Some days, if you're like me, you just need a little encouragement, especially when you've stopped to take notice of how the days are flying by and your life is marked more by the years that have passed than by the years you are promised. Today, is one such day. So, Karl Barth:
[We]
have no option but to take what we are given -- a limited
life in an allotted span of time. And this simply brings us back to the
starting-point. Does life really have to be like this? And when we raise
this
question again we again shake what we think are our prison bars and
angrily or
anxiously contrast our determination with the conditions under which we
are
forced to live. And the question itself is still unresolved. We still do
not
see why things have to be as they are, and not otherwise. The whole
picture
changes, however, if we are not concerned abstractly and generally with
the
limitation of our life, but with the God who limits it; if we are not
concerned
abstractly and generally with our allotted time, but with the reality of
the
God who allots it. In both cases, of course, we are concerned with the
same
thing. But the same thing now becomes quite different. It becomes so
different
that -- if we really count on the reality of God -- we are not merely
confronted by
the convincing and definitive answer to our question, but the question
itself
is resolved. Therefore the question of our Whence? and Whither?,
of the
duration and perfection of our life, cannot lead into the void, like a
broken
bridge in a sea of mist, but always to Him.
From
Church Dogmatics III/2.
