Broken

The human is an odd creature. I use "creature" here intentionally. We are not a cosmic accident, the product of chance, some highly evolved, superior animal. We are creatures -- creations of the Creator. We are perhaps His highest creation, but we are nonetheless creations. Which makes us odd.

We live our lives here on Earth for a limited time. Everyone is worried about the percentages of people dying of COVID, but in the end the death rate from being born is 100%. We are all here for a limited time. Yet we live like we'll live forever. We take unnecessary risks and do things that will neither serve our time on this planet well nor, especially, our time in eternity.

We are creatures put here by God for God's purposes, but we live as if it is "all about me." It's about my pleasure, my comfort, my best interests, my personal preferences.

We are offered eternity by an eternal God with all the wonders and delights that God's eternity will provide, but we're disdainful of that and prefer the immediate, the here and now, the short-lived for people who are short-lived. So instead of an eternal view on, say, sexual relations, we prefer the immediate, short term satisfaction and ignore God. God offers us involvement in His infinite and essential work and we prefer to pursue the finite and unimportant work of making money, gathering fame and power, and the rest of the world's sandcastles. God offers us love, joy, and peace which we say we really want, but substitute lust, momentary happiness, and a few minutes of quiet instead.

At the core, we are not the center of the universe. We are creations of the Center of the universe. It is not about us; it's about Him. We are not the protagonists in this story; we're the fillers. We're the characters that populate the story around the main players -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amazingly, God loves the fillers. In fact, He offers to adopt the fillers. But we miss the point even after being adopted and still think it's all about us.

We're not merely odd because we are so shortsighted that we can't see the truth about ourselves. We're odd because we miss so very much that stands in front of us, offered by the hand of God, right there for the taking. All we have to do is give up our self-righteous, self-aggrandizing position and accept His gifts of grace, mercy, love, adoption, relationship, eternal life, and so much more. It's not like we're clamoring in this life for the good stuff. We're finding pleasures in the trash heap while we're offered treasures in His presence. We are ... broken, out of order, malfunctioning. He can fix that.