2024-09-18 A Meditation on Safe Landing

“2 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” (James 1:2-4 ESV)

Some sort of glide, some sort of safe landing place: would it seem strange such wealth flies under the radar? The enemy’s best bets as to what to surveille are rooted in a variant theology, a different philosophy, a more odd and more strange mindset. They observe; as for us, we live into Jesus’ will for us, flourish, are content with the slim financial pickings perhaps if by counterbalance we are rich in friendships, in sanity of mind, in reassurance that come Judgment Day largely we are the upright and moral crowd.

We are content even if in full-on pleading mode come Sunday worship, “help the pain”, “help the diagnosis”, “help the rote habits”, come prayer time, come daily routine. We are content even if the cipher has already been broke, the childhood a trauma story, the adolescent years a wild search effort for placement and meaning, the grown years a cubby-holed remove from anything that might jar or frighten or involve too deeply our best intimations of the Man, the Woman inside of us.

To glide, to safely land, is to fly in the face of the down-to-earth facts of life: brother on brother, neighbor on neighbor, sister on sister, the angst-ridden hungers—enmities, frustrations, infringements—creating wild fantasies and temptations, to forget “do no harm”, to wonder if only it would all just go away, to ask if we care. To ask us, being the good Christians we are, to reject any and all revenge fantasy, but too: this is no different than a cancer or a diabetes. It cannot quite be cured; we put on airs of calm and innocence, we put on airs of friendship, when a good hug is needed but forgotten, when a sacrifice of the kosher aspect of it all is brought to the altar, when a urgent Word is breathed into the shared listening-space.

To be a soldier is to be unapologetic that our ability to glide and find safe landing, is nothing to be ashamed of, no product of anyone’s good looks or intelligence, but a trusteed Gift; people see not the outward appearance but rather something more gentle in an interlocutor; we see in each other that some are a million miles removed, having not had these sets of life experiences, and we need that verity, that assurance: we have been entrusted with an amount only so far as what we are capable of handling, but called to handle we certainly are. We are called to defense, to man the gates, to dream big about just how lovingly—see the flip-flop and indecision—we relate to each other, all frustrated enmities washed away because of Christ. Because of Him, and Him alone: who mourned the sins of His people, who lived a notch or two closer to the Blood. Who was all things to all people, and ours to live for and to die for.