2022-12-17 A Meditation on Future Model Community

“But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” (2 Pe 3:13 ESV)

The model community is some fascinating notion that beckons, as we hunker down in the trenches, as we see all of life’s phases as being simply variants on the theme of war, as we dream modest but big: for there to be peace on earth.

The question of whether the faith learned in the trenches, will be our faith in that model community, when all warring has gone to peace, when we propose to pick up where once upon a time we left off, is the question of heart-change: we truly are new creations, and what seemed implausible in times past—that we should make a profession of faith—now promises to be our bedrock, while finally (question mark here) faith becomes only the foundation, and the day’s concerns become things not directly religious or faith-based.

But that is a big question mark, because in reviewing life’s stages, in some regard we always were trooping. We always hid from barbs coming from all directions. We felt unpopular (even though we had friends). We had a broken home front. We were jarred and victimized and inducted into things way too adult for us at that time. So we don’t exactly know life in that model community, with rotunda and grid of streets, with simple houses and yards for all.

We are natural troopers. We move from the trenches simply to a new kind of trenches, working on the embedded point-person aspect, or on the diplomacy aspect, or on the community-liaison aspect, or on the recruitment front, the training for a future war we pray goes easy on us. For there are apocalypses and there are slaughters. There are mutually-assured destructions and there are handshakes and simple commonality of intent, chess games and blustering claims notwithstanding. Life is an ecosystem, and each of us has to understand the importance of every playing piece.

So we’ve come to be Christians now. And how will that look, when we “move on” from first principles, faith leading to repentance, amendment and change of life, grace making more sense than any works-righteousness? It is said that for some the faith won’t “stick”. Some will have a honeymoon of belief, and then fall away. It is said that the initial fireworks and aura of love will fade. But we are of tougher stock than that. We are women and men of our word. We have indeed made that dangerous prayer, wherein—nevermind stages—we are revolutionized from within. We are now entirely New. We turned a corner, and flipped chain reactions of consequence on their head.

We awoke with a fervent desire to be purposeful and bold, to bother each other about faith. We harangue the devil. We bluster and bother the spirit in the air, that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. But in all this, also we take our calm moment and pacific outlook. We witness with our uncontrived peace of mind and quietude of being. We never set out to win that war, but it is one the Lord deigned for us to win nonetheless. To be pacific. To be peace. To be exemplar of calm and peaceful Service in the war.

For our strength is an inner strength, and our enemy ratchets up the rhetoric and implied threat, exasperated at our sanguine disposition; but no matter, whether only a remnant will survive some future war, we know the Lord’s will shall be done (as prayed in His Prayer, the “Lord’s Prayer”), that souls are carted off to eternity, of immense importance each of them, being with Him, loved and not having left this world in vain.

More than that, the proud will be brought down, and mighty deeds of Love deriving from God, will shorten the time of hardship (Mt 24:22). But oh, how Satan tries to discourage and make meaningless. So our first faith is one that sticks, because our battles were ones that had their completion, peace being made, yet in all this a trooper’s mentality: onwards, but to the helm of faith. Model community notwithstanding, we have the sternness, life upon life responding to the inner trauma, and there—alert and on watch—we are comfortable to dwell.