2023-05-17 A Meditation on High-Minded Service

“15 “So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), 16 then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. 17 Let the one who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house, 18 and let the one who is in the field not turn back to take his cloak” (Mt 24:15–18 ESV)

Times they are arising, and are already here, when we hasten to put our trust in a Greater Than Thou, greater than ourselves, greater than our humdrum existence and output. When cogent and practical life goes absent. Flee Jerusalem. Flee to the mountains. Hear today the clarion call and worshipful fruit, output, product, of a heart coping through life’s sickness, calm through life’s clarity of vision, peace through the utter overwhelming Vision.

Help, with calm Word for the hour, with Command and Obey, something we long for and are grateful for, to be under orders you might say: to live our paltry existence for the sake of knowing we are doing pleasing work to an unaffected and unperturbed God and Spirit Above. That this hour of quiet reverie, this time of either amazement and worship, or of frustration and plea, is one of but a finite number that shall fill our meager lives. We shall do well to furrow and burrough, to seek and to hasten, to live in the Eternal rather than the clutching and grasping panic of a life slipping out of our grasp. This day. This hour. Flee to the mountains, or to a sense of self-love and reassurance, a calm dotingly paid out even when we wish to be prolific in work and accomplished in labor, fruitful in career, striped and symboled and uniformed in calling.

See the few lasting hopes, one for a chance to please earthly fathers and mothers and, in absence of that, a heavenly Parent. Two to be companioned by His Presence, so as to believe in what cannot be seen: the holy duty and labors of a Spirit internal, a personal aliveness, a self-worn determination, a hopeful persistence.

Something of the Divine lives within each of us. Something of the miracle-working does tame and color our output. Something of the meek obedient yet but a child, lives in our hearts, which hearts do long and hope to be Pleasing and Debt-absolved, to hope somehow to find hope in the reality of a Command and an Operation. When all else is pleading for a spiritual Companion, for Jesus, for the business of the day’s labors to consist in this friendship and together wandering, recruiting perhaps, having meals together, knowing we have no debt to any god for anything further than this Sabbath-paced existence.