A Reminder

The king reflected and said, “Is this not Babylon the great, which I myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?”  Daniel 4:30  NASB 1995

I myself – A man should not write down his thoughts until he has no time left to complete them.  Before that time, every word that is inscribed in a text becomes a fossilized memory of some prior state of mind, a relic of a progression toward the end.  It is subject to criticism, evaluation, interpretation, speculation, and most importantly, misunderstanding.  Why?  Because the end determines the beginning; until a man reaches the end he does not know what his beginning was really about.

The only way to avoid this inevitable consequence of writing something is to keep it alive—by speaking, by dialogue. Conversation is the constant resurrection of  a man’s thought.  It is the revision of what he means via interaction in community.  Writing is soliloquy.  It anticipates an unknown audience.  It does not engage a living audience.  Dialogue adjusts the past to the present.  A man discovers what he meant in conversation with another.

Perhaps this is the difference between the letters of Paul and the teaching of Yeshua.  Paul wrote, and as a result we have two thousand years of debate about what he meant.  Yeshua wrote nothing.  He taught.  He spoke.  Of course, we interpret what others wrote about what he said, but when he said what he said to his disciples they were engaged in a living conversation.  They understood him in the presence of others, not as verses in a text but as dialogue about life.

I have written thousands of words.  Every one of them must be revised according to the end of my story.  They are merely stepping stones on a journey somewhere to a destination I do not know yet.  The real meaning of those words can’t be known until the end provides the lens to see them clearly.  The meaning of my words will be apparent when I have no more time left to write them.  In the meanwhile, everything is a process; everything is becoming the end.  You, my faithful readers, will understand what I write after I am gone, and no more changes can be made.  The meaning of a life isn’t known until it’s over.

Topical Index: life, death, meaning, Daniel 4:30