Fabric

I wrote this as a response paper for my class and it so affected me that I decided to share it with you all. Let me know what you think.

Throughout the lives of people, it is physically impossible to not have relationships with other people. Even in the womb, a child has a dependent relationship with his mother, and begins to know her voice. There has only been one human in the history of the planet that was without other humans for any length of time, and that was Adam, and God didn’t let things stay that way for very long. “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” (Genesis 2:18 NASB) Even God said that there people were not meant to be alone. We exist to help one another, and to give each other, for lack of a better term, a support system. Dallas Willard calls it a Circle of Sufficiency in his book Renovation of the Heart. In his theory everyone has a circle of sufficiency that is made up of one’s immediate relationships. We often find ourselves struggling desperately to maintain these circles because they are literally what we rely on to continue our existence. Human life, when it is stripped down to it’s utmost base form, is a relationship. To take an ancient metaphor, all of the lives of people and all their relationships make up a “fabric” of which the people are the "threads". Their relationships weave these threads together to make the tapestry that has been the human existence. Now even though close up, one can see the individual threads, and indeed if one was small enough (or the fabric large enough) only a few threads intertwining would be visible. But the farther out we zoom, more and more of the picture becomes visible, and we can see that this fabric is of a complex weave indeed. Not a single thread is detached from the fabric. And that fabric connects every thread with every other thread from the present point in time all the way back to Adam.

Sufficiency Circles are based off of the fact that we are all connected, and that there is no circle that is removed or separated from any other circle. We like to think that we are self sufficient though. That our circle could go on unaffected by the circles around us but Willard points out that even the most basic of circles, a mother and child, can be vastly affected “The togetherness of the mother and child may be drastically affected by economic conditions on the other side of the earth.” (Willard p. 180) He goes on to point out the truth of the fragility of our little circles. That even though we struggle and try and strive to make our circles stable and safe, the fact is that a ripple in the cloth will start somewhere and travel to the far tips of the cloth. We feel the affect of an earthquake in Haiti. People in Alaska are touched by a Hurricane that wipes out New Orleans. The sad thing is that we’ve so tried to separate ourselves from the pain, (because who wants pain?) that we sometimes don’t even acknowledge the affects of the ripples in the ever expanding cloth. We fool ourselves in doing so. We are, essentially, lying to ourselves. Willard uses the phrase “Everything is okay now”. So often a mother will comfort her child with these words, usually at times when they are least true. Only once we realize our total and complete submersion in the cloth do we realize the tumultuous situation that we find ourselves.


There is only one way that one can overcome the chaos of the ever-expanding, ever-rippling cloth, and that is to “anchor” oneself onto the only one that is truly self sufficient. The One that could, would He chose to, completely separate Himself from the cloth, and be perfectly fine. I talk, of course, of YWHW, Creator of the universe. But through some stroke of genius, His Son, and oddly enough Himself, confined Himself to a single thread, and allowed Himself to be woven directly into the fabric of the cloth that He created. Jesus Christ “came” to earth (whatever that means) in human form. Born as a babe of the virgin Mary, and effectively, as a string in the cloth, rippled that sucker so hard that we’re still feeling the effects today. And He’s managed to do something that no one else has ever done before, or since. He defeated death. Completely shut it down. Death has absolutely no hold on him. Not even Methuselah, longest living of all humans, can touch Jesus record. (Genesis 5:27 NASB)
Though Jesus ascended into heaven, his thread still runs strong, straight through the middle of the fabric, sending vibrations throughout. Those that weave themselves in with His thread can find a place of steadfastness. As the psalmist writes “The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, My God, my rock, in whom I take refuge; My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.” (Psalm 18:2 NASB).

Rob Bell, in his NOOMA video “Rhythm” talks about our relationship with God as “getting in tune” with the “music” that God is playing. Those that weave themselves in with Jesus thread begin to vibrate and pulse on the same wavelength as Him and are in harmony with Him. This ensures security; however, it also means that those that are in sync with Jesus' thread, are out of sync with the rest of the fabric. This causes stress in the weave, conflicting wavelengths, and dissidence. It is known amongst the Christ followers, as persecution. There will always be a dissidence and conflict unless every thread is woven in with the straight and narrow thread of Jesus Christ, only then can every thread ripple in sync with every other thread in a beautiful harmony. The Bible says that in the end, God will take the threads of the fabric that have refused to join the harmonious and intricate designs of Jesus, and pull them out of the fabric itself, throwing them away to be burned forever in a fire, completely separated, for all eternity, from the only sure “sufficiency circle” that exists, which is Christ. Is that not the most hellish thing that one can imagine? The others, however, who have dedicated their life to being in sync, and intertwined with the Christ-thread will be woven anew into a glorious new cloth, that ripples and flows in perfect synchronization with the central strand of Christ. All dissidence, all conflict, and all unrest will cease forever. Only the beautiful dance of the synchronized threads will exist for the rest of eternity. Is that not the most heavenly thing that one can imagine? Therefore, I suggest, that we strive for the heavenly, rather than the hellish, and endure the dissidence of today, for the perfection that is to come.