You are alive! The very fact that you are reading this blog means you are a living, breathing human being. I think we all too often view our existence as life + X and miss the quite astonishing fact that before all of our cultural accessorizing, we are alive. We get so distracted acquiring things that we think will make us happy that we fail to see that we are already complete. Life becomes about the X and not the augend to which it is added. We need to remember that we are well constructed homes patterned after a unique image of God architectural plan, so it is not the landscaping, paint job, or toys in the garage that give us value, but rather the way we have been knit together in our mother’s wombs. Ultimately, the only place where we will find security from the storms of life is in our fearfully and wonderfully made human dwellings, and not on our perfectly manicured lawns hugging plastic pink flamingoes.  While Simon and Sharon may entertain us by trying to find that 0ne-in-a-million human being with the X Factor, the only Judge that really matters offers the ✝ factor to anyone willing to confess their human mediocrity. Christianity is Good News because it is not concerned with finding fame in this life but rather setting us apart for the next.

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence …

Where is the life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 96.

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