How Long Will You Drift Among the Broken Monuments?
by Donavon L Riley

Perhaps Plato? Perhaps Buddha is perfect? Perhaps Moses, with all his laws and visions? Mohammed, with his fervor and fire? Kant, with his pristine reason? Shakespeare, weaving human frailty into immortal verse? Goethe, grasping at the infinite through language? Tolstoy, wrestling with the soul’s deep currents? Nietzsche, mad with the idea of the Übermensch? And on and on, each man stepping forward like a guide from the mist, parading their brilliance, yet carrying the weight of their incompleteness. We’ve worshiped their words, their philosophies, their visions, but still, we remain unsatisfied. They shine briefly, then flicker out, leaving behind fragments, whispers of truth. But none are whole. None are full. They lead us to the edge, but leave us staring into the abyss.

Yet, standing among them, there is One different from the rest. Not a memory, not an idea, but the fullness of mystery itself—the God-Man. In Him, there is no fracture, no incompletion. His human goodness is divinely whole, not a half-step toward truth but the whole truth embodied. His righteousness, not strained by time or limited by human frailty. His mercy, infinite and real, not a fleeting ideal. His beauty, not a concept or abstraction, but radiantly alive. Everything in Him is complete. Nothing is merely miraculous because everything human in Him has become divine. He is the bridge, the fulfillment, the culmination of all that every philosopher, poet, prophet, and dreamer has grasped for but could never reach.

So what now, O sleeper? How long will you drift among these broken monuments, these half-complete idols? How long will you linger in the haze of human achievement, worshiping the fragments and forgetting the whole? Wake up. Turn to the One who stands beyond this endless parade of imperfect men. He who is both the beginning and the end, the deliverer of souls from their long captivity, from the grip of death. He alone can take the shattered pieces of your life, your striving, your longings, and make them whole. He alone makes complete what is human by drenching it in the divine.