2023-07-15 A Meditation on Fragile Discovery

“37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; 38 therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”” (Mt 9:36–38 ESV)

Fine as day as any to recruit. Bearing in mind, the spirit alights first here and then there: unto Jesus as He emerged from baptism; in the unlikely inspired demoniac, the babes and innocents, the plaintive injured or blind; in our colleague or unimposing yet inspired friend. It is a fluid reality, and bears lightness of being, to see amidst all tension and worry the soul set free and now prophetic, visual prophecy of salvation history; oral statement of God here and now; unwitting vision for what good tendons and foundations should today be laid.

For all are two steps away from a devilish route and output. But we are those who listen, expecting to hear from all quarters, from all comers. The alternative is to grasp and clutch, to fail in that trust fall or penitence that did cause us to emerge washed and possessed of Ultimate Things as a spiritual reality.

Therefore the will to fight is no grandstanding or bellicosity untamed, but a call this and every day to be those recruited: we sign onto a Decision that is significant. No, sir depressive, not all decisions amount to the same thing. No, mister irreverent, not all routes lead to the same city. We are today capable of adopting a newfound, timely, urgency, to rise up and fight, to destroy all arguments and lofty opinions, to see that voice of the saved alternately that voice of the martyred, in the air and climate all around us: the spiritually martyred and at some point those literally persecuted out of their very lives.

We pray for leaders, as their Experiment is underway, Called to lead yet just as susceptible as their many footsoldiers, as their vast army: just as likely to have a nerve pinched and, rather than bringing it before the Lord in prayer, to settle for something clutching and controllable, but unfortunately thereby crimped and compromised.

So we delight in the knowledge of the Holy Spirit as One not afraid, but also not grandstanding or bellicose, but with urgent sense of quiet calm, humored peace, daring assurance, as the battle is joined yet we… we are just as humored as ever before, though many are making sacrifices untold. The battle wounds are worn with a certain pride. The devil tricks us into seeing all is quiet and inoffensive, when we are those mightily offended by the false prophecies. Unlikely bedfellows are joined by vast spiritual affinities; this is used both to Good and to Ill, by our same Spirit. People find likenesses in their peers along strange and subtle battle lines. We each of us know the fragility of war, that we are half of the time fighting ourselves, until we be reformed and renewed, by a Spirit militant (see Jesus’ words) and victorious; if we are headed to Heaven then we are the victors. Only this, that we know our time on this earth is three-dimensional and needy of an ethos, a character, a policy, a crusade, a Cause. We are not blindly replacing all things with a very compromised simplicity, though His yoke is easy. Rather, the simplicity of a doctrine merely obsessed with “submission” is met with the complexity of a doctrine concerned with flourishing. Human flourishing, neighborly sanity, ecclesiastic humility. We are those submitted and educated in certain schools and thus a bit nervous: as we march on our beloved halls of learning and experience, have we alienated those much less endowed than ourselves? Have we begun to tickle that nerve that they just hate? Just as much as we hate the ignorance. All this is cause for no longer measuring who is the winner, but submitting to a Divine measuring rod that works in unexpected ways. It is a day to recruit, because we are learning new languages and displays of a deserved confidence in our Father in Heaven and in the brethren and sistren.