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True life ...

Thursday, Oct 25, 2012. Talking about truth, we need to stay with the term “true life” for a little bit. What is it, that determines “true life”? Is it a reasonable concept to talk about it at all? I want to talk a little bit about daily needs, frustration and how it links into true life …

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Daily frustrations and true life …

How are you dealing with all those daily frustrations of your job and of your family? Perhaps you say it is all fine? I guess then you are a little too much in marketing mode. Life can be frustrating, and as far as I can judge all of us have these frustrating moments, where we just want to stop operating. Does this have to do with true life? The term refers to a counter point, to a different experience, to something which can help us and can change our situation.

We first need to be a little more concrete with the frustration. Some of us are frustrated in our job. Perhaps we put a lot of effort into a big grant application or into an offer for a customer, and we just missed it. Now we are there with nothing, no grant or no contract, and all our effort seems like a big waste of time. We ask ourselves: was that worth doing it? Where is life here, not just waste of life? Where is true life, which is exciting and motivating and where effort gets at least some reward?

I know these moments quite well. If you set yourself challenging targets, you will also loose sometimes. If you never loose, you did not go for challenging things and then everything is boring anyway. Risk is a necessary part of life. But I also found that I need what I would call “true life” in all of this. I need a life full of purpose, full of friendship, full of reward which is given on various levels of my existence. And just from a practical point of view I have learned to carry out things in a way that they are rewarding independently of the outcome of a particular application or task.

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Life with him …

For me, faith plays a central role for true life. God is there, and he is giving me purpose, friendship and reward all the time. When he is guiding my life, he helps me to see the purpose in the tasks, and to find the value in the different activities. He is guiding and leading me, showing me why and how he wants me to do things (indeed a good part of this is taking place in bible study and prayer sessions). And his power is large enough to generate something useful out of every single step I do. That is just the contrary of the frustration experience. I do a step, following him, and he makes something useful out of it. Isn't that great? It is more than great, it is fantastic, brilliant, breathtaking …!

True life is life with him. If he is there, things are different! That is a simple statement, but it is what the bible tells us all the time, and what is the coherent experience of my own faith life over more than two decades. True life then has a very dynamic component. He is changing things, day by day. He is giving input into our life, is creative, opens possibilities which we could never dream of or think about. God, the God who created nature and all the fantastic life forms we know, is still as powerful and creative as he used to be. True life here becomes creative life, a life full of new possibilities … (Roland Potthast) ... more texts

jn_en_2012_10_25.txt · Last modified: 2017/06/18 16:48 by 127.0.0.1