The week in a breath

What have I been left with in this first week of blogging? Nothing is inherited and nothing is accumulated. Whether we receive something or put aside a good slice of anything at all, we will certainly never take anything with us after death.

A rather drastic start to the page, but it's what I was reflecting on in the car today. A life spent learning, a life spent building, starting a family, having children, and then? What remains is surely what we have been, but only in people's memories. What we can do, instead, is enjoy creation. It sounds like a simple sentence but it's hard to put into practice. Yet simplicity is reality. Let's enjoy what surrounds us, what has been Given to us.

If I compared my life with that of a person in need, I would surely be in sin, because I live a comfortable life; but from my position, for better or worse, I realise that wearing yourself out for certain things is useless in the end. Yes, money is needed, you need to work to earn it, but in the end do we really need to work so much? To sacrifice our time doing a zillion things only to stay at an ordinary standard of living?

I'm not opening a gigantic reflection, I just want to reflect on the title of this article, which is about the week that has passed since this blog began. How much I enjoyed this week, how useful it was, and whether it brought me anything.

I got tired this week; it served to get me to the end of each evening exhausted, and it led me to finish only breathless tasks. The moral? I could have done so much more with a different use of my energy and with greater satisfaction.

A child always enjoys the inheritance of their parents, and as parents, these too were in turn heirs of something. But a child does not know what sacrifice means or what inheritance means until they have someone to leave it to, and even before that, until they build it (the inheritance). A child will grow up to become a parent and will almost certainly (and I wrote almost certainly because it isn't always so) be the same example of what they received. As a child, can you say today that you hadn't understood anything until a few shivers ran down your own skin?

Today, not with my experience as a parent but as a child, I can say that I hadn't understood anything before, and afterwards I had to work to look at myself again and be new for my life. Everything I didn't understand as a child, I didn't understand as a parent either, and do you know why? Because I never understood being a father, nor being a son. I could only learn it when I found the true answer.

Being an example, what on earth does that mean? Putting the word into practice, and not just listening to it and deceiving yourself. Because if you listen to the word but do not put it into practice, you are like someone who looks in a mirror and sees himself as he is. He takes a good look at himself and then goes away and at once forgets what he looks like.

Powerful, right? But it's not my own idea, because it's actually top-quality flour, the kind that has made healthy bread for a life of fullness. It comes from James's sack, chapter 1 of that famous book of the Bible.

To cut it short: if I hadn't come close to a true spring, I couldn't have drunk and quenched my thirst. Today I can reflect on things deeply because my comparison comes from a Father who, before anything else, loved what He made. He loved everything around us, creating it, giving it to us and telling us to enjoy it. We, instead, managed to complicate our lives, while God simply told us to stay with Him. He shaped our life by giving us more feast days than work, and this is also shown by the fact that the Jewish calendar has more festivals than working days. He spoke to us of love, a love that not even Satan can imitate. What more are we looking for in our lives?

We can't manage to enjoy one week in peace; how do we expect to enjoy life? We talk about freedom thinking we can escape our problems, but all we manage to do is get into even more of a mess.

I recommend reading the manual before we keep banging our heads against our own efforts, only to admit afterwards that you could have read it first, understood it and put everything into practice for the good of your life. Yes, exactly, like the letter of James: learn to look at yourself in the mirror and walk away remembering what you saw.

The Bible is not a book to read and keep among the bestsellers, but one to read and reread to understand and put into practice, because inside it are all the instructions for the failures we cause every time we do things our own way. And in it you find failure and solution, before and after, wound and cure, sin and forgiveness, love and hate, life and death, father and son, the strength of victory, the armour for battle, the strategies for conquest and so much more.

From a week of rushing around to a biblical reflection. This shows how much I still have to learn from the instructions, from the manual of my life. I make a common mistake: I switch the mechanism on without reading the instructions first, and only afterwards go and read the troubleshooting section.

Have a good week.