MINISTRY FROM TWO POLES

It’s coming. We don’t know when. We don’t know from where. But come it will.

It won’t be denied. It won’t be stopped. It will instill fear to our very core – fear that cripples us as we see the fabric of our illusory faith rent apart.

It will come with change, and we’ll react with sameness. In the face of the onslaught, we will shrink and cower and grab hold of every last little bit of our limited worldview, desperately trying to prevent the advent of a new, uncharted, horrific unknown.

And that which brings us comfort, that which we accumulated by the sweat of our brow and the desire of our hearts, will be the very thing that threatens to drag us down into the abyss. It will challenge our security, which is why we will resist it until we have nothing but shreds of our old egocentric values to grasp onto. And it will continue to come.

It will come with the pain of having to examine our own hearts in light of what we profess to believe. It will come with the shattering of our sense of justice, the dismantling of our concepts of morality, and the splintering of the very foundation of our form of civil leadership. It will precipitate fear of unknown proportions rising up out of our twisted imaginations. We will perceive monsters that terrify us to our core. And we will react – oh, will we react. But come it will – relentlessly chasing us with our own demons.

We will grasp the last vestiges of our traditions as if the very existence of creation depended on them. We will look backwards, striving to return to that better time when things were recognizable and predictable and orderly. The chaos that we will envision will terrify us, gnaw at our very understanding of our own identity. The more it stares us in the face, the more desperately we will reach behind us in panicked attempts to revive what is lost, rotting and gone forever. Even the horror of our past corruptions of righteousness and humanity will pale next to the sheer magnitude of the destruction of our temples and storehouses and edifices of power. And it will come even further.

We will offer up sacrifices of lesser beings – scapegoats sent out into the wastelands of our previous existence to appease the threat. We will accumulate every scrap of wealth in the hope of buying our salvation from the pending horror. We will fight over tidbits of meaningless artifacts of our existence as though ownership and control will save us from that which has been unleashed. We will even barter with other peoples’ food and water, and descend into the debauchery of unimaginable gluttony. But it will sweep aside all that we have, and come anyway.

And by the time it approaches, we’ll be standing there utterly powerless – hungry, naked, unwell, rejected and oppressed by that which we fear. And it will envelop us, surrounding us as we mourn the loss of everything that we have had and been and done. And it will overcome us in that last time and place in which we have nothing left with which to fight. And we will succumb to our own domination by that which has endlessly pursued us.

We will no longer fight, but accept what is beyond our control. Our past glory will be but a memory that fades slowly out of sight as we sink into the depths of that which holds us. We will be confused and lonely and helpless to do anything but be swallowed up into a different reality and sense of order – one that does not fit with all we have held to be true.

And when we finally open our eyes and see that all we have is each other, each and every one of us will be held in the palm of God – our creator – our redeemer – our sustainer. And we’ll see that all that terrified us was our own imaginings – what we projected onto God. And we will be awed.

And as the Kingdom of God finally dawns, we will wonder why we fought it so long – why we held so tightly to our own creations, our own selfish desires, our own hateful idols.

And we will be loved, like we always have been. But we will love – oh, will we love – like we were always meant to. When it comes.