A guided reflection
Four
Directions
Human beings do not exist alone.
This will take 10–15 minutes.
Enter slowly.
We exist in four directions
Touch each direction to begin
At each threshold
Notice.
Wonder.
Realize.
Do not rush. The questions will arrive one at a time.
One
Toward the earth
The ground beneath us. The world that sustains and resists us. The environment we inherited and are reshaping.
What do you notice about the gap between us and the earth?
What do you wonder about our human response to this?
What do you realize?
Two
Toward one another
Every relationship. The people we need and disappoint, who need and disappoint us. The distance that opens between people who meant to stay close.
What do you notice about the gap between us and others?
What do you wonder about our human response to this?
What do you realize?
Three
Within ourselves
Between what we intend and what we do. Between who we want to be and who we find ourselves becoming.
What do you notice about the gap within yourself?
What do you wonder about our human response to this?
What do you realize?
Four
Toward the ultimate
Whatever we take to be ultimate: meaning, transcendence, the ground of everything, or the silence where God would be. The oldest hunger.
What do you notice about the gap between us and the ultimate?
What do you wonder about our human response to this?
What do you realize?
We have looked at everything in this section as people who carry all four fractures.
The environmentalist carries relational damage into their activism. The therapist carries their own internal fractures into the room. The person reaching toward the ultimate carries the weight of everything they have not resolved.
Every attempt to repair these fractures is made by someone who carries them all.
This is confronting. The truth is that even as we seek repair, we are also generating the damage.
What if there is another way
to view this story?
What if someone existed
without any of these fractures?
There is another way. Click to see this story unfold.
Chapter One
Creation
What if the damage isn't the original story?
The oldest account of human existence describes a world where none of this was broken. The earth was good, not threatening. People stood before each other without shame. The self was integrated. And God was present, unhidden, close.
What we experience as normal is the wreckage of something that was whole. This is not how it was meant to be.
And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.Genesis 1:31
Chapter Two
Fall
The four fractures didn't arrive separately.
The fracture between humanity and God. The fracture within ourselves. The fracture between people. The fracture between humanity and creation. They ruptured in a single moment, from a single source: the human heart turning away from God.
They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden, and the man and his wife hid themselves.Genesis 3:8
Chapter Two
Fall
And the turning didn't stop there. Whatever the heart desires, the will chooses, the mind justifies, the body enacts. We don't only inherit this. We participate in it and repeat it, daily, in every direction.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?Jeremiah 17:9
Chapter Three
Redemption
One person existed without any of the four fractures.
Jesus Christ exercised dominion without exploitation. He loved without the distortions of shame or self-protection. He was, inwardly, without fracture. He stood in unbroken communion with God — and he came.
In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.2 Corinthians 5:19
Chapter Three
The cross and resurrection
Then he absorbed the full weight of what the rebellion had produced. Every fracture, every turning, every debt across all four directions. On the cross he took what we owed. Then he rose.
It is the hinge on which everything turns.
He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.Romans 4:25
Chapter Four
Restoration
The story isn't finished.
Everything the rebellion took is being returned. Made new. The earth freed. Every people gathered. Shame fully healed. God present, face to face, without barrier.
Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.Revelation 21:3–4
It is a promise with a name attached to it.
A life.
A death.
A resurrection.
Jesus.
A moment to sit with this
What do you notice, in any of the four directions, as you sit with this story?
What do you wonder?
What do you believe?
It is an invitation
to explore his story.
If this has raised questions you want to explore further, get in touch.
Or explore the story of Jesus yourself —
read the Gospel of John
Where would you like to go?