Through every toil every day,
Through every flaw do not dismay.
How short you fall can never stain
Your righteousness in Him.
The only debt that still remains
Is love and freedom in His name.
Our weakened flesh is not our claim
To what He freely gives
So at the end of every day,
"It is enough", each one should say.
In Christ, no debt remains to pay
Except to freely live.
As a few friends and I hustled to get an exposed roof covered before the encroaching monsoon clouds dumped their torrent on us, the radio in the back of the pick-up chose to encourage our efforts with the song, "Killing in the Name of" from Rage Against the Machine. As we listened to Zack de la Rocha repetitiously scream, "F#%k you! I won't do what you tell me!" with the synchronized pounding of the band behind him, something unexpectedly struck me funny enough that my friend asked what I was quietly laughing about.
"They did what they were told," I answered in relationship to Rage's COVID canceled tour. And if you want to attend their next show, you'll have to do what you're told as well. I know that's out of context for the song's genuinely noble intent but that's where humor lives sometimes. Rage's rage is radio only for now.
The radio is a powerful communication tool but it doesn't provide the same sense of being part of something big as when a booming concert moves us in shoulder-to-shoulder unison by the thousands. My wife and kids had never been to a big name concert before we attended a Newsboys show a few weeks ago and it was a blast to see them get carried along with the pulsing excitement of the crowd. It's a version of why many of us enjoy singing with the crowd in a church service more than by ourselves at home. We all love a manifest measure of unity with like-minded others. Without that, not even a ground shaking amount of rage makes the stage worth it.
Each week on my drive to Flagstaff, the giant marquee sign over I-17 North tells me to "Join X million Arizonan's. Get vaccinated." My news feed regularly ques up articles for how to win over the "vaccine hesitant". A steadily increasing stream of alarms about new variants and restrictions to manage them strives to leverage the tide of society ahead of the curve. It all had a familiar ring to it as I contemplated the history of evangelism in my time. I remember being a Pentecostal teenager and being taught how absurd the reasoning of the heathen world was (we'll call them "Gospel hesitant") and what the best strategies where for winning them over. The emphasis was on converts, for their own good of course, but the important thing was they came around to our way of thinking. Every success at legislating our faith into laws that restricted the Gospel hesitant from acting too far out of line with our worldview was loudly praised.
Evangelists for every movement and cause through all of history follow the same pattern. Whether they're trying to save the world from people or save people from themselves, they're always plagued by the hesitant who just don't see things the "right" way. And then, just when you think you've got the offender boxed in, some minor change let's a nearly identical version of it loose on the world again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
As far as examples to follow, you generally have two choices. Either strive for power and influence in favor of your cause until the next variant gives you something new to squash or live out your own convictions and let the world run it's course. There is obviously some balance between the two but if Christ is your example, it's obvious that the wisest and most powerful leader did the good he was here for and let the world run it's course. And he aimed evangelism specifically at following his example, not squashing every variant in the world. You can insert Gandhi or Buddha or whoever you like and largely get the same result to differing degrees. Or you can insert the average, echo-chamber politician and perpetuate the strife.
The world may indeed hang in the balance of humanity's collective behavior but we don't own the scale. We don't set its weights and measures or the times that it's reconciled. Authority over those things belongs only to the One who created them and none of us can summon him through science or faith to validate our cause. Even as we may rightly work to win the fight, long live the variants, those evasive and everchanging things that flaunt our limitations and refine our focus. Even as we try to convert each other in a world that inevitably returns us all to dust, may you have all the success of any humble virus at adapting to the world you're in. And even as it's dawning on us that life may be different than we imagined, let humility temper the shock that what we have strongly regarded as self evident no longer appears to be so.
