2023-07-27 A Meditation on Peculiar Light

“3 We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, 5 because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, 6 which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, 7 just as you learned it from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf 8 and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.” (Col 1:3–8 ESV)

A soul consigned is a soul strangely luminant. A soul having touched hardship, emerges in God’s loving arms somehow a little more sophisticated. That is, no pressure to perform, but rather it adheres to something Post-political (if we accidentally wander into that no-man’s land called church politics). What formerly divided our days and our decisions, somehow is graduated from. We graduate unto a fresh sense of today’s Project and Calling. We even stop the fussing over points of pride and of disagreement. We stop the fussing over “my way or the highway!”. We stop the fussing over censored testimony, blandishments, Christmas trees ornamented with Cause and Politics.

In other words, we invite a certain distraction where our posture is a posture in motion. The soldier of the Lord is more concerned with ensuring the security, loving security, of each and every special person in their community, than in division and alienation. The soldier of the Lord is a bit special themselves, because of being at once meek but also rather in possession of a maligned and rare Creed. It is a creed, for all the weaponry, sidearms, lances, and helmets, that must glow in ember form on its own recognisance, it must be hated and persecuted, it must cause nervous laughter at times and outright shunning at other times. Yes, it must percolate and try even our immediate fellow-in-arms or gal-in-arms.

That is, some are a lightyear away from their former associations, the nurturing upbringing somehow latched on safely and hip for the journey, but the ones for whom no time was spent learning to coexist, suddenly and strangely gone down for the count.