Except ye become as little children.
(Apocatastasis: starting over; restoration of an initial state.)
(Jesus as the alpha and the omega. The omega and the alpha.)
Jesus bends the straight line of time and experienced reality from a straight line into a circle or a horseshoe. And the end and the beginning look at each other, They are the closest to each other. Jesus crosses that divide. It is the rebirth. Jesus tells Nicodemus, “I know how to get where you want to go, but you can’t start from here.  Anywhere you are on this circle is further from the place I am; and the place you should be. The closest place to the end is the beginning.”

Do not miss the transition points:
Jeremiah 17:19ff
"This is what the Lord said to me:
Go and stand at the all the gates of Jerusalem.
Say to the people, 'Be careful not to carry a load on the Sabbath Day or bring it through the gates of Jerusalem. Do not bring a load out of your houses or do any work on the Sabbath.  Keep it holy..."

This is a continuation of a previous thought regarding Christ--he whose life is indescribably described where two lines cross— as the invisible fulcrum on which all things pivot. He IS the Sabbath. He IS the doorway.  

Jeremiah is making the connection that the Sabbath is an invisible door.

The Lord warns in Jeremiah: Do not miss the invisible transition points--these Sabbath Doorways.  See them. Separate them clearly and with devotion: keep them holy.
This inability to maintain an attentive eye towards the relationship between things—to keep it holy—is a constant mistake committed by those who struggle with God.   The unseen relationship between two worlds IS ALSO the doorway between two worlds, two realities, two stages of thought, two paradigms, two levels of consciousness, two lives.  These transition points are thresholds.  They are not simply a tether between one work week and the next or between outside the city and inside the city; they are an invisible door--a quantum wormhole hidden behind the wardrobe.  A rift transporting between what is above and what is below, between heart and mind, intellect and faith, faith and works, emotions and reason, material and spiritual, a part and its whole, and a whole and its parts, and so on…  They are a doorway to new and more accurate visions of the many worlds you inhabit.  In them and through them you discover which world is greater and which is lesser, which world is outside and which is inside, and which world sits within which.  And so God does not take lightly the mistake of ignoring the background in lieu of the foreground, or vice versa, ignoring the foreground for the background. You need to see both.  Regularly, rhythmically, cyclically—at the frequency of life, you need to see both.   But if you never find the doorway between two worlds, then you are forever trapped in one. So what now?  How can you find a door you can’t see?  For it is only by seeing the doorway as separate from your current reality—by keeping it holy— that you may truly walk through it. 


Jeremiah hints the answer to seeing invisible doors is related to not carrying a load--unburdening, letting go-- as you pass through.  You can't bring anything with you.  He describes these holy transition points as the Sabbath and the city gates, and commands the people not carry a load on or through them respectively. 
He warns!   He raises his voice and his fists at the city gates! He warns that your constant resistance—your consistent pushing or pulling in one world—allows these vital thresholds to other worlds to slip past unnoticed.  If you push-on through, then you miss the keyhole. If, for example,  you never put down your load to crossover from the outer world to the inner, then you will miss the threshold; never even realizing your sandaled foot passed for the briefest of moments through something called an inner world at all.  In your constant striding from peak to peak, stepping right over the valleys, you will notice neither the heights at which you walk nor the depths beneath your feet.  If everything’s resistance against a load, then the Sabbaths fade away and everyday is Monday.  And, then, there really is no change. Jeremiah warns:  when you carry a load from outside the city to inside, then no matter which gate you cross, you never really enter it.  It is only in unburdening the weight of…of whatever, of “being you,” that you may see between, see how things relate, that you may see clearly the invisible door and walk into the city of God.

Jesus connects things:
Like Sunday connects Saturday to Monday.
Like the rest connects two notes. 
But not only does He connect things, he is also in the things he connects. He is in all, and yet he remains hidden to us. 

It might be that our ability to see Jesus holding the world together at all, is precisely through His invisibleness at the fulcrum of things; at the hinge of events; at the transition points; at the center of the cross. Those places where life pivots are supposed to be pivotal, but they are often places we don’t notice (and ignore at our peril) because they sit in between one thing and the next.  They are the valley between two peaks and the peak between two valleys—or as the Lord himself laments: “at every high place and under every spreading tree.” They are at the crossing of two events—two lines of thought.  At the axis on which our world turns, although not visible or audible, He is nonetheless always there.  Even in his body on the cross I can see his hands, east to west.  I can see his crown of thorns and his feet—north to south.  But at the intersection, it is his unseen heart that is truly on display . 


