Squaring the Circle

This is Gailsman’s choice of themes for this week.  Go see what the fellas: Dave, Fishing_Guy,  Mac, and Gail’s Man, have for their Header Challenge entry this week.  I’m sure that you will find them fun and often intriguing.  Hopefully I will have found a picture by one o’ clock.  I’m posting this now so that I will quit writing and go searching for a photo.   If you come here early, swing on back around, I will have put something up for my new header.

When someone says that you’re squarin’ the circle, they mean to say that you are trying to do what is logically impossible or at the very least, isn’t something a logical person would tackle.  It is something I’ve often been accused of.  And I was looking forward to finding just the right photo-op to display my penchant for that, or at least Dirt’s penchant for shaking his head. 

I could have taken shots that could picture recent squarin’ the circle moments like starting a small business in the worst possible times.  Or putting a Market Garden in the middle of a swamp (well not really, that could be a hyperbolized statement on my part).

But I’ve been taken in a different direction as result of yesterday’s brain and spiritual fog, the clearing last night and then my being forced to sit quiet today. 

A circle can’t be squared – for reals it cannot – and that was definitively put to rest I believe in the mid 1800’s, but up until then many a mathematician, geometreian (is that a word?  don’t think so), put a lot of effort into it.  The ability or rather the non-ability to do so has something to do with pi and the type of number it is or isn’t.  Any way the reason, unless your a math freak, really isn’t of importance just the fact that it can’t be done.  There-by the rise of the idiom, “squarin’ a circle” for the pursuit of something that logically is impossible.

If something were truly impossible then obviously a person would not, could not, do it and any attempt would be pointless, unless tilting at windmills is your sort of thing.  Most of us who value our time on earth would not attempt to do something that was truly impossible.  I do believe that the idiom, when used, applies to things we deem illogical to attempt and have success at.   We say, or at least mentally say to ourselves that a great many things are not logical that indeed have little to do with whether they are truly possible or not.  That is what I have come to want to write about, consume today. 

What came to mind naggingly yesterday in the fog are those things that as a culture we offhandedly deem illogical and therefore we don’t attempt them or say that the pursuit of such is folly.

God seems to specialize in squaring the circle.  And He asks us to be a people of squaring circles.  Things like taking care of the poor, even though our efforts will never wipe out poverty.  Giving help to those who ask it of us. And those we are aware of. No paperwork, no worthiness scale, just giving.  Wow.  That’s fairly illogical eh? 

Honoring our parents, good, bad or indifferent from childhood to adulthood and all the ages in between.

Loving the unlovable. 

Forgiving the unforgivable.

Risking life and limb and reputation to promote love, not ourselves.

But it comes from a God who through death gave us life.  That alone is a fairly illogical move.

God who though He is almighty, the creator of heaven and earth, all that is seen and unseen, came to earth as a mere babe.  Born into a poverty most of us lovely citizens would frown on and be suspicious of.  Yet he drew men from half way across the world with a star and they were not shocked nor dismayed to find the king that they sought in the conditions of a common man.

The request to be squarers of circles comes from an almighty God who chose to minister to the world from a homeless position, not an earthly kingly throne or even a jeweled encrusted pulpit atop a marbled stage.

God for whom we are undeserving yet from whom we are showered with riches beyond our imagination.  He asks us to be squarers of circles, to do the hard things, to not agonize over what we are called to do but just to do.  Not asking for reward.

God who values each man, knows the hairs on each head, asks us likewise to value one another, not for how educated the other is, riches owned or powerful, but just because they are.

God who is only one God but three persons.  Who has always been.  Who resides outside of time and everywhere.  There is no place that He is not, no time that He has not seen, has not created.  There is nothing He cannot do, nothing He does not know.

It is all so very illogical, at the very least beyond our human logic.  Maybe that is why He asks us to lean not on our own human understanding but on His wisdom.  He tells us that we are not alone, but that He supplies us with our every need to go beyond human understanding, we can do all things through Him who gives us strength.  We can indeed do the unimaginable, the illogical. 

And now to find but one picture for you, Clever Reader, that would convey how I feel today about being a true squarer of circles.  Circles that matter.  The circles I am called to square.

So this is the picture I chose, it wasn’t hard to find but I’m glad I wrote my post first.  As soon as I opened my latest file of pictures, the ones I took on Christmas, I saw that I had no farther to look.  I could have chosen any of the three of my sons in a contemplative mood, God has been good to Dirt and I and blessed us with godly sons for our dear daughters that we raised.  But the picture of Mike is perfect, he’s a thinker and a squarer of circles for sure, of himself and others who are fortunate to know him and call him friend.