"Reality is like fine wine, it will not appeal to children"

I read a line in a book this week that said, “Reality is like fine wine, it will not appeal to children.” Interesting don’t you think? Pause and think about that a minute……

I remember in my drinking days, that’s right…. I had those days, I acquired a taste for a really good dry red wine with a good steak. I still like wine with steak, but I stopped drinking it because most Baptist stubble over drinking and I’m a Baptist. I might add, I did have a problem with drinking too much, so that’s another reason for staying away from the evil brew. I think I can handle it now, but there are many in this country that can’t so I’ve decided not to encourage them. There may be a little wine at the marriage supper and I’ll have a glass there, if you don’t mind.

I wrote about reality a while back if you remember. I said reality was about redemption and I still believe that to be true, but this analogy about reality being like a fine wine is a good one. Life is complex to say the least and this analogy speaks to that complexity. The writer of this statement was talking about how maturity, like a fine aged wine, learns how to understand life and how to deal with it. The process of maturity takes time. The more time given to wine the better it gets, and life should be the same. God is redeeming mankind one person at a time, and one day at a time. This redeeming begins with our spiritual awakening to the fact that Christ is Lord, and that He is worthy to be followed. After that awakening the maturing begins and continues until we depart to the next life called heaven, and will continue there for eternity. We will never stop learning about the greatness of our creator, and the greatest of his creation….us in particular.

This complexity in life never disappears and it’s this complexity that leads us to make a mistake, we tend to make life into a formula. We want life to be predictable, a set of steps if you will. We want it to be something we can control. If we do this, then we’ll get this. The problem with that kind of thinking is…….. it just isn’t so! How many times have you thought if you do the right thing everything will be OK. Then something goes really bad, and you think….what happened? Life can’t be broken down to a set of rules that will give us a predictable outcome.

God did something different in His creation, something we would never have done, He made life relational. If you think about this long enough I believe you’ll agree, life as a formula would never come close to the life God intended. Relationships can be complex, but the love and the beauty experienced in them cannot be equaled in any other way. Love is unpredictable, there is no way to find the depth or width of it….. and that is why love is so wonderful.

Here’s the problem we have with this relational stuff, we just don’t trust anybody. We are afraid if we get too close we’ll get hurt or we’ll get rejected. So the solution is to make life into a formula, something that doesn’t require getting close. This leads to an even bigger problem, we do the same thing with God. If you study the life of Jesus you will see how He was continually trying to get His disciples to trust Him, to believe Him. It was totally relational. Jesus would not give them a formula to follow, He told them to follow Him. Nothing has changed, it’s still about following Christ. Trusting Christ is what makes trusting people possible. Relationships are complex, and unpredictable but rich in life.

Life will not get better as we get older but will become one of many regrets if we don’t take time to develop meaningful relationships with people and with God. We have to stay close to Christ, we have to believe Him, we have to Trust Him, then we’ll learn to love Him. Jesus said, “follow me”.