A Sacrifice

I have made choices while deeply absorbed into a world of moral folly. Consequently, my choices were foolish, taking place outside the boundaries of my calling and covenant with Christ. Some of them resulted in permanent changes that I never foresaw, stuff I live with to this day, and more coming. A few of those consequences God redeemed by miraculous changes. Those changes came because they serve to enhance the fundamental value of my testimony of God’s glory.

What serves His glory is simply the fulfillment of my reason for living; it is, by definition, in my best interest. To imagine an interest in anything outside His glory is the doorway to Hell.

There is a sense in which Our Father respects our choices, though. Going back to start over and recover the potential of all He offered is not consistent with His glory for reasons that require you understand His divine character. I can’t explain it, and asking the question is a waste of time. So the net result is that I take the calling He offers that excludes a whole lot of blessings I could have had, but will now never know in this life. I placed myself into an alternative sequence of possible and probable events, as the expression goes, and God still has a plan to use me despite my silly choices.

But part of His use for me includes redemption by taking better options along the path into the future. That I am aware of the moral optimum of what might-have-been and should-have-been serves to teach me that I should listen better. Departing Eden didn’t change Creation; it changed our ability to cooperate with Creation. We no longer have that wide open moral instinct to do what’s consistent with reality. We are forced to guess, and if we don’t activate the heart-mind connection, our guesses won’t make a whole lot of difference eternally — all of them will be wrong because the whole thing rests in the wrong place. But with the heart-mind on the throne of moral decision, I can do a lot better.

And my heart reminds me constantly of things I could have had but can’t go back to reclaim. I testify to the verity of that thing even if I can’t claim all of it for myself. This is a tension that we cannot leave behind because it is fundamental to our fallen existence. It’s a part of the time-space constraints that constitute a significant symptom of the Fall. We can’t simply choose to take our awareness and go back in time to restart some process that turned out wrong. I can only strive to recover what’s left. Part of what’s left is my prophetic calling.

Even that requires the moral consideration of things on multiple threads, something foreign to our cultural mythology. Moral choices are not linear and certainly not restricted to one thread of consideration. There are multiple parallel threads that do not necessarily jive with each other in my human reason. There is no single logically clean and perfect choice anywhere. His divine will for me is not that simple; it requires a certain kind of artistry that is far more than artistry. Faith is its own thing, with its own unique kind of virtuosity that we exercise far above any mere mental awareness. Nothing that I, or any other human, or all of us together, could express that moral truth with clarity or depth that a mind can absorb and process.

Net result: My calling and my sense of peace with God requires that I live in an urban environment and do my best to ignore all the problems that causes me personally. My fleshly human desires have become aware of all the sweet goodness of living more naturally without all the pollution, but my heart says that would be selfish against the particular calling on my life at this time. I can’t do what I have to do anywhere else; not now. This is not meant to portray me as some noble, saintly martyr, nor someone seeking a cynical excuse to wallow in urban hedonism. And it serves no moral purpose to blame any number of nameless other folks out there for creating this mess through which I must wade. I take this path knowing that it is not optimal to my human health, and not optimal for helping me stay in close communion with God’s Creation.

So instead of lying naked on the ground next to my natural hut in the wilderness, I go outside and touch the highly hybridized shrub that the landscaping service chops into squarish shapes. I ride my bike along paved (and soon unpaved) routes humans make to touch some wilder bit of nature and try to stay away from power lines and cell towers for just a little time now and then. I go outside for brief moments in today’s rainy weather and just feel Creation as best I can in the middle of one of the largest (area-wise) urban expanses in the US. I live below the official poverty line and consume what the grocery store offers within my limited budget, praying that my appetites can be adjusted to come closer to that Edenic ideal within the range of what they have.

If you can do better for yourself, please do. I’ve developed a form of tolerance that I wish upon no one. It includes having seen things I cannot un-see and hope you never see, because I suffer with the visual memories. Would you like to extract human body parts from the wreckage of a motor vehicle? Did you know that freshly ripped human flesh can stink? Those images did not come from God, but from Satan and his torments. I’m not “tough;” I’d rather not have seen such things. They do not ennoble; they are scars from my folly. They represent a vanity of vanities. Shake your head at the marks of my stupidity and know that I am constrained by them. At the same time, don’t waste any pity on my insignificant life. God chose to use me in spite of my idiocies, so let’s celebrate mercy, not human accomplishments. The power to sacrifice self is glorious; the necessity of having to sacrifice is not.

I sacrifice one kind of peace for another that strikes me, and only me, as a moral imperative. And because of that tension from a thousand threads in the moral fabric of reality, I’m always waiting to see if the balance of things in my faith requires a change in priorities.