In gen­eral, peo­ple expend their great­est ener­gies to acquire the weak­est forms of power. Lying is weak. Manip­u­la­tion is short-lived. Brute force is tem­po­rary. In the end, spir­i­tu­al­ity over­comes all of them. For those of us watch­ing the world from the side­lines, it is some­where between sad and pathetic to see so much human energy wasted on the end­less cycles of social and polit­i­cal con­flict. Yesterday’s win­ners are today’s losers and the reverse will be true sooner or later. Illu­sions are pow­er­ful. Temp­ta­tions are con­stant. The game is the same. The pat­tern is a circle.

Wis­dom works every time, but it is slower than imme­di­ate force. Given time, it watches all neg­a­tiv­ity crum­ble and all cyn­i­cism land on the trash heap. Scan­dals are quickly yesterday’s news. Noth­ing is dis­cov­ered in them but human ten­den­cies toward fail­ure and car­nal weak­nesses. There is noth­ing new about that and there never will be. The grave ends all power strug­gles that have to do with this world. Ulti­mately, worldly power is very short-sighted.

The Bible is a power book, but it is writ­ten in sur­pris­ing con­trasts. Israel is saved by mirac­u­lous inter­ven­tions and not by its size or abil­i­ties. Jesus turned the power approaches of his world upside down, by show­ing that all of the mil­i­tary and polit­i­cal forces mus­tered against him could not erase his life or end his influ­ence. He did not fight back. He did some­thing more pow­er­ful: he tran­scended it all. That is the power of spirit over mat­ter. It is not whether one wins or loses in the imme­di­ate but what approach is taken for the long run. Trust in God, the ulti­mate good, over all forms of tem­po­rary evil, is the less obvi­ous power in the uni­verse but the final vic­tory over all struggles.

Jesus said that the road to life is “nar­row” in that it is hard to sense and rel­a­tively few find it. The rest sim­ply repeat the power strug­gles that began with Cain. Win­ning is tran­scend­ing. It is step­ping aside from the march of the herd. To win is to see it from God’s point of view — that to reign is to serve. Bet­ter a poor car­pen­ter on track with the ulti­mate than a king lost in a world of tem­po­rary power and pseudo-control. The win­ners of the game are the ones not play­ing it.

Para­dox is not a place; it is real­ity. A para­dox is some­thing that appears con­tra­dic­tory but is nev­er­the­less true. Light acts as a par­ti­cle and a wave. It can­not be both, but it is both. Para­doxes have extremes that appear to can­cel each other out, but in bal­ance reveal greater truths behind them. Jesus taught in para­dox­i­cal state­ments: “If you lose your life you will find it.” How can you lose some­thing and find it at the same time? The truth behind the para­dox is one you have prob­a­bly already expe­ri­enced: When you give your­self to a greater pur­pose or cause, your life becomes more meaningful.

One of my favorite para­dox say­ings is: “I do not plan to live long, but I am liv­ing for­ever.” It is unrea­son­able to plan to live for more than about one-hundred years here, but it is totally rea­son­able to live in a way that opens life’s pos­si­bil­i­ties infi­nitely. Win­ston Churchill is still around, so is John Kennedy, and St. Fran­cis of Assisi. Their lives were not equal, but their actions still echo in fame or by sheer his­tor­i­cal impact. Every life, no mat­ter how lim­ited, con­tin­ues to echo in some man­ner. We all speak from the grave and beyond it.

In the mean time, I live the con­tin­ual para­doxes of being both a saint and a sin­ner. I give myself away to redis­cover myself. Mil­lions of my body’s cells die each day so I can live. We live and die at the same time. I save money by giv­ing it away. I for­give the unfor­give­able and dis­cover pop­u­lar­ity through anonymity. By tak­ing my life not so seri­ously, I am able to look at it seri­ously and make changes that really mat­ter. The great­est truths are not seen straight-on but out of the cor­ner of one’s inner eye. Some­times I see most by turn­ing a blind eye to what every­one else is watching.

The clas­sic the­ol­ogy that Jesus is both God and man screams para­dox. How can the unlim­ited be expressed or lived in the lim­ited? That can­not be, but appar­ently was and is. Then again, how can some being only a few DNA seg­ments from a mon­key build space­ships? How can it build com­put­ers and do heart surg­eries being eighty-plus per­cent water? Cul­tures that reject the para­dox par­a­digm limit them­selves and do not progress well. Some of them even self-destruct. Life is para­dox­i­cal. About the time you mas­ter one stage of it, that stage is over. Some of the youngest peo­ple I know are old. What I am say­ing makes no sense until you quit try­ing to make sense of it.

