2024-04-08 A Meditation on Tomorrow Now
“11 You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. 12 For the ministry of this service is not only supplying the needs of the saints but is also overflowing in many thanksgivings to God. 13 By their approval of this service, they will glorify God because of your submission that comes from your confession of the gospel of Christ, and the generosity of your contribution for them and for all others, 14 while they long for you and pray for you, because of the surpassing grace of God upon you. 15 Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” (2 Cor 9:11-15 ESV)
Little serfdoms and broad virtual impact: the future, as dreamt up in an atmosphere conducive to learning, may go one way or may go another. We are strangely going deep, reaching far, grappling wide, to realize evolutionary signposts unaddressed, past shifts in the mind-body, Man-machine, community-technological duality, that were signposts passed unanswered.
Unprayed for. Ungrappled with. It is a bit of a war we’ve lost, as it might seem, if only we weren’t inducted into a prevenient, determined, efficacious Life: that beyond the Grave, life’s audacious leap from the evolutionary waters into the fresh air of Tomorrow.
And then the little serfdoms and viral communications broad and traversing boundaries. The strange gated nature of today’s community met today’s enabled mobility. The determined nature of life’s Cross, of Christ’s Cross, is blindingly better than our best designs and hopes and dreams. It compensates and it dwells in unity. It sparkles in one direction and hunkers down in another direction. It causes a no-time-to-delay Response, action-reaction, to being anew and to allow for Life to continue unafraid, unfettered, not spooked, tremendous and rambunctious, Determined and pattern-solving, naturally formative and choreographed, in some way Illuminated.
Therefore today’s Peace is today’s winning venture, today’s humming determination, today’s onslaught of depressives too great to face squarely, and hopes too awesome to dare bank on: evolved life takes first a slow crawl, a backwater sojourn, and then leaps and astonishing bounds. And this is beyond our pay-grade, of a sort. Our duty is unto the better claims of a Christianity Revealed, not so much slowly evolved, but with stark Intervening insight, evolved and New. It is a Christianity holding lightly the Body, the Spirit, the Mind, the Intellect, the Audacity, the Determination, the Confrontational: it gives a spell or formula called Cruciform Life, life in service unplanned, in duty not cynical, in transparency just fit for our reaches and mental stretch. We can envision, because so much is left in God’s hands. We can labor, because so much was hastened from the Grave at God’s hands. We can be like children, or mature like adults, because He has written into the stars and into the signs and wonders, simple Encouragement and Promise.