God loves rednecks and I can prove it. Our central AC breathed it's last early in this most recent and newsworthy heatwave. We're cheap and at the moment broke, but mostly cheap so some of our fellow rednecks gave us a couple beat up window units they had lying around like ordinary rednecks do. They were literally stacked between the broken down car and the chicken coop. We were thrilled! The first unit was installed right away and, to fill the gap left from it being the wrong unit for the window, I cut a proper size piece of dirty, weathered plywood from the nearest scrap pile (I have several right now just to make sure we're not mistaken for HOA types). My fortune was so good that a single cut yielded the perfect board and our new-to-us AC is now securely roaring the last hours of it's marginally efficient life away cooling our living room to a chilly eighty five degrees or so.
"But what of the second unit," you ask? Why, I installed it improperly in a window on the opposite side of our house this very day! And when I went looking for the correct size board to make up the difference, I stumbled across the trashy plywood scrap I had saved from installing the other unit and, guess what?! Perfect fit with no cuts! Now we're enjoying the cool breeze and death rattle of cheap AC units in stereo! Life is good! The last part of this story is that I realized I could remove a panel from the ugly, crooked, broken, central AC on our roof and make it suck huge volumes of fresh night air into the house when it's cooler outside than our window units can accomplish inside.
I feel like we just won a championship game against the heat and I should thank some people while the cameras are on me. Thank you to my redneck friends who kept trash knowing someone like me would be stoked to call it my own one day. Thank you to my redneck wife who shamelessly cheered me on every time I solved a problem related to doing things wrong in the first place and who couldn't be happier to use someone else's trash to death with me for the thrill of a barely adequate, cool breeze. She even contributed the solution of stuffing the small whole in the board with cotton swabs so it no longer serves as a mosquito portal. And, of course, thanks to the God who has the foresight to arrange who I marry, who my friends are, what trashy board I grab at random and how I cut it to get an accidently perfect two-fer on the installation. Take that, you oppressive heat wave!
Hello stranger. Please hear me true.
I know you not, but need not know you
To give you passage into my heart
Of my own nature you are a part.
A fellow human and likewise equal
To call things good or call them evil,
To call one, "friend" or call one, "foe"
To lean on more than what we know.
I'm confident you can relate
However different each one's stake.
May common interest yield truer aim.
I'll strive to hear you. Please do the same.
In it's essence, a blind person's sense of distance is exclusively connected to the metered effort required to move through it. The bathroom is ten steps from the bedroom. The dinner table is twenty steps from bedroom. Therefore the dinner table is farther than the bathroom. This works until assisted travel is introduced. The next town is reached by walking to the car which is twenty steps away like the table. Therefore the next town is the same distance away as the table. The difference is you can only reach the next town by sitting in the car for a certain time, as if the space around you needs time to change rather you needing time to move through it. In this way, space becomes an increasingly fluid but not irrational concept to the blind person even though the sighted person knows otherwise.
As I run around my country neighborhood in the pitch black, I feel that sense of warped space. I am the sighted and the blind person at once and my mind is on high alert without the usual indicators of distance. I feel the texture and tilt of the road with each foot strike. When I know it's safe, I close my eyes so that not even the distant porch light or the faint glimmer of the setting, crescent moon aid my sense of progress or direction. The feel of the center ridge of the road beneath my feat says I'm on the right track. The effort of each leg pushing forward and exchanging balance in cadence says I'm moving forward. "Where" is a mystery that my senses are trusting to my memory. It's thrilling... and short lived. A few steps in row unexpectedly miss the feeling of the center ridge and my sense of place on the road is gone. My eyes open and the few porch lights along the way give just enough light to guide me home.
Much of faith is the same. The Kingdom of Christ is closer than the dinner table. I just cant walk to it. My feet know what to feel for but they don't always knot how to find the trail when they lose it, and it can happen so quickly. Sometimes, even with my eyes open, it's dark enough that only my memory of seeing makes me able to recognize a trustworthy path by its shadowy fragments. The rhythmic shift of my balance confirms progress and direction that natural sight can't reliably indicate. I miss a step and my eyes widen. A porch light leads me home, left on by someone who's already there and waiting for me to arrive - the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
