I was having a moment with my six-year old son the other night just before bed time. He was not in such a great mood and since I’ve always encouraged him to feel free to open up to me whenever and with whatever, he took the call.
After sharing his concerns with me, I decided to play him a song titled “fear not” (one of my favourite gospel tracks that speak to me when I feel any reason to become afraid) After listening to the song, he repeated some words to me saying “mommy is the song saying when you walk through the fire you won’t be burnt?” He then said: “But that’s not true, you will definitely get burnt if you touch fire.” He continued to narrate some instances of people who got burnt from interacting with fire one way or another.
Being the scientist that he is, I totally understood his argument. I then had to explain to him that on this particular song we are not necessarily referring to the actual/literal fire. We are making use of figures of speech to describe scenarios/situations. He then asked if the song was a gospel song, I said yes. Then he said: “Oh okay now I see, I didn’t know it was a gospel song, you should’ve told me from the beginning.” I obviously took it for granted because I assumed just from the lyrics and sound, he ought to have known. Eventually, the song did not cheer him up since he didn’t understand and so it didn’t speak to him. I needed to go ahead and affirm him in other ways and eventually we said a prayer, he cheered up and went to sleep.
Now, I wonder how many of us live like that? How many of us are in oblivion to the multifunctional dimension of life? Are we really that naive to believe that life is as obvious as 1+1? And that things are as straight forward as black and white? There is indeed more to life than just the literal, physical dimension and although most times life makes perfect sense just in the natural/physical, this by no means suggests the absence of a more complex/unnatural theory to life.
One of the most fundamental answers to this is in our makeup. Yes, our makeup already indicates to us because as human beings we are a spirit that has a soul and lives in a body. A human being is in three parts, we are therefore multidimensional and so we couldn’t possibly expect life to be one way. If you didn’t know, now you know: There is more to life to just the physical!
Sometimes the answers we’re looking/searching for are not staring us in the face. Some things require us to dig deeper, to see beyond sight itself and to discover the fullness of being human. Remember that we are not mere bodies, we are so much more than that and the sooner we recognise that the getter.
So, instead of limiting ourselves to only our five senses, let’s embrace a life out of the box. A life out of the box is so much more liberating, try it.
