{"id":2446,"date":"2012-05-29T16:31:56","date_gmt":"2012-05-29T23:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2446"},"modified":"2012-05-29T16:31:56","modified_gmt":"2012-05-29T23:31:56","slug":"ten-minutes-to-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2012\/05\/29\/ten-minutes-to-live\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten Minutes to Live"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m doing a writing workshop at the Duke Reconciliation Institute<\/a> this week with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove<\/a>. \u00a0As an exercise, today we had fifteen minutes to write what we would say if someone found us lying in a ditch with 10 minutes to live. \u00a0Here’s what I came up with. \u00a0Interesting to see what floats up in a snap exercise like this.<\/p>\n

In the end it is all about grace.<\/p>\n

This birth was a grace. \u00a0You don’t ask for it. \u00a0Maybe you don’t want it. \u00a0But it was given and it was a gift, it was very good.<\/p>\n

It hurts to be born but you don’t remember it. \u00a0Your mother remembers, but she doesn’t remember the pain. \u00a0The pain of birth is a grace. \u00a0Forgetting the pain of birth is a grace.<\/p>\n

Learning, gaining knowledge and wisdom, is a grace. \u00a0One thing you learn is that you have to fight to learn, you have to wrestle to become wise. \u00a0The people who want to teach you, they mean well, maybe some of them teach well, maybe some of them, maybe all of them, want to make you them. \u00a0So you have to grow up, to see your teachers as human beings, like you, to appreciate them, to become a teacher yourself. \u00a0And then you have to learn to repent of what you’ve presumed to know, the knowledge of good and evil you thought you owned, and learn unknowing.<\/p>\n

Time is a grace. \u00a0What is time but space God makes for creatures like us? \u00a0It flies away like dry grass in the breeze. \u00a0There is no past — it is gone; there is no future — it is not yet; there is no present: \u00a0look, and it is past. \u00a0There are only nows proceeding in succession, windows onto the timeless source, catchlights in the eye of God.<\/p>\n

Death is a grace. \u00a0“Except a seed be planted in the ground and die, it will not bear fruit.” \u00a0This birth and death of mine may be the one thing I do that no other person in the history of the universe will do. \u00a0Yes, Death, the big-D of Death, is a curse, the curse. \u00a0It’s no-thing, that big-D of Death, it’s absurd. \u00a0So this death we die must produce life. \u00a0This is the meaning of the Resurrection. \u00a0Life from death, new creation from formless void.<\/p>\n

Let grace be all in all.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m doing a writing workshop at the Duke Reconciliation Institute this week with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. \u00a0As an exercise, today we had fifteen minutes to write what we would say if someone found us lying in a ditch with 10 minutes to live. \u00a0Here’s what I came up with. \u00a0Interesting to see what floats up in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-Ds","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}