“10 According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. 11 For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— 13 each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. 14 If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. 15 If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” (1 Cor 3:10-15 ESV)

Until the center starts to wobble, the heavy combat is still in infancy. Spiritual progress, alertness, Encounter and Entering In starts when some focused energy serves as a new Pinion, that the Other Matters may in subconscious Love, in our subconsciouses’ Remedial, Positive Mindset, Eternal Fixer-Upper, rework and reassign and Create: Create a slow Passion of our own, our own Crosses, our losses in life, our hopes and dreams, our Belonging to the healing Contingency.

And the brink is terrifying, but again to the pinions, the supports, the foundation: we have, if nothing else, this to hold on to: that Christ is for us, even as we will be tempted and tried but only according to what He gives us the strength to forthwith undergo. The Encounter, words are too abundant at the Excitement Factor of life in community, life in Service, life on the Front Lines. We are those “heirs” who hold our accounts in a special Remove, because to play around with the machinery… this is a scary game. So much of our heart is on the line. So much of our Reason for Being is potentially called into question. So much of our composure is rattled and mocked, and as the Presence is discerned, wailing sirens of Surrounding Prayer do lead us ever so gently into Society’s New Tomorrow.

Hold fast, then, to the pinions, the crimped but Solid as Steel foundational other-mindedness: change up the pace a bit, and see broad horizons that lead to ever broader Healing. We envision, and parents and friends, each suddenly jolts into a right place. We envision, and career and caution suddenly invent themselves. We are newly Cautious, because time is finite, and the stakes couldn’t be larger. And most, some at least, of whom we meet are well aware of the rat race, but too, the Potential Discerned in simply some fashionista Fascinating resume of the Spirit of Company, of Friendship, of mutual Battle Service.

The Christian is primed for an End to the malaise and Beginning of strangely Optimistic, terrifyingly-so Confidence, that one day even meager little we ourselves will Rise Up, to new heights we’d never think ourselves worthy of. All this because Christ is a Man blanketed with Gold, and yet His eternal gift and bequest to each of us, is Spiritual in prognosis, Immaterial in fact, Airy in composure. We will live more Contented than those who accumulate material wealth: such accumulation can even become its own Hell. Yet we careen down said route, all the more distanced from Hey, my burden is easy and my yoke is light. Hey, the birds of the air and in the trees have no worries, why should you Worry?

The fact is, a vortex entered via His Cross, wherein we will be restored to our loving family and friends, but on the Other Side of a trial, of Life Experience and Maturing in the Faith. We will hear of wars and rumors of war, but the energy is in the younger generation, not in us who have wasted our youth in partying and profligacy. Only even Now Christ is able to restore us, to make something of that experience. But the sheer terror of life minus His patient Hold: the fact, not all works will be saved, much will be burnt up, but this is that we might rely not on ourselves but on Him.

It is no con game or pyramid scheme, either: the contented in life are just like that loving mother or father in the faith, that friend or sister or brother in the faith-filled Family. And we can have this heaven on Earth mildly put, when trials have punctured the covetous secrecy or Ambition. We can Enter in upon the soldiers’ war in certainty that Heaven and Hell are real, and we are the guinea pigs of a generation two thousand years hence who will diagnose and microscopically analyze decisions made in an earlier frame of evolution, at least, of the evolution of Morals and of Tools (that is, mankind’s own evolution being either indiscernible or nothing, on said scale any longer). We will be like that skeleton of a T-Rex, that is somehow Proof: the Spiritual has not entirely been obtained, just yet.