The Great Reversal

Walking with the crowds

Carried along by the pressing forward,

Each one eager to get ahead

But each one starting the same;

Born as a baby, and from then on, struggling towards

meaning, power and influence.

Be someone

Be remembered

Make a big impression.

Leave some indelible mark in your 3 score years and 10.

From birth, a struggle to find eternity, to burst through life

with such dazzling intensity, that everyone will remember

forever.

But walking the other way, picking out a route against the

crowds, a soltary figure passes me . . . passes all of us -

all straining away innocence, to be someone, and he

passes us, a quiet chaos in the crowd.

Christ, eternal, omniscient, creator, beyond time, source of

wisdom and beyond petty claims of influence. . . in very

nature God, slips into reverse and walks back past us -

away from Kingship, away from power, away from influence,

away from eternity, away from wisdom . . . towards infancy.

Calmly stepping into the body of a tiny child.

And even as this baby grows, figuring out how to control
the body he himself designed, he still walks the other way,

realizing that life cannot be found in the struggle for permanence,

but in giving it up.

The great reversal subverts me. Tired of pressing forward, I realize I need to turn, for what I have been searching for has just past by me the other way.

- From VX35 (see http://www.vaux.net/)