Man is that a subjective phrase. It can mean something somewhat positive if someone is pushing oneself to the edge to achieve something bigger or greater, pushing a frontier. It can also mean something negative, like one is barely keeping it together. I find myself living in both definitions of that phrase. I am trying to live the positive, but in my zeal, I find myself pushing the negative side with the volume of activity and development I am trying to engage in.
More than that I am trying to be defined by He who I was created by. Now when I say that I am not referring to my parents, but rather to God. The real mystical thing about God is this. He has revealed himself through history through two things:
1. The Bible
2. Experience
Really the Bible just points us to God and allows us to experience Him more fully or at all. That doesn’t de-value the Bible. It actually makes it all the more important. It becomes the Litmus test against which experience is measured.
So back to the ragged edge. I find myself testing myself against the Bible right now as I prepare talks that I am giving to others out of the book of Luke (from the Bible). Right now I am looking at John the Baptist. This guy was different, eccentric really, and living on the ragged edge. Outdoorsman extraordinaire. In some ways he wasn’t so much counter-culture as he was a man of integrity. Much of what he was telling people was the stuff that supposedly his audience embraced. He was calling them to put up or shut-up. Now that’s not very politically correct. In fact, when the leader of the nation he was living within confronted him, he called him on the carpet as well, and well, lost his head over it.
So what is the bottom line. Life is far from an X-game, it is far from an experiment for me. I feel like I know exactly what I should be doing, and I am trying to figure out how to do more of it. I really believe that no matter what we do in life, Pastor, Executive, Tradesman, we need to be defined He who created us: God, and He who brought us the message of a life with God the way we know it today: Jesus. The ragged edge I need to be living on is the one where I am defined by my devotion to telling everybody about this reality. I am feeling pretty smooth right now.