When we disconnect—when we disconnect one event from another, one life from another, inside from outside, intellect from faith, church from state, emotions from reason, spirit from law, breath from prayer, news from good news, alpha from omega, first from last and last from first—we are leaving relics of idol worship at all those critical junctures, casting lots for Jesus’ clothes, trying to separate a seamless robe, desecrating the cross.


Strangely, Jesus is also the great separator: “brother from sister, mother from child”
In His moment of visibility to the soul; He cuts.  He is both cut in two, and cuts in two.  He is separated and separates. And in that separating, He joins anew what was previously un-joined. He connects again what had been disconnected.

The moment he is called out as the chosen one and the spirit newly rests upon his shoulders like Elijah’s mantle, Jesus is lead by the spirit into a wilderness of suffering and insufficiency—because that is the state of all man. And in that state, in that place, he faces the ultimate representation of adversity--The Adversary--that which opposes all man. Why? Why at the beginning?  
Suffering--vulnerability--want--death-- is laid out before him at the beginning, because that is where his journey will end. And before he can minister--transform--change--before he can relieve the world’s suffering--it is absolutely fundamental that he confronts the question of what to do about his own suffering and insufficiency—of the temptation of not having, but having the power to get.  
What does he do in that wilderness—in that state? 
What do you do? That same wilderness of suffering and death is of course your natural habitat. What do you do?
Do you have the power to change lifeless green paper into bread and satisfy yourself?  The world says you do. Jesus says to the world, “I don’t need what you are offering.” He is stating that in your chronic condition of suffering, life is not about getting what you want--it is about accepting it.  And those are very different things. Opposite actually. It is facing it.  Not avoiding it. He knows real life actually exists outside of your wants.  Transcends it. 
"More than bread alone" is the tap on my wife—Betsy’s shoulder in the grocery store by the cash register worker who she talks about all the time and cares for and prays for and has developed a relationship with; and says things like, My friend is not here today. I wonder where she is? How she is?
What is the goal of a trip to the grocery store?  Where does life happen in the grocery store? Is it the exchanging  of a plastic card for bread?  
But then, right in the middle of our lives, right in the middle of “I don’t have.  I must get,” right in the middle of the grocery store…a tap on the shoulder.  It’s her! And look!  She was on her break and she saw Betsy and wanted to see her. Then, two people smiling at each other in the middle of their lives. They talk about life.  They talk about hurts and joys.  And Jesus looks over to the Adversary with a smile on his face, “See, where life is?” 
When Betsy gets to her car, she realizes she inadvertently stole a few items at the self-checkout and has to go in to pay for them.  Why did that happen? Because she had left the wilderness of want and inhabited the kingdom of heaven.  And, she, a creator of new worlds,  takes joy in that moment, too. 


Where is life? It transcends our sufferings and our wants. It is more satisfying than a break at a work. It is worth more than bread alone.

The mysterious plant at the end of the book of Jonah touches him literally—literarily. It connects to the fragile, fleeting nature of his own existence.  The plant is Jonah’s fragile ego growing above his head—this plant he cares so much about.  A distinction is being drawn between caring for this fragile I and true caring.  My furious mental labor over the lava lamp, ameboid outgrowth of Me requires that I encapsulate and float away from my world and think about what I observe.  It is a separate, alone, thinking kind of effort—a brooding, straining, selfish kind of caring.  True caring—true effort and labor in God’s cosmos— is a connection; an intertwining of two broken things: my life and my world. 
But all I want to do is sit and look at the world—at that great city of Nineveh—as an outside “objective” observer, and not burn while I do it. Yet there I sit in frustration and anger.  My head burning.  My flimsy, little structure can’t keep up with the heat and the sun.  My own mental effort, my own thoughts even burn at the loss of the little relief I have for a moment—that little shade--at the “wrongness” of its leaving—at the exigency of the plant which was there when I woke up and disappeared while I slept.