A Meditation on Deciding To Believe

2023-06-01 A Meditation on Deciding To Believe

“17 By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 19 We love because he first loved us.” (1 Jn 4:17–19 ESV)

Probably the biggest sell today is the firmness of mind, the cadence of spirit, that does walk as the Forgiven rather than as the Accused. For we blindly agree with our accusers, in some things. We blindly harbor fears that at the last we shall be divvied up and accused, sinful and wretched. We harbor fears we shall not make the grade, or make the cut. Because our brand of faith is insufficient; people sigh over us, and talk to us patronizingly. People have a basis called prior gossip, that they bear allegiance to. People dislike our origins story or our Christian personal history. And it seems nothing we can say will please them. Something of our integrity must be robbed. For it is a high game, many winds, in the Christian society.

Today, we bear allegiance to a living dynamic, firm in mind and strong in spirit, to tackle, take head-on, walk into the good and obliterate the evil, with story upon Scriptural story: Christ was hated, judged unworthy, damned to hell, and all this in just one morning’s work. If nothing else, this is the sum of our Scriptures. And always we have the opportunity joyously to go to first principles, first penitence, first equation balanced and solved.

So the flagrant request to “relax”; “make quaint conversation”; “avoid scary words” meets the determined Zealot: us, sold on a quest, a platform, a reaction to the imputed infamy, by meeting it with fighting zeal: God designed us to be welcoming for His brand of Grace. God designed us to inspire, lead, and to pray, to teach and to uncover: we uncover the deeper secrets, that all life is pent up in unforgiveness, and this day we hasten, rush to the pace of the Cross. We are aggressively hopeful and well-humored. We are bravely pragmatic, sanguine, talkative or quietly meditative. We can do all things through Him who walked this earth and loved those whom He met.

This day, we do not fear to be reliant upon a Spirit opposed, a contrary turn, an inimical cut: though all the world be cynically assembled against us, we are in allied territory, territory of a daring allegiance: we bear loyalty to that Cross, and trust we will be strengthened for the heat of the day, that this mild decisiveness will play out strong and mighty for the task. Yes, we hush and fear to oppose, but as ill spirit divvies up, spills forth, damns what was Man, Woman, we are unafraid to be those Opposed and Contrary. Here we dwell in a light of a Man immediately taken to His Cross, a Man already liminally dwelling in the life-to-come, already cleaned up and healed at each working joint and point of invasion. Simple love and life invested in the ligaments and in the every portion of Man’s body and soul: air, healing, health, Resurrection, workings-together. It is no fear then to sleep, to take our rest, in this optimistic, upwardly ascending, mentality.

So we feel made-over and new. We feel like the damnation has passed overhead and we… we survived, for the sake of a few prayers or silently-harbored faith. We are firm on this, that as we fear the general mindset, the status quo, we also are bold in the faith that our interpretation is valid and strong for the course. The enemy backs off. The cynic retreats. A war that had threatened our horizon, is talked down, no longer fought. Because a new day dawns, and we are still here, still in that in-between stage prior to final judgment, but given assurance we are goal-getting, winning, attentive and hopeful it shall bear well for us. For indeed it shall.

No longer accepting compromise, we are those promised unto upward gaze, heavenward. We dare to discover a relaxation of the essential, needed fight. The clasped fist, the meek hope, the simple rest, all this is vouchsafed when like Christmas morning we are awarded some undeserved prize. It is a trust-fall, a carefully deescalated rest, an astonishing imputation that yes we are those who now deserve, who are prized and awarded with untold newness of life here on this earth, now redeemed earth: the quiet and the joys, the simple gifts and pleasures, the end of fearing to be attacked or criticized just at the moment when we start to trust. We are those who have overcome, and all that on no strength of our own, but because of Him who loved us. Determinedly, against the status quo, with no reason except that such was God’s intention for each one of us individually. So it is love that breaks the mold.