OSWALD AND ME

Sixteen days ago, I recommenced reading Oswald Chambers’s book, My Utmost For His Highest. It seems to be one of those books that, while it may be tough reading the first time, improves considerably with subsequent ones. It’s one of those books you can have on the shelf for years and then, dipping back into it, discover many treasures in it which you didn’t see years before.
Today, the first sentence which really struck home with me was, “For instance, the Beatitudes seem merely mild and beautiful precepts for all unworldly and useless people, but of very little practical use in the stern workaday world in which we live.”
‘Unworldly and useless people’. Is there anyone reading this post who hasn’t, at least intermittently, felt that way about themselves? I know that’s how I feel about myself too often for comfort. How many of us feel like real worldly success stories, really? Then again, God seems to have a habit of picking up those who are seen and/or see themselves as worldly failures and teaching them to ‘aim’ for Him and His Heaven as opposed to earth. C.S. Lewis made the observation that, “Aim at Heaven and you’ll have Earth ‘thrown in’; aim at Earth and you will get neither.” He uses caring for one’s health as an analogy on page 104 of Mere Christianity, ISBN 0–02–086940–1.
Allow me to add a caveat here: we do need to stay focused on Heaven; there is always the danger of making the winning of Earth the end rather than a side matter.
Chambers’s devotion touches on this with the next sentences. “We soon find, however, that the Beatitudes contain the dynamite of the Holy Ghost. They explode….when the circumstances of our lives cause them to do so. When the Holy Spirit brings to our remembrance one of these Beatitudes…..we have to decide whether we will accept the tremendous spiritual upheaval that will be produced in our circumstances if we obey His words. That is how the Spirit of God works.”
For some reason, this passage reminds me that, for all of us, our spiritual lives — that is, what we believe in and act on — is both backdrop to, and the ultimate aspiration of, our lives. If anyone thinks otherwise, feel free to say so, but include the ‘why’ of your belief, always. According to St. John, Jesus said the same thing: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”
This is what God does, always. He takes the washouts, the failures, the smallest and the most peripheral among us and infuses them with the dynamite of His Holy Spirit. Does not the very Statue of Liberty have a poem identifying all of us, or our ancestors, as having been just that once on a time? When peoples and countries who begin in that way forget such beginnings, they forget who they really are and they also forget God. Nothing I can think of testifies to how many of us have forgotten both God and our abject startings with more eloquence than what we are doing right now on our southern border. There are other such testimonies, to be sure, but that particular one sounds loudest in my ears right now.
To shut a door against genocidal killers is not the same as to bar the door against abject refuge-seekers, so no comparison of this to Israel’s wall is warranted. In this country, the latter is what we now permit our government to do and which we’d better change right smartly if we want to avoid the fate of forgetful and declining empires. Before a people, or peoples, who we see as inconsequential prove themselves very much otherwise.