been redeemed but are still in the process of redemption.  We can see in part but anticipate a total vision of a restored humanity.  A whole heart that is completely healed, and the reign of our good God.  

            As we wait, let us feed our souls with what gives life.  Let us drink from the cup that does not run out.  Let us encounter Jesus and see His beauty. 

Feed your soul.

“earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.” – Psalm 63:1