We are healers.
We who live by the heart of moral consciousness bring our faith and convictions to bear in a fallen world. We have found that path of the Flaming Sword back to Eden, and it is our mandate and natural desire to help others find the same for themselves. For our brains, there are two primary considerations to help organize how we go about that mission. First, we have to gain some understanding of Eden as the norm, the nature our created design. Second, we have to understand fallen nature so we can provide directions to the Flaming Sword.
Our minds, true to their nature, will experience a curiosity about all the various expressions of fallen nature. We will be tempted to taste every perversion, but our hearts know better than that. Our hearts can discern the whole range of perversion vicariously; our hearts can directly sense the misery in the hearts of those who wallow in the Fall. Yet there is something there our minds do properly seek to understand: What path takes the victims out of sorrow? For most folks, it’s a subtle difference between tasting specific evils versus directly sensing the moral nature of it. Simply calling it “evil” offers no help at all to the wandering souls. They need a map out of the wilderness; we have to get involved in their lives.
One of the biggest obsessions that blinds our world today is all this noise about political activism and what constitutes proper government policy. Their distraction is a part of the blindness and perversion itself. We know that Scripture explains it quite well. In previous posts I offered the parable of God’s household and three different levels of involvement: there are God’s children of covenant adoption who are permitted to see from His perspective; there are servants who don’t accept the terms of covenant but do have some idea what’s going on; there are also domestic herds who have no clue. In our day and time, virtually all of human political activity falls in that last level of domestic herds. God directs the affairs of humanity from a distance and those involved have no clue.
They imagine that they are running the show. They imagine that political activism makes a difference; it does not. It appears to make some difference, but none of the changes really matter. It’s all completely superficial. If you apply your heart-mind wisdom, you can see this clearly.
Our mission is two-fold. First, we raise the standard of God’s truth. We need to study with our minds how to indicate something of the nature of what things should be like. Thus, I offer my own attempts to translate God’s moral law about human life here. My hope is that it provokes your consideration so you can flesh out your own way of telling it. Second, we help others by discerning their moral condition, maybe some of how they got there, so we can help them struggle back out to the truth. It’s not so much the specifics as the moral vision. We don’t need all the mechanical details of their sickness; we need to see the cause in moral terms hidden behind the symptoms. I am often surprised at the wide variety of twists and turns people take getting lost, the numerous layers of neurosis in maladaptive choices.
The heart-mind has a natural capacity for empathy. Some of you have a very strong native empathy on top of that, but we all have the basic gift from God in our hearts. If your heart doesn’t provide some direct sense of individual human misery, you are still missing something. Pray for God’s guidance. But at the same time, our Creator is a very complex personality, because Scripture also says He laughs at the arrogance of men who think they know so much. He asks very sarcastic questions about how much they know of Creation along the lines of, “Where were you when I laid out the tectonic plates of this planet? Can you determine the time when earthquakes should happen?” In the same breath He offers deep empathy for helping them climb out of their sins. He knows what it takes to move the hearts of people; He also gives us a clue in our own hearts.
So on the one hand we can snicker about arrogance of political poseurs, while another part of us weeps at the destruction their pitiful solutions bring. We pay attention to the foibles of humanity in accordance to our divine calling. Each of us has our own peculiar vocation within human affairs, to grasp the nature of moral failure and the way to escape into healing. For me, it encompasses social sciences (which includes politics) and computers, so I comment on those two things here often. Were it my wife writing a blog, it would be cooking and how to bless children; but then, she’s not a writer. God grants each of us at least one means of expression, a way to share His glory. Each of you reading this has your own collection of natural interests and talents with which God has equipped you to answer some segment of human moral need.
