2023-08-08 A Meditation on Found Anew

“24 And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” (Heb 10:24–25 ESV)

Vibing off of the brethren, off of the sistren, we coach and discipline ourselves into a frame of mind, into a manned station, into a Calling invoked, used to become alert, to feel useful, to see far and wide beyond just the day’s circumstances.

Snappy to show allegiance, determined to live into the calling: the Christian soldier blesses, invokes with a prayer, the service-minded work for the day. The soldier is already victorious for here, there is an end to hostilities, a peace, something that seems to make her or him almost—as soldier, as warrior, as peacekeeper—a victim of her or his own success. So, to the calling and to the station: manning a space reserved for the one whose enlistment was the fruit of a distant vision, seeing around a corner many others blanched or demured at: too much for us; who cares, so long as there is peace in our generation?

Who cares, indeed. To teach the youth, to bless the coming generations, to take a moment just to pause and give thanks: this is what we’ve long hoped for. This dialog, this trooping around together, this salutary greeting to friends new and old, is cause and circumstance lived out.

Then to the stations, the soldier’s peculiar domain, if of a religious, Christian stripe, to worry day and night regarding that staid edifice down the street: is Grace being preached? Have we sufficient faith in Christ, in Jesus, to understand recruitment: certain souls must be there, cannot be overlooked, are part of the cipher called Sabbath unity. Yet then too to see how much rupture there is. How much urgent Call to enter in upon and warm the cooler recipients of Grace: those who fear worldly society things, fear provincial spirits, fear cliquish snobbery, fear people who lack the patience and time to come together.

Grace is never stale, but puts a bounce in our step. It is the strength of greeting the one looking here and there for a safe place to rest their gaze, nervous, bound in all manner of ways, hurting for that message that is at the ready in each of us soldiers and partners in the Gospel: today, if you hear His voice, thank the Lord for reason to celebrate. We have reason, to celebrate a sense of ecstatic fruit borne out of honest pain revealed. For a moment, pain and impossibility, on the parenting front, on the honoring of parents front, on hard-to-face facts of the insistent division: either obsess and cower in the fear of sins past, or rise and celebrate in the new life springing forth from those rubbish thoughts today redeemed. Compost of the soul. Seedbed of the heart. Trellis of the mind.

For once, we were excited to bear witness within the gathering, within the fellowship, within the coming together. For once, we didn’t cower in our own little world, but genuinely warmed to see the brothers and the sisters. For we prayed into and sought out and marched in hopes of finding today’s Good News. We dabbled this way and that for a line of attack, a courageous point of view, a reason for the celebration, a gentler pasture. This we found.