The Business at Hand 1.2.2025

     The time we have is easy to quantify. Days. Weeks. Months. A year. Opportunity will manifest itself in many ways. Just consider the nouns. People, places and things. During 2025 we will meet people and say goodbye to people. People will fill us with anxiety, joy, heartache, hope, aspiration, and perspective. Some will go places. Mrs. Beckman and me, we like to stay home. Some of you like to go, go, go. You will vacation, go on mission trips, or just have a satisfying drive. Now, “Things” are a bit of an oddity. The category itself would seem to encompass everything not “people” or “place” which, for me at least, calls into question the definition of noun as a “person, place, or thing.” It may have worked during school days, but it certainly doesn’t do any justice to the wide variation of “stuff” we encounter during our lives.

    Let’s summarize. We meet people, go places, and do things. We did in 2024, and we will in 2025. What we have not done is to in some way quantify or otherwise describe those people, places, or things. To continue the grammatical path (trap) we are on (in which we are imprisoned), we need to add some adjectives, some good-ol’ modifiers that will allow us to make some basic judgments about all this “who, what, and where” we are confronting. 

• New, exciting, challenging people.
• New, exciting, challenging places.
• New, exciting, challenging things.  

OK so we each know, encounter, and experience different “noun categories.” The stuff of life! What of it? How do we process all this information? What is our purpose? What is the business at hand? In some sense, this is, or must be, our purpose. Verbalizing the nouns of our experience, quantifying, comparing, describing, and categorizing them. Acting upon the stuff of life with a coherent approach and appropriate purpose. 

    Now…I understand most people are not so explicit in all this “noun-verb” talk, but we are each involved in the conversation. We might ignore it, argue with it, or try and otherwise elude it but all of us are intimately involved in the making of meaning in our lives. We are always working to match up the verbs and nouns of our experience, to mix in the right modifiers and in some way make sense of our lives. You may not use grammar to conduct the search, but there is some kind of protocol you are following. 

    The business at hand is understanding our place in the world. Either we make it up or someone discloses it to us. We get to choose the source, our own limited horizon or someone else. Ultimately, defining and describing the world according to our own personal desires or standards is an act of enormous hubris. Why should my nouns, verbs, and modifiers articulate reality for others? 

    Throughout history, the wisest among us have discerned that this “search for meaning” this process of engaging in the “business at hand” is bigger than any one person. In fact, it is not a material, physical, or even a linguistic quest—it is inherently spiritual. We are Spiritual beings and our ultimate purpose, the business at hand for the human person is to seek ultimate truth outside of our self, from the ultimate self who defines and delimits reality for us. 

Technically the “enlightenment” ended in 1804. For more than 220 years humans have behaved as if it never ended and that we have been liberated from simplistic spiritual needs. Except, more people now are hollower and more unfulfilled than ever. Perhaps our reason has kept us from seeing what most reasonable people before us always understood. Meaning we “make for ourselves” is narrow, selfish, narcissistic, and solipsistic. Man as a spiritual being exists in community. In isolation we are mere ghosts in the shell of our own humanity. 

    If you want to do the best job humanly possible of pursuing what it means to be human, you need to find a place in and become a part of a Spiritual community. A church. The family of God. I realize that sounds a little off in our self-centered, self-defined age. Perhaps the present has been bent out of shape not by obsolete theologies but by the even older issue of the fall. Sinners first look to self and only look to others when their own weaknesses and vulnerabilities become unbearable. 

    What if we, you and I—did not wait for some collapse to find meaning in relationships. In other people. In the verbs that give life to the nouns. 

    In the New Testament. Jesus describes the Business at Hand as “the Kingdom of God”. In the Kingdom, God rules, but His people reign. In the Kingdom we find God’s love, justice, mercy and kindness. In Kingdom we are more human, not less. In Kingdom we discover that the business at hand is to love and to know God, and to love and to know other people. In Kingdom we learn freedom--not fear. In kingdom we learn wholeness not brokenness. In kingdom we learn service, sacrifice, and salvation. In Kingdom the business of heaven is the business at hand. In whatever way you describe it—whatever nouns you nominate or verbs you articulate—kingdom means God with us in the person of Jesus, loving His world even to His own death. He has done His part. It’s time to go to work.