This is the day after a big national elec­tion. Being a stu­dent of human behav­ior, I am sen­si­tive how social events affect me, as well as oth­ers. No mat­ter how detached I may try to be, I still feel the national mood. We are some­how mys­ti­cally all con­nected. The world seems to stop and hold its breath for elec­tions, the Super Bowl, Christ­mas, Thanks­giv­ing, Fourth of July, and New Year’s. The day after one of those events every­one breathes a deep sigh of relief. These are “marker” days. We look for­ward to them but are glad when they pass. We go back to our jobs and start look­ing for the next marker upon which to hang our hopes and fears.

I also call these days after “cul­tural hang­over” days (and there are many types of hang­overs: infor­ma­tion over­load, enter­tain­ment over­load, vaca­tion over­load, work-a-holism rebounds, etc.). Peo­ple look for­ward to an event. They invest a lot of emo­tions. When the event is over, there is empti­ness and some sense of vic­tory, defeat, or just sim­ple relief (like when you are dri­ving away from your in-laws house after Thanks­giv­ing). Today every­one needs two aspirin and a lot of water. The day after has come. Life goes on as normal.

Per­son­ally, I min­i­mize all hol­i­days and grand social phe­nom­e­non. I like step­ping aside and detach­ing into my own lit­tle world of spir­i­tual aware­ness. These spe­cial days are not unim­por­tant, but I have dis­cov­ered that I get more out of them by not get­ting too much into them. I pre­fer to observe. Last year I kept up with the Super Bowl on my com­puter, while I worked. My team won. I cheered to myself. I did not have to come back to the office on Mon­day morn­ing feel­ing tired or behind. Being “in the world but not of the world” is one of my favorite Chris­t­ian perspectives.

You prob­a­bly will not find me in a street riot after a ball­game or protest­ing or pro­mot­ing any­thing that requires vio­lence (ver­bal or oth­er­wise) to get a point across. I need not recruit oth­ers to feel as I feel or think as I think; I dis­trust all mob actions — regard­less of the cause. Oth­ers do not have to hold my opin­ions for me to be secure. It is the day after, and I have already for­got­ten the day before. I have a feel­ing that my life is about some­thing else.

Life is largely telling our­selves about our­selves. Most peo­ple do not know that; they get too busy with the details of wak­ing life and ignore the inner para­bles they tell them­selves all night long about what it is to be alive and what it is to be them. Few pay enough atten­tion to their dreams to remem­ber them, and most write their dreams off as silly noc­tur­nal actions of the mind. By doing so, they miss a won­der­ful inner mir­ror edu­ca­tion about themselves.

Dream lan­guage is sym­bol and para­ble lan­guage. For exam­ple: two themes that repeat them­selves in my life are sym­bol­ized by floods and going to school. Lately, these two themes have become inten­si­fied. Floods usu­ally rep­re­sent impend­ing chaos and extreme demands. I have often told peo­ple lately that I am “drown­ing at my desk.” Word cues in the day often become image-stories in our sleep. The floods are excit­ing and take place in child­hood geo­graphic areas, but end the same way: they threaten to over­whelm me, but they sub­side at my feet. Yes, I have a lot to do. No, I do not feel inad­e­quate to the tasks or sit­u­a­tions. Chaos has a way of back­ing away in the pres­ence of my faith in God and con­fi­dence in myself.

Life is a school. That too has always been a pow­er­ful theme in my life. Thirty-five plus years of edu­ca­tion from early child­hood to mid-adulthood have also been cou­pled with a decade of teach­ing in var­i­ous col­leges, plus even more learn­ing and teach­ing in my pri­mary task as minister/counselor. Life for me is learn­ing, learn­ing, learn­ing, and teach­ing, teach­ing, teach­ing. Con­se­quently, my dreams are often cast in class­room sce­nar­ios. In those class­rooms, I am very sel­dom the teacher; I am gen­er­ally the stu­dent. To this day, I am an avid stu­dent of life — and I hope you are too.

In a world in which oth­ers try to tell us who we are, it pays to stop and pon­der what we think of our­selves. We mir­ror our­selves in our wak­ing actions and in the all night dra­mas of our dreams. The key ques­tion has to do with whether or not we are pay­ing atten­tion: Are you learn­ing who you are? You are made in the image of God. Life’s les­son is mostly you. Pay atten­tion. Do not reject what is in the mir­ror, for it is divine.