2024-09-26 A Meditation on Perspective

“3 Finally, brothers, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honored, as happened among you, 2 and that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men. For not all have faith. 3 But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one. 4 And we have confidence in the Lord about you, that you are doing and will do the things that we command. 5 May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.” (2 Thess 3:1-5 ESV)

Depending on what angle one takes on things, either the body as gathered is insincere, a mass timid and too tempted to try to please the powers that be, or the body as gathered is electric, a cohort and college Convicted and choosy as to the words to use. The latter can scarcely help but to preach: a word with their actions, a demonstration of the Power of the Spirit with their demeanor, their defeated image or rather their triumphant, held, prayed over, Emergent Image.

Depending on one’s angle the mass of people are either opportunistic and blase, plain and kissing up, or they are ones we can believe in. We can encourage with a word. We can see the diapers and swaddling cloths and Invest: no crime no foul, to be those who hypocritically sigh whenever a faith principle is named: “God has a plan”; “Sigh”. “His ways are perfect”; “Sigh”. What, in fact, are we talking about?

It comes down to an army of the individual faith warrior to spot the avenues well tended and the channels carved, to invest and inject here a few pick-me-ups, a simple reorientation: Oh, yeah, there is no punishment for voicing doubts, for puncturing the balloon of hypocrisy; this we are called to do, to steal the air from the lungs of doubtful deviance, deviousness. With a gladsome greeting and a smile on the face. It is only your hate, young soldier, that fails to see the fields white for the harvest. It is only your own efforts to please your doubting atheistic friend, that makes you duck out early. It is only your own nursing garments and manna from Heaven that makes pride, a pride that fails to see the inherent Friendship spelt out.

The soldier is always personally charged with being “that voice in the room”, that has the power to change the dynamic, to fit plug to outlet, livewire to socket, to begin to see—if the tides have run dry and the beach overrun with creeping, crawling things—room for a tidal wave of faith. We are to fight in stern comport and affinity with the soul who asks questions and tries to honor Life. We are to fight in bold alliance with the generous thought: if anyone in the room is a Christian, maybe that someone is you.

So to the angles, and to the right one chosen: we who salute have no time to abandon our Creed and our Socialization. We were raised on a knee most artistic and broadminded, perhaps. We were a class of people who could not resist making jokes about the blind or greedy submission of those “so-called Christians”, but also we preserved the Name. We saw a militant Urgency: we cannot sit around and ignore Judgment. We are being judged even as we speak, while others wallow in kissing up and faux simplicity. We are outcast and Individuals, soldiers of a Crown, a Banner lifted Most High. It is all well and good, that today we eat and tomorrow we die; this life means nothing if we are instead allotted some so-called calm, some “peaceful” way to get old. The victory is to those who come and go like a dream in the night, who did see that Angle Winsome, that Approach Ecstatic. We are no longer ashamed of the brethren, the sistren, because each holds in themselves the ingredients, the place marker or bookmark of what—in a heavenly last dance—might have been. What we might have gotten up to. A Christ-event the fuel, not for the greedy, but for the thirsty and the hungry, to ride High and Lifted Up upon. We need more juice, not some respectable amount, but More. And we are unashamed thus to dwell in the nursing troughs and the teat of Victory.