“7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. 13 By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 17 By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” (1 John 4:7-21 ESV)

Amid many mysteries, Christ’s person is an Encounter and neither entirely opaque nor translucent, He is a Rorschach blot, an invite for us to Project and to fuss, to diminish and to mock. Exactly who He is to us, is wrapped up in the come-to-Jesus haste and urgent ways we pigeonhole each other—including Him—and the ways we go patronizing, go accusatory, go tolerance. We tolerate Him, never quite affording Him the opacity and individuality, to be All Things. 

Because wouldn’t it just be fitting… for Him to be at our service, our beck and call, our gladsome Decision to look down a bit over our noses, at His simple digs. What if. The mystery of What If. The Invite from a Christ, to unburden ourselves, to punish His lack of a magisterial “Wizard of Oz” contraption, is an Invite we relish but also in lightsome saddened yet joyous times, we Reflect: He is what the world needed. He is what the Spirit of the Ages upbuilt and raised up.

Mission Critical, then, is an Invite to be Post-Relationship, Post-Induction, Post-Rapport. We operate in the vicinities of each other’s personalities and personas, with something that melds beyond any opacity, into the very bones and soul of the Man, the Woman. We learn to lean in on our personal Jesuses, rather, to be Helm and Team with her or him. With he or she. With a burgeoning, buzzing and lifegiving Symbiosis. Careful, dear Soldier: at your fingertips is the diminished View on Christ, and the Fact of betrayal or denial when push comes to shove. Because His mission critical Status is overlooked, His personality a reflection or projection of our own needs and wants.

Also, He relieves us of the pressure to be like Him entirely: if we know sin, He—it is reassured—knows us despite that light. Despite that fright factor of what are our own projected sins as we nod off or forget the Disciplined Thought. Mission Critical is to Engage the friend as much as the foe, as we lean in on each other and Rely, Trust that the right things are vacated, absent, the seductive thoughts or compromised Inner Being, is no more. Everyone is heavy and offensive, on some level. Likewise, everyone is post-Correction, post-Self-Analysis, post-Discipleship, to know and to love in spite of Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death. And when we see this in a peer, it is with God’s eye perch and perspective. It is us Using Christ to anticipate and work out our own sins.

The militant, then is mission critical around really learning not to judge others but rather to Reflect on oneself. Our vaunted thoughts, our dreams of a Future and a Hope for loved ones, our utter vulnerability towards being, like Christ was, immediately Engaged and Harmed… for the better of the community, but oh, would we willingly have sacrificed as much? Christians die daily. Christians give of themselves for the one taught and for the one Honored as Holy even though the sins are projected back upon mister, miss Teacher. That is, “projected” as in attributed to the person we behold: we attribute our own sins to them, because isn’t that plausible? Isn’t that cache and schadenfreude? In the haste of life, Nothing, repeat Nothing, is calmly reasoned through. Already we have sacrificed Christ. Already we have rubbed the salt in the wound. Already we have angled for our own betterment or at least avoidance mechanisms for blight and mildew, that is, avoiding the Hope we instill even in the blighted ones. That we are copacetic with Boredom and Uninteresting Service, this is part of our Cross in life. It is the way we ignore so much that is sophisticated, and we work simply for the ye and amen.