Looking back (4)

However odd the idea may seem, re-reading some of the passages produced here since starting to record my thoughts in this way, has told me much that I did not really know even when writing those words. Much about myself, that is: about my own thinking, beliefs, hopes and fears, my potential (where it does exist) and my lack of it (where it does not), my ongoing journey, my sense of direction, and about the gifts I have received. It has also helped to clarify some of the things which hold me back and which perpetuate my recurring sense of marking time; not of being isolated, lost or stranded, as I have no sense of being left behind, but drifting along with the rest of the world without any certainty as to where I am meant to be within it, and pausing whenever I find those things for which, I believe, all the world should pause. It is the failure of the rest of the world to pause with me which generates the illusion of marking time. And it is my reasons for pausing, and the thoughts arising from those reasons, which provide most of the words that eventually find a home among these pages.

When the words that stand as the title for this blog –‘Soliloquy at The Very Edge’ – first settled into place, I knew that I would be talking to myself in the sense that I would be pondering and weighing my thoughts as I sought to make some sort of sense on the page, but I had not anticipated talking to myself in a way that would make me both student of the teacher, and that same teacher of myself as the student. That this has occurred has provided me with further food for thought, and, while writing this, yet another unanticipated moment when I must pause to consider the implications of that fact.

‘Soliloquy’. It had never struck me before that it is a beautiful word; a word that I should have been ranking with one of my already mentioned favourite words – ‘perplexity’. I have always appreciated it; it has always lodged in my mind as something applicable to me: something with which I am comfortable and from which I am unlikely ever to separate myself, but suddenly there is a new way of interpreting or understanding the idea of talking to oneself. It is not simply giving some form of utterance to one’s thoughts, but teaching oneself. At this moment I am not writing because of something that has already happened, however recent; this is taking shape within me as I write and is driving me toward the suggestion that my reason for being here is not quite as I have thought until now.
Soliloquy is not only a form of talking specifically to oneself, but of speaking without addressing any one else. Inevitably, much of what I have written, while being born of words uttered within myself, has been directed to you the reader; it has been spoken to no particular or specified person but has nevertheless been spoken directly to you, whoever you may be. Without an intention to speak to you in some way I would never have begun to write here at all, but the thoughts into which I now find myself led suggest that perhaps that is not the main aim of the prompting that brought me here.
Could it be that it is the real Teacher within me, the Holy Spirit of God, who, being unable to get through to me in more direct ways, prompts my willingness to go through a more laborious unravelling of thoughts and words? Does the Spirit lead me through this process, not so much that my thoughts may aid or support others, but rather that the process may clarify for me the identity of their source – differentiating between The Spirit and my own wayward ideas – thus more effectively enabling me to recognize His leading, and more meaningfully to reach out to those same others in the future?

Once again I have been drawn completely away from whatever I had been thinking to write about in this post, but failure to go with the leading, wherever it may take me, would undermine all that I have tried to do here. I had set out to continue with the theme of 'looking back', and have been shown that such a theme can indeed have beneficial effects in our future. Anything lacking such effects is mere futility.
Perhaps the important message I need to convey is that looking back, to the right things and in the right way, can enlighten each of us in our search for the path into our future by revealing aspects of our past as having been parts of that same path. It is not the words I write here that have any worth; it is the places to which they may prompt you to go, and which will speak to you as an individual and unique child of God.

‘Do you hear?

Long ago I prepared this,

from days of old I actually planned it,

now I carry it out:’

(Isaiah 37:26)

It seems that ‘looking back’, as a theme, will now run to five posts. I had not anticipated that, but then that is a large part of our world-bound problem; we think we can plot our course into the future when we should be casting ourselves completely on the guidance of the Spirit, sent by God through the reality of Jesus Christ for precisely that purpose. I can have no idea what the Spirit may say to you or where He might lead you, but may He speak loud and clear to you, and may you hear, understand, and respond to His presence in your life.
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