2025-03-20 A Meditation on Mandate

“3 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 2 a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 3 a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6 a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7 a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8 a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.” (Ecc 3:1-8 ESV)

Mandate to soar, mandate to pause. To lift up thanksgiving for our in situ reality, to form and allow to be knit our souls around a humbler train of thought, humbler claims, humbler duties: this sounds like a second conversion experience, only the Mandate, to fight, to sign up, to be dutiful, this Mandate was never denied. Always, we held high the Gospel Banner. Always, we allowed Joy to be our prescription. Always, we demured or paused upon hearing, seeing, experiencing the Largesse of a friend, near body, or foe.

They go Large, we go meek. They go Capable, we go student. They go Exemplar, we go proselyte. Candidates for ministry, all, yet to that Fight: not a War intertwined with our Faith à la Constantinian Cause or the Crusades, so much as that come what may, we go sensitive and internal around the Faith. The Cause, we see it from inside out, we see it as Sign and Example of duty discharged. We see it as come-what-may, and our patience neither signs Christ’s Name to the outward depictions of War, nor does it withhold His careful Prayer and Cause as bound up in it, as intertwined, as a manner-of-being duty and Reckoning.

All life is reckoned with. All life is come-what-may, the bluster of War, the elation of Peace: it propagates and affects, trickles down and Changes the spirit of the age. In all this, we are students of Christ. We are nurturing a more blessed dialog and prayer life. We allow ourselves to be sensitive though armored, patient though weaponized, reflective though top-down submitted. What we are, is a sign and a portent, a bulwark and a mentality, that and who knows Christ For Us, come the assault and frontal bleak prospects; caution, the meme that suggests effectively we are not “good folk”, the ways we build upon ruined composure and confidence, rebuild the walls, never as perfect as the first time around, until we Allow and Concede to Christ’s own Resurrection strength: our Walls: they are just as sensitive and evolved, experiential and historical, dialoguing and Witnessing, as our first beauteous frame was. As beautiful. As effective and useful. As relevant and insightful.