Weekly Meditation

Meditation for Sunday, June 27

By Ron White

Galatians 2:19-21

What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work. So I quit being a "law person" so that I could be God's person. Christ's life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine," but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.

Paul demonstrates extreme humility in this brief passage, a selflessness that exceeds any I have ever experienced. Raised by rule-enforcers, by parents and a church whose strictness might have quenched the spirit I have inside, I don’t completely understand how I remained a strongly spiritual person. God did that work for me… in spite of my rebellion against both church and parentage. That was ALL GOD, not Ron White. As a result, I have lived a lifelong spiritual journey just as Paul and myriad others - and perhaps even you – have. This is a journey bound up with…and impossible without… deep faith, a faith journey outside the normal bounds of the physical world we live in, a faith journey which quantum science is finally providing a foundation for and is even decoding.

God and faith have no physical time constraints. The quantum scientific principle is that nothing is “timebound,” frozen in past, present, or future. The quantum law – of everything being everywhere all at once – supports that belief. The Bible teaches that God foreknew me before I was born. Birth is part of a sequence. But, that sequence is not locked in time. God sees past-present-future all at once. That is how God knows what “will” happen “before” it does. God, after all, is the Creator of it all…whatever or whoever God is…and that is the question we may not know until we “see” God face-to-face, as scripture describes it.

When Paul says that he doesn’t live his own life, but rather lives by faith, he is supported by another quantum principle: what we understand to be physical is an illusion. Interestingly, ancient eastern religious thought at around the time of Christ taught that everything is “maya” or illusion. Maya, by the way, also means “body of water” or “sea.” Genesis refers to the parting of the “waters,” not necessarily a physical reference. Remember that I Corinthians 13 says “for now I see in a glass darkly (or dimly)?” Have you ever looked through a microscope at that which cannot be seen by the naked eye? By faith, you accept that the lenses have been refined to a state which allows you to see the magnification you can see. The same is true of the telescope. By faith in science, we believe we know that we can see the light (events) on a far distant planet or a star that happened millions of years ago (there we go again trying to put a time-frame on an event). While it may have happened on that planet/star all those millennia ago in our usual understanding of time, we also understand that it is happening right now, in the present where we are experiencing it. So, when did it happen? Then? Or now? Both? How about observers throughout the universe between that star and us? When did it happen for them? You might be interested to know that what happens to an electron here happens to an electron there right now. That is trillions of light years from here (the time it takes to travel there at 186,000miles per second).

Just as Paul said, I no longer need to try to prove myself to God - though I foolishly thought I did at one time. God had faith in me before I was born. So, how’s your faith doing when you compare yourself to Paul? You can take him off of a pedestal. He was a regular person who understood some things about living faith that you and I are only just beginning to grasp. You can live outside the lines, too, just as Paul did. All you have to do is choose to believe God is there for you, wants only the best for you, and will support you through it all, no matter how dark the times may become.