The Greatest is Yet to Come

 Watch video for "Dream", starring Yasiin Bey and the words of Muhammed Ali.

Muhammed Ali isn't the most prideful person in existence. He was just the most honest about his pride. We are all full of that pride, and modern culture tells us to glorify it. But there's a truth wrapped up in the lie of pride that actually is pretty beautiful. I think this video shows a hint of that truth. Dream. It's wistful and anxious. It asks for more. It makes you smile with anticipation. Draw the line there. Realize your best is a reflection of God's workmanship in you. Glorify Him, not yourself. Then you don't just win in some ring. You win understanding and peace beyond that same understanding. You win hope and renewal. You win contentment and rest. You may also win trophies and financial gain, but that won't be what brings you the most pleasure. You win relationships. When you forfeit yourself, you win everything. When you make it about yourself, regardless of what the world sees, you only gain enough satisfaction to last you til the next battle. When you look up and look out, you win on every level.

 

My Epiphany from Last Night

The language of numbers was most likely given to us before Hebrew, or any other language for that matter. Scholars strive to learn Hebrew to better know their God in the language He first revealed Himself. Yet through creation, He first revealed Himself through the language of math, not Hebrew, with it's rules like any language, to communicate physical and ephemeral realities. So-to-speak, the rocks and stones are actually crying out now in this very moment (Luke 19:40; Hab 2:11), but we don't speak the language. However, God is quite fluent. So why not turn water to wine? Why not heal the sick and raise the dead? Why shouldn't the winds and waves obey Him? We will never and probably should never gain total fluency in this language--for the power too great, and our grasps too small. But to refuse ourselves the intrigue of such a language is to deny a form of communication unlike any other. In turn we lose our sense of place and give rise to potential pride, an assumptious pride that says we don't need to know math too deeply, for it's not needed in Christian Bible study topics or what-have-you until discussion of making biblically frugal budgets or learning time management. All that other math is a science for someone else. Is it perhaps prideful to think we can really communicate with God on deeper and meatier levels if we're continuously choosing to deny the biggest and most blatant form of communication He has afforded us through the natural world and then also through predecessors who have done much of the dirty work in uncovering the rules to the language? Not to say we're all made to be mathematicians, but wait, that's not right. Because if we're being honest that's actually exactly what we've all been made for. We may have different focuses and goals assigned to us, but just as "politics should be the part-time pastime of every citizen", math, science, and reflectively the arts--in any medium, should be the part-time pastime of every Christian and scholar wanting to know God more.