The start of a New Year is a traditional time for making New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps you made a few for this year. A resolution is a resolving to do a thing. Being resolved means to be decided and determined. However, sadly many if not most of what we call “resolutions” are really just illusive wishes.

I believe the problem starts with an one’s lack of any real, long-term vision. Even as we grow in Christ, often that vision is at best cloudy and unfocused. Hence, resolutions become random, reactionary, short-sighted expressions of weakly-willed wishes. “I will lose 20 pounds.” “I will exercise three times per week.” “I will read my Bible daily.”

But when any action step (resolution) becomes its own vision, true spiritual and intellectual myopia has indeed set in. We are in need of the “Laodicean salve” for our blindness (Rev. 3:15-18) and/or a new set of spiritual lenses to bring the world back into proper focus.

In our cursed condition, we tend to simply let the world impose on us and our children a bad vision of what done-right-looks-like. For instance, we as adults strive for the “American dream” with all its ill-defined, and deceptive “security” and materialism. And, perhaps our kids labor slavishly to look like the latest all-too-sad-clown with his pants down around his knees and perhaps singing or listening to music that you’d see as obscene if you could understand the so-called lyrics. Or, maybe the vision is a sad, pitiful super-model who is border-line anorexic and who uses drugs to keep her face and figure properly gaunt. Or, the choice of vision might be a highly-overpaid individual who has laid his/her life and talents at the altar, not of Baal, as the ancient Jews did, but at the altar of Ball—football, basketball, baseball, soccer, etc.—a modern, more fashionable idol of “enlightened” man.

Humans are not designed to be driven by action steps; we are clearly designed to be moved by honest, meaningful visions of where we need to be and what we need to become. Just watch anyone for a moment when they’re unaware they’re being observed and you can tell something about that person’s vision for the moment and perhaps for his/her life.

And, sadly that vision is usually fairly reactionary and short-sighted.

A book that impacted me early in my Christian walk was a little fable called Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I have a framed poster hanging on my church office wall right now depicting it. I had it hanging on my apartment wall when I got married and my wife had it framed for me as a wedding gift. I have always found it inspirational. Written by Richard Bach in the early 70s, it was immediately a best-seller and it is still in print today. The book is about a sea gull who became bored with the life of the typical sea gulls scrumming for food. Jonathan rather learns and perfects his flying ability. And thiis passion for high-flying brings his expulsion from the flock of beach-dwelling crumb-eaters. However, learning to soar into the skies, he meets other gulls who’ve learned the art of flying high. Finally he meets Chiang, the wisest of the gulls who mentors him in the higher existence. Ultimately, Jonathan returns to teach other birds about this higher existence.

The book is probably more humanistic than spiritual, but it is an apt allegorical effort to demonstrate again what the greats have tried to tell us. It demonstrates what Jesus, the greatest of all, was and is trying to tell us—that there is life on a higher flight path here that leads to a much superior existence in heaven. You want to be a low-flyer scrounger competing for the crumbs the world throws out, or do you want to be a high flyer that seeing the big picture lives out her/his grand destiny.

Bach’s work was perhaps a more modern expression of the work of the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato expressed the challenge and distress of enlightenment and “high-flying” in his classic Allegory of the Cave found in his larger work, The Republic. The allegory is a fictional account of a dialogue between Socrates, Plato’s teacher, and Glaucon, Plato’s brother. Socrates describes a scenario in which a group of people were bound in a cave and allowed only to see the wall of the cave in front of them. Behind them is a blazing fire and between them and the fire is a walkway on which people walk with all sorts of things on their heads, casting shadows of such on the wall of the cave directly in front of the line of people. As well, the only the people could hear were the sounds from the walkway echoing off the wall. To those chained in the cave, the shadows and faint echoes represented their reality. It was all they knew.

However, a prisoner is freed and allowed to turn to see the scenario playing out behind them. At first, blinded by the intense light (blazing campfire) previously unseen, after some time of adjustment, the freed man is able to see the association between the fire and images on the walkway, thinking at first that the shadows were the higher reality. Eventually however, the freed one realizes that indeed the fire is the source of light and the images on the walkway were the source of the shadows themselves. The prisoner experiences an even higher reality when taken to the surface, and after some additional adjustment to the even brighter sunlight, is able to see the models of the images on the walkway illuminated by an even greater light. (continued in Part 2 by same title)