Don’t you just love how activists oversimplify everything?
Keep your guns. I’ve never had a good one, so I traded off the ones I did have that weren’t much good. Since I can get food without hunting, all I really need one for is home protection. The world is crazy and it’s my shepherd’s duty to protect the others near me.
But it still depends on God to supply. What He does not supply, I assume I do not need. Granted, my son living here with us (and his family) is a sheriff’s deputy with all the weapons you might expect he’d have as a gun lover. I don’t love them, but I enjoyed learning and using them in the military. Target shooting is just plain fun. And though I never really had to use it, I still have a strong tactical sense of how to use them in stressful situations. I don’t get agitated easily in moments like that.
But over the years gun ownership fell out of my religion. It’s still sensible, but it’s not an issue of “gotta have one” these days. You can’t accuse me of being a wacko peacenik or a Western religious pacifist, either. I have no delusions about some slick talent of talking people out of violence and criminal intent. I don’t suffer the Charismatic’s delusion about the power of words, as if Jesus somehow taught conjuring magic. Still, I’m honestly not worried about it.
What stands in the place of all that is hard to explain. I’ve always understood the theory of faith — do what your conscience demands and let God handle the rest. You can learn that and use it as a mental discipline. It tends to work for reasons most people don’t understand, but it works well enough in the sense that the results are generally good. But what about learning in your heart that you honestly aren’t concerned with the results?
This is the part I can’t explain. If your heart is still operating under constraints imposed by your mind, you won’t get it. If you’ve made some effort to teach your mind to obey your sensory heart, you’ll recognize it immediately. Depending on how far you’ve progressed down that path, you may be all fired up and tickled at it. That is, you may or may not experience much emotion, but something inside of you glows like the sun when people share their experiences of leading by the heart. Your heart knows, regardless if your mind understands.
No, I cannot explain the difference between sentiment and a move of the Spirit in your heart. I can tell you there is a big difference between emotion and Spirit; I’ve shared some of the tell-tale signs. Still, you are the only one who knows for yourself. The problem is, if you are deceived, you could still sit there nodding and be a complete fool about it. That’s how real faith works up against simple firm belief. The latter is deceptive and only God can break the addiction to the mind’s thrill to power.
Despite all the good and wonderful things we owe this virtual connection here at Kiln of the Soul, the one Christmas gift I most want to give and cannot is to let you see my faith in real time.
My heart tells me that in the near future I’m going to be working at some task that involves demonstrating that faith to some folks who’ve likely never seen anything to compare with it. As you might know, the heart is notoriously short on cognitive data, and long on power and faith. I’ve taken all the steps my mind can guess would help in preparing for this mission. For example, I’m now working from my laptop and tablet only, because I know with a certitude this fits whatever my heart is saying is necessary.
In the same sense I used to love guns, I used to love computers. I can scarcely tell you what a big change this is. The endless hours of hobby computing are finished. I haven’t tossed aside the skills and knowledge of either tactical gun use nor computer security and operations. I feel quite certain I’ll still use both at various times. But neither is anywhere near center stage. When you start letting your heart rule your life, no human can predict what it will do to you.
Living by your heart permits a wealth of complication and subtlety that most cannot even comprehend, because it empowers you to handle it. Merry Christmas, brothers and sisters.
