BitterSweetLife

In my better moments I am willing to restate something pithy and original that I have just said, something like "Can you turn down the volume on that song you are blaring for Aidan eight dozen times in a row?"

At these times I am careful to articulate and project, so Lindsay can get the gist of the vital communication, despite the crazy antics Aidan is performing in the background. Like I said, it is during my better moments that I am willing to repeat myself. Why? Because recapitulation is the leaky faucet that you repeatedly fix, the squeaky floorboard that regularly wakes up your one-year-old at 2 a.m., even though you have nailed it down and covered it with carpets. I don't like to repeat myself. The first time should have been enough. In fact, repeating myself is so exhausting and inefficient that I can hardly spare the brain cells and calories it takes to make my tongue form those words AGAIN...

Then there's Jesus. With his entire life, uninterrupted by snide commentary or remarkably expressive rolling of the eyes, he recapitulated an entire race. He was a divine editor, a reteller of the story of earth, an immortal-human artist, who took what had already been written, told, made--and did it over again.

It should have been right in the first place, but he crossed out, erased, backspaced, and, laughing at Old Scratch, started from scratch. He didn't just embellish, he improved. He remade and fixed. He recapitulated the sorry, damned misspelling we had made of ourselves, and wrote his own name, perfectly legible, in its place. JESUS, SON OF MAN.

Now we saw how humans were supposed to live, and the earth breathed a sigh of relief, so happy that now there was a perfect man to rule it.


Inspiration:

The Son became incarnate in order to bring completion to creation. For God intended his creation to be ruled by a perfect human being, and without such a ruler creation is incomplete, lacking, defective. The sinless Lord Jesus Christ is the ruler creation needs, for he is truly, authentically human in the way all human beings are supposed to be. This aspect of Jesus' work is sometimes called recapitulation, a term coined by Irenaeus of Lyons to denote the idea of going over something again to get it right. - Pierced for Our Transgressions by Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach