2025-01-15 A Meditation on Being Entrusted

“29 “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” (Deut 29:29 ESV)

Entrusted, concerning some of the daringest relics of faith, the prayer warrior helms spiritual relics, the good ship Mercy, Contrition, Change and Amendment of Life; Forgiveness. To give. To see this giving, call it simply manners and breeding, in a Muslim or a Jew, in a Hindi or a Buddhist, in a free-thinker or a conservative: it beguiles and adjusts all we think we know about our own personal boast: Christ.

Entrusted, we defend the fact of contrition, and the fact of change and amendment of life. Obviously? Not so! If anything is “sacrosanct” to the skeptic, whether churched or not, it is that people do not change, that someone always was a Christian or never in fact changed to become a Christian. And it is a clever bunch we wrassle with. But to our willingness: to die the spiritual martyr’s death, if that’s what it takes, only to do so in part would be blasphemy: Christ died for us; simply to “go away”… that is not Firm and Formed Faith. That is too convenient, in this age of mansions of spirit being lost by the thousand; the diversity, the history, the architecture of a people’s group, of a neighborhood, of a wounded but resilient gathering, now made friendly and neighborly because that’s simply what we humans become once cast out or allied.

Then to the biblical giftings, and the strange schadenfreude—not strange, but easily forgotten in the rush of day—of premonitions or cadenced thoughts. We all have them. Only the other day, I had a tragedy in mind! Only the other day I thought of so-and-so. Only the other day I was frightened by a dream, or awoken with a start. And then to be Entrusted like the good soldier is Entrusted. Fate lies in our hands. Soldiers of fortune or blue-blooded soldiers of principle, the Call is to go into the warzone, to travel to the hotspot, to Invite the coffeeshop banter and that banter to see it turned into Urgency. Haste, to be that somewhat bored soldier: bored with the polite discourse, and eager to Talk Serious. Eager after all to have something, some angle, some intrigue, some puzzle, to apply our minds to. And to know from Christ Himself that it easily leads to an immediate Cross. To have been, after all, a bit too sharp. To have been, after all, a little too rocking of the boat. To have been, after all, too visionary. Our vision… these are not in the movies or in the popular culture quite, only they in fact are in both: the inspired vision of society, of a future Peace, of enabling and safer monitorings. To enable the bright star of a poor community. To enable the refugee in an encampment. To have each morning that five to fifteen minutes of prayer and study: have I forgotten? I am here on benevolence, with a Vision I man the checkpoint. With a Principle I helm the barracks. With a Notion I march the perimeter.

The circuit, our cancers and endemic sins… these we cannot simply shake. These we must be careful around, not to be too cavalier if there is a danger of relapse. Remember this, that the sins abstained from: these are a victory, even if the pangs of some sense of wrongdoing still haunt. We once were wrong in tone or procedure. And the breakage at that time still haunts: it is nigh impossible to fix a border dispute. It is nigh impossible to mend two crews, one of which accidentally or not has injured or killed another. Who can forgive those who took away our home? And so we do not limit our Forgiveness of others. We become that “I don’t know which religion you are, I just know what you just did is something I call ‘Christian’” type of observer.