Confluence and convergence

When I order something online, I usually have it shipped to my work address so that it will get to me during business hours.  My friend Jared does the same thing at the Sprint store where he works.

ROB: Hey, Jared, there's a package here for you.

JARED: Cool, go ahead and open it for me.

ROB: (Opens package).

JARED: What is it?

ROB: ... It's the gayest thing I've ever seen in my life.

JARED: Sweet, my Harry Potter DVDs came!

And while it may seem ridiculous to the uninitiated, I'm right there with Jared.  I know, I've already geeked out about Harry Potter in one post, but bear with me.  As I near the end of the saga and see how neatly everything fits together, from the beginning of the first book all the way through the series, I'm really in awe.  So many themes and subplots beautifully woven together to make me laugh, put a smile on my face, touch my heart and lift my spirits.

I write this not to praise the books or the author, but to share just the most recent example of something that has caused me to pause and admire the capacity of the human mind and spirit to wonder, to be creative and to appreciate beauty.  In stories or in life, when I see courage expressed, when I see someone humble himself, when I see the sacrificial love of a parent for a child, when something makes me laugh really, really hard: I see how fearfully and wonderfully made that each of us is.  We are agents; we are transcendent; "the blush of our anger could bury the sun."1

Like the romantic hero in Chapter 1 of Chesterton's Orthodoxy ("I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before."  "Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it."2), I want to chart my own course; I want to do the discovering.  I want to leave a mark on the world that only I could have made, in a way that only I can.  My curiosity burns when I ponder just how God might use the unique confluence and convergence of my talents, interests, desires, and opportunities.

A few years ago when I read Galatians in the Bible, the significance of Saul's "Damascus Road experience" became very clear to me.  He didn't obtain the gospel he began to preach by learning about it from Jesus' twelve apostles; he obtained it from the resurrected Christ when he revealed himself to Saul on the road.  Yet when he meets up with the apostles three years later, his message fits with theirs!  Because it's from the same Jesus.  Saul becomes Paul after he meets Christ, and devotes his life to spreading the gospel he received.

The Gospel, while I cannot plumb its depths, is simple.  Everyone understands love, and that better than all the "subtlety" and "nuance" I continue to grapple with.  I will hold out to make an impact in a way that only I can.  But I will also hold out the gospel of love itself to my corner of the dying world, that God may awaken their unique confluence and convergence of talents, interests, desires and opportunities.


1 "Levels of Light", Sleeping At Last
2 Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton