the life that is truly life

“The life that is truly life”

Do good, be rich in good deeds, be generous and willing to share. In this way you will lay up treasure for yourselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that you may take hold of the life that is truly life. (1 Timothy 6:17-19)

LIVE LIKE WE MEAN IT: This weekend marks exactly one year since I moved my blog over to WordPress. When I got this site up and running I decided it was time to begin writing around a common theme. The result, I believe, has been a sharpening of my focus.

Bottom line, I want people to know what to expect when they show up at “The Life-Charged Life.”

RE-RUN: Here is the original “life-charged life” post from May of 2011, where I thought out loud about how I wanted this blog to sound. It began with the following question….

Is there an over-arching theme to my writing (I think so)? What – if anything – is the common thread that runs through my words?

It turns out there’s a lot if content that I come back to time and again; here’s a partial list:

• The Greatest Story ever Told, and most especially how our lives can be a part of that story.
• My family, simply sharing some of the day-to-day anecdotes that get my attention.
• I talk a lot about my role as “The Preacher’s Husband.”
• Related to the clergy-hubby stuff are observations about the living community of faith at First Presbyterian Church of Brandon.
• Another sub-set of that important theme is my ministry to men.
• Sometimes I write about the world scene, events from the news that capture my imagination.
• Then there’s my work, the books and the travel and the speaking engagements…

But – and you can probably tell that I’m thinking out loud here – if I had to shove all this inside one pithy category that might actually spark some kind of a national conversation (something that might move this blog from a curiosity my friends read and into a search-engine tour-de-force), then I wonder what that might be?

It comes down to this: I’m interested in life. I’m particularly interested in how we engage life in the everyday “get up and do it again” rhythm from day-to-day. And I’m most interested in how we can lift that experience from the mundane and the mediocre and into what is possible.

• I’m talking about the end of half measures. No more “good enough,” or “I guess that will do.”

This is how I put it reads in “GET REAL”:

Mediocrity is a sad curse that threatens to suck the lifeblood from many people, people who might otherwise pursue lives that actually mean something beyond the day in, day out of survival. We all know people who constantly regress to the unremarkable. We may sometimes be tempted to follow that path ourselves. It is too easy to fall into patterns of below average, develop a comfortable rhythm there, and consequently live out our lives without ever pushing any kind of envelope at all. (p 119)

My category, it appears, is “The Life that is truly life”. That’s a concept from Paul’s letter to Timothy in the New Testament. It’s a handle I can live with.

- DEREK