nobody said it was easy

Nothing is ever as easy as it seems.

Life. Living is easy, right? Breathe in. Breathe out. You need not even think about it: your body does it for you. Those delicate, spider-webbing neural pathways in your brain, programmed down to the finest intricacies of the art of Living, keep your ventricles and atria pulsing in rhythm to the heartbeat that they create.

But nothing is ever as easy as it seems. 

Because even if you breathe, even if you possess health and vitality, even if you go so far as to be beautiful, there is so much more to living than just existing. There are choices and plans, relationships and community; there is pain and anger and hatred, purpose and failure. There are joy and sorrow and tears that are of both and neither, everything and nothing. And after you have endured all of them, when you have been shredded to pieces by pain and bound back together by hope a thousand times over, when you have had all of the tears wrung out of you yet somehow seem to have more left; when you have slept through hundreds of sunrises and every ounce of breathing your body has ever possessed has been wracked, wrung, stretched, spent... you die.

Death is simple, really. Life ends. The body wears out. The neurons grow tired. The laces that bind and balance the chemicals in the brain become fragile and tear. Bones grow brittle and bodies grow frail. Disease creeps in through the weak points, then ravages the life behind the barricades. It ends. Fades. Is over. The clockwork of us winds down to a stop, and as simply as that, we end. 

But nothing is ever as easy as it seems. 

Because there is more than a body, more than dust hollowed into a cavern of vessels and organs, that lives and breathes for a little while and then shall be dust again. There is a Soul. A Soul, crafted with more care than the dust that became the First Adam, a soul made in the image of the one who created it, made to love and choose and pursue and desire. Even that was simple, in the beginning. It was Fellowship—the creation of a second Living Thing, to be and experience and love. A thing to find precious and be found precious by. We were made for joy.

But nothing is ever as easy as it seems.

Because what was made for joy turned itself to treachery. That pure and enduring construction, the Soul, bent itself to reach for the Living Death of lovelessness, and achieved it, scarring itself forever. Twisted with a deformity that would ever after be passed on through the flesh, the most precious and pure of creation became the most fallen. And in doing so, that which was ever only meant to be held by its Creator was thrust away from His arms, the nature of Perfection abhorring the nature of Imperfection by law of its existence. For one to embrace the other would be to erase their definitions, and both would become Imperfection, equally tainted and fallen.
 
The solution would have been easy—to destroy. To uncreate what was created, to paint the canvas over in black and start afresh. But he didn't. 

Becausepraise God—nothing is ever as easy as it seems. 

To counter the Curse, the Cross. 

Nothing is ever as easy as it seems. 

To quiet the Groaning, the Grave. 

Nothing is ever as easy as it seems. 

To restore the Rejected, the Resurrection.
  
Nothing is ever as easy as it seems. 

To gather the Lost, Love.
 

because, by some queer contortion of reason
(you will find most people call it Grace)
nothing is ever as easy as it seems.

1 missives:

Lilly said...

Grace. Sweet Grace.

This was beautiful! I love this part;

Because—praise God—nothing is ever as easy as it seems.

To counter the Curse, the Cross.

Nothing is ever as easy as it seems.

To quiet the Groaning, the Grave.

Nothing is ever as easy as it seems.

To restore the Rejected, the Resurrection.

Nothing is ever as easy as it seems.

To gather the Lost, Love.

because, by some queer contortion of reason
(you will find most people call it Grace)
nothing is ever as easy as it seems.