The Christian does not seek their own private opinion or interpretation. The Christian is out for the truth, out to find the way things really are. We will not be satisfied with anything less than absolute reality breaking into our existent living and penetrating to the deepest fiber of our being. We are not pragmatists: our life is not built around practical rules and codes of conduct. It is built around a relationship to the Truth, Truth in the shape of a person. It is not a sterile, static, or monotonous affair done on Sundays with pale faces and forced piety. It is not an abstract metaphysical enumeration, the whipping boy of academics. It is an active and adventurous endeavor, full of vitality that weaves its way through the stuff of life. We do not follow the voice in our heads, nor the private interpretation of our subjective experiences. We see and do all things in the light of God's truth, truth revealed to us both in the general and special sense. The half-guesses of our subjectivity are satisfied, moment by moment, by God's objectivity.
All of this truth and guidance are not meant for intellectual enlargement; we are not here to become sagacious gurus. The truth and light of God comes to us for one purpose only: so that we may be lead to Him. "Let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacle." God calls us (and those we bring with us) to communion with Him and nothing less. Every moment of existence, whether in joy or sorrow, is not to make us more clever or amiable while we struggle to survive. Rather, it is to draw us closer to Him by making everything that He said about Himself real in actual experience. This is the Christian life: the reality of God flooding every aspect of existence until there is nothing else that we (or others) can see except God incarnate all around us and in us.
-Jon Vowell (c) 2010
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