Without Any Ire

“How blessed the day when the lamb and the lion shall lie down together without any ire,” (William W. Phelps, “The Spirit Of God”). We as humans are hybrid creatures. We're both predator and prey. Angels and devils. Children of God and Natural Men and Women. Eternal and mortal. As C.S. Lewis put it in The Screwtape Letters, “Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.” Right now we have inside of us the lion, the king of the jungle, the divine part of us that knows we are destined to become gods and rulers and that this life is an important but very brief and temporary step on our journey. And we also have the lamb, the part that knows that we are weak and vulnerable and that our lives are fleeting and time slips away from us. The lion and the lamb generate a lot of animosity and ire between them. The lion wants to charge ahead and take its place as rightful king. The lamb wants to make itself as small as possible and pray that the lion doesn't eat it. There are things that we can only learn as we try to navigate between these two very different aspects of our nature. Sometimes the Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak and that means we have to listen to that little lamb and recognize that we can't become perfect in one frenzied afternoon. And sometimes we have a Goliath stomping all over us and we need to listen to the lion and arm ourselves with the strength and power of the Lord and stand and fight for what's right. But a lot of the time it's a mixture of both and the Lamb and the Lion hate working together. The lion thinks the lamb is a whiny little baby and the lamb thinks the lion is always getting them both into trouble. But there will come a day when the lamb and the lion shall lie down together without any ire. How blessed will that day be! We will have united the eternal and the temporal, the spiritual and the physical, the divine and the mundane, predator and prey, lamb and lion.