When a Paramedic attends to an injured person, they apparently ask them three questions to determine the person's level of consciousness. What is your name? What day is it? or who is the Prime Minister of Britain? Finally, where are you right now? God asked a question in the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve chose to believe the serpent's lie about the character of God and then disobeyed God. 'Where are you'? God asked. How penetrating this question is.
Where are you in your life? Where are you as a man or a woman? Where are you in relation to God? The story we are living in determines where we are. What story are you living in?
As a result of choosing to believe the serpent's lie about the character of God, humanity chose to define good and evil for themselves apart from God. Reality is something that human beings make up then if they don't let God be their ultimate reality. The creator God will not be ignored though, so he left his mark on us by giving us a conscience knowing a sense of right and wrong. He made us as relational beings so that relationships are fundamental to human life. We all know this. Our deepest wounds come from broken relationships and our deepest joys also. To be human is to be relational. Without a sense of love and belonging, there is always suffering.
By using the Paramedic's three questions but using different words such as Story, Journey and Desire we can have some idea of answering God's question 'Where are you'? We are born into a broken world, so we all have imperfect blueprints from imperfect parents- if we had parents. Our story in the form of our childhood and life journey is shaped by factors like people, experiences, agreements with the messages we received and inner vows we make to self protect amongst other things.
Our story then determines the journey we take in life and who we become.
Turning points in our life journey also affect the direction we take. This all goes to form both our story which in turn forms our identity. As human beings we have desires. If we are living out of a fragmented identity, our desire will be to self protect and numb our pain and of course this self protection and numbing out will continue to form our identity and dictate our journey, because we will be living out of a different 'script' written by someone else. Some of us know we are living out of of someone elses 'script', some of us do not.
To be fully conscious we need to be Alert & Oriented x 3 to our story, our journey and our core desires. At the heart of the problem is the problem of the human heart. We need a new heart. This is where Jesus longs to be invited into our story, to transform, heal and liberate the script of our lives and bring us into his bigger Story. He enables us to absorb our pain into a larger sense of meaning that is bigger than ourselves.
Jesus died to transform our story. He is still asking 'Where are you'? Next time, I am going to talk about something called 'The Father's Embrace' that has the power to make our lives 'Alert & Oriented x 4. I thought you said 3? There is a fourth.....