Thinking well
Have you ever had one of those days when nothing can go wrong? Rare, I know, but hang in there ... maybe you'll know what I'm on about soon. Perhaps you've mixed up the tablespoon and teaspoon measures, but found that the chocolate cake was just that much better with a little more rum. Or washed a red shirt with your whites and found that pink actually really suits you (it doesn't suit me - I've tried). Or arrived an hour later than you thought the event started to find you'd mixed up the times and you are now perfectly on time? All these things started out badly, but ended well. You've been looking backwards through time to find that what you'd originally thought terrible has now, somehow, changed into something not quite so terrible after all.
I think that this is what redemption is all about. It is a process that takes us - you and flawed little me - as its starting materials, and changes us. Redemption is worked into us, and out of us, and through us until one day, as we look back on the journey we can see that we too have been changed for the better. It's not a bad process, as they go, but takes something quite outside ourselves to accomplish. After all, all those examples mentioned earlier were coincidental (and hypothetical - I really don't suit pink!), but they do serve to make my point. But what if there was a way to take all situations - all things, now and forever - and find a way to work in (and out and through) them for good too? No more coincidences! This is a part of the Great Big Redemption Plan! (dum dum duuuum).
The Great Big Redemption Plan is not a new idea, and it's certainly not my idea. Perhaps I'd better start by saying clearly what it's not. The Great Big Redemption Plan is not a way of saying that everything will just work out if you hang in there. Or wait long enough. Or work hard enough. Or smile enough. No, for the Great Big Redemption Plan to be set in motion, Something had to Happen. (I'm turning into Winnie the Pooh with all these capital letters!). Its beginning was active. An act to set this retrospective prospective and everyotherspective plan in motion. I will now digress for a moment.
My flatmates and I went out for dinner the other night, and we were talking about the Passion of the Christ movie. I've seen it twice now, and on both occasions found it horrible, stunning, awesome, and moving in all kinds of ways. How's that for a situation where, when you're in it, is hard to see how good can come from it? But the last minute or so of that particular movie is the whole entire point. They are that Something Happening. They are the beginning of the Great Big Redemption Plan.
So there is one important difference between those days that work out for the best, and the Great Big Redemption plan. On those days when it turns out ok, most of the time it's a coincidence. The final article - that pink shirt, the rummy chocolate cake - they are not what they were intended to be, and only by coincidence did they turn out ok. The pink shirt really would have been better white, but pink is not as terrible as you'd originally though. And this is where the difference comes. Imagine a voucher that you've been given - you can take it to the shop, and redeem it. You redeem it by swapping the promise (the voucher) for the real thing (a new pair of shoes). And the new pair of shoes are then the real thing - they are what the voucher is intended to be, and by redeeming the voucher, it becomes what it was intended to be.
Do you see the connection now? The Great Big Redemption Plan is not intended to make life lovely for us - its meant to make us into what we're meant to be. That's what redemption is. We are like a promise, like a voucher that is, by Something Happening, able to be transformed into what we are meant to be. No coincidence at all - a divine plan that is being worked into and out of and all throughout our lives. Redemption. The end of the story. A happy happy ending. So don't let the small things (those red socks...) get you down. Even they can be transformed and redeemed. And certainly don't let the big things get you down either. You - all of you (and each of you!), and every moment of your life can be redeemed as well. Just a thought. :-) K.
- Posted by flyingkiwi on 18/07/2007.
- flyingkiwi's site
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