Lively

This has been a continual tension in my family since I was too small to articulate it. My father’s family – all good British pioneer stock – saw that ‘idle hands are the devil’s workshop’ and tried never to rest until they broke. My mother’s family – Pennsylvanians from the time of the Mayflower, with various other farming stock grafted in – learned to work and play hard, but in equal measure, as the seasons allowed. Trying to reconcile those takes some doing, but I’m slowly learning not to confuse ‘tired’ or ‘ill’ with ‘lazy’, while working hard when the work needs doing.

By coincidence, I came to this post just after listening to the Killers song “Be Still.”

WJT, after a while, it stops being coincidence.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=godwink

I haven’t listened to the Killers’ “Be Still” in a while, but I have been thinking of it for several days. I have listened to the new album, Pressure Machine, a few times since it came out Friday. The last track, “The Getting By,” ends with:

But maybe it’s the stuff it takes
To get up in the morning
And put another day in, son
That keeps you standing where you should
So put another day in, son
And hold on till the getting’s good

That significance of getting up every morning and putting another day in comes up in several Killers songs, and this one kept reminding me of “Be Still”‘s “Rise up with the sun / And labor ’til the work is done.” A paradoxical (and true) way of being still.

I have recently been studying the purpose of prophecy. It seems to be to warn, to help us prepare, to teach and encourage.

But it is not to tell us everything that will happen. It purposely doesn’t tell us enough to either hinder our agency or opportunities for us to struggle or figure things out for ourselves. It isn’t to tell us everything – it is to guide us, and to enhance our agency.

Lively is proactively and energeticly exercising our agency.