2022-09-23 A Meditation on Full-On Mode

“And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment,” (Php 1:9 ESV)

Sometimes it seems faith needs to be calibrated. If our waking time needs to be measured against our sleeping time, well so too with faith: a little of the Cross, an amount of Resurrection, all in the right admixture. Some hope, but far be it from us to dwell in cloud-cuckoo land! Measure that amount of hope against an amount of warning and caution. Measure each positive statement with the “concomitant” negative statement. Do you love? Well do it such that you also correct others. Do you have joy? Well keep it within legal frameworks, no more joy than—sigh, let’s face it—honest appraisal of some nasty stuff. It’s as though we need to be careful not to expend too much of the drug called “faith” into our listeners ears.

Yet this is not so! Christianity revolves around a Total Resurrection that encountered a Total Defeat. Christianity always calls us to serve in that zone on the front lines, where we have faced War as a reality, and in such awareness, we have gone to bat, gone to the front, put all on the line in certainty that Total Victory is needed against an impossible foe.

There will be no compromises, until it is proven that one Man, and this Man a saint, rose from the dead. We are so possessed of our times and our milieu, that we can compromise on all things minus that one point. We have so much wealth of a spiritual variety, we can ignore the pundits and naysayers, and serve with the homeless and the needy, compromising only this: our comforts, our familiarities, our safety net, our fasting, our fear of being accused of violating the Temple Law with these miscreants, and we too having the hardest time divorcing ourselves from our own miscreant former life.

There will be no fuss with those who disagree: we are not here to reason with them (though we may, in downtimes, reason a bit (Ac 17:2)); we are here to demolish earthly argument and bring all thoughts in subjection under Christ. And to do so with the weapons of our warfare being spiritual; it’s not that we can’t clobber someone over the head (all of us have that capacity sometimes), but rather that the victory will only be ours if a spiritual victory, an assent, heads nodding and hearts agreeing in acceptance, is won. Majestically, we approach. That is, we want freely-made decisions. We want a Loving dynamic instead of that age-old fear that is taught; we believe that in open servanthood, based and rooted in love, there is something Accomplished untold and unspeakable: people become their own best representatives and witnesses to Resurrection strength. We believe that Man’s folly as to being fickle and unreliable when based in love, is no matter: we thrive in that zone where for a moment Love does prevail. We worry not over the frightful times of man against man, a person against his or her fellow. Those will be and come to bear on us, but that is the testing time because of it being the bondage mode, wherein we believe our lover in the Heavens will carry us through, and we, wise, satiated and aware of prayer’s power, suddenly rise up, percolate, froth, and find ourselves on a winning track. Such is the wisdom and foresight of Jesus’ teachings: they prep us in untold ways for the fight ahead.