At some point in my childhood, Star Trek in reruns made “tranya” my favorite drink. While Diet Coke surpassed it in college, tranya remains the drink of dreams: good dreams.
What is tranya? I do not know, but it looks delicious, and futuristic, and Captain Kirk drank it. The way the weird alien child (played by Clint Howard!) said the name (“tranya”) sold me.
What more did a kid need to know? Tranya is out there waiting to be imbibed after we invent it, but we must not wait for someday. The quest for tranya has no end and so we have developed a custom for the wait . . .until the day we can drink tranya indeed
Hope and I have taken to calling Saturday in our house “Tranya Day.” Why? On Saturday, we break our normal rules of civilization. I can, glorious dispensation, not just eat breakfast in bed (pancakes!), but play my Star Trek Timelines game. On the must indulgent Tranya Day, I get some time to read . . . just read!
The best thing of all is to do something new. The best tranya is the tranya nobody has ever had before today, because God helped us create a new pleasure, a new joy!
For us “tranya” has become the licit pleasure that we cannot always have, but can experience sometimes . . .on Tranya Day. In fact, no Tranya Day is like any other Tranya Day. Hope and I just drink the tranya that the new day brings . . . as much as it brings and have a good time. With God’s grace, we think of some new way to have joy and that becomes tranya too.
Pity the person who does not know God . . . the boundless source of tranya. How can this be? God has given us creativity and part of the reason for that creativity is to invent licit pleasures. These pleasures can be shared. How happy is it to try a new recipe? To make a piece of art nobody has ever seen?
Tranya!
The Kingdom of God is here now and we can experience some of the joys of that Day now. Prosperity gospel preachers have ruined the joy of the Lord by making it about money or stuff. Instead, the joy of the Lord is about real happiness. Real happiness comes from God when we are in God, but God mediates happiness to us in many ways. He made us “good” and though we are broken, His image remains. His repair mission, part of the work of the present Kingdom, is ongoing. Creativity is part of that design. Joy is part of that design.
My Nana taught me that you need no money to have tranya. You needed only imagination. She could conjure laughter and fun (tranya!) while peeling vegetables. Don’t ask me how: like her meatloaf, the secret went to Paradise with her and awaits me.
In this vast cosmos God made, almost nothing is immoral. We take the few things God had to forbid and obsess over them instead of inventing the many new pleasures that God wishes us to enjoy. Our imaginations, freed by Him, are not limitless, but vast. Our creativity, empowered by His Spirit, is huge.
There is so much vast happiness, so much love, so much joy.
Ah . . .tranya.
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