2023-05-07 A Meditation on Alert

“But stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”” (Lk 21:36 ESV)

Heightened alert, news ambient of past hardships, degradations, futility, while hope forward and promising, no-time-to-delay commitment to the cause: this is the soldier’s unique outlook. He or she was once was feted and marching along in life, until untold would-be defeatist attacks, personal and all-encompassing, entered in upon their sacred space. Until untold ill fruits were dished out to them, to him or her, no fair accounting of their love shown, no fair administration of their hard work and commitment to make something of this their life on earth. No fair reckoning with a higher Judge who saw their deeds done in love.

And to look forward: it is somehow the legitimacy of the cause that unites us to Joy, living on a promise, abiding in a memory, all life explained in one past gesture of costly love, of innocence sacrificed, of others near and dear to us who were “all-in”: in the game and in the moment; we are certain of this, that our words had divine power to build and then like the lot of Job in the Bible (Job 1:8), the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son decided to give Satan permission to try us. And tried we were, hated by a common-sense world around us, hated for being woman, for being man; hated yes for convicting the observer of their own plush abode. Hated for suggesting that bad things happen in direct proportion to manifest goodness of soul. Bad things happen to good people.

So the heightened alert, not clamoring after a bygone era but hopeful and accepting of promises made today, to be there for one another, to find a stark place of conversion and confession out of which blossoms real patience in the midst of hardship. Out of our loss comes patience for the journey. Out of our decrepitude comes willingness to work in the new and horribly compromised framework of life. We are willing not to harbor bitterness but to say Yes in divine, inspired way, to the offer of anything by way of sanctuary, by way of teamwork, by way of a common foe called the Devil and Mammon and Pride and Ill-will.

Will is good for the journey: the will-power and desire of Man’s heart not to bear grudges, not to seek recompense; the ogres who torment us are in cynical times seen as mere caricatures of what all people do to each other, the bullying, the usurping, the convenient advantages taken; but we have this Life within us, to burst onto the scene with divinely-inspired Joy. We have this Life within us, to bless and to nurture, to love and to heal; to undo the years that the swarming locust ate, and undo the decades of compromised labors.

Those labors were not in vain; though sad and cause for mourning are the unmet opportunities. Whilst others were for their season in good form and raising families and flourishing in friendships, we were down and out. We were a little too foundational and bedrock: life hated us. Life questioned that Cause and that Joy for which we are hated and persecuted. Life said “Ha!” to us, as though we were gaming the system with our pleasant outlook. Life hated our femininity or our masculinity. Life wanted us to cease and desist now and forever, from the zeal and bedrock and commiseration that endears a few special souls in the community, to one another. Who are now fellow-travelers. Who now alight upon God-things in view of the heightened alert: alert because we know the enemy’s wiles. Alert because we fight with no man but with spirits in high places (Eph 6:12), crushing spirits, abusive spirits, reckoning as though only if heard for nothing else then heard for our gratitude for the arena of peace, the bubble of safety, the time lent to us, time that was stolen in the case of the lives of others; time, in which we falteringly speak as though duty-bound to the ones silenced and to the ones hated for all manner of thing, from the color of their skin to their identity in marriage choices, and so on.