It started so nicely. I managed to wake up bright and early, got a light breakfast and started on the reading routine I follow. Went out and picked up the litter around my building, then headed out for an early start on my workout.
And what a dynamite workout I had! I managed to bump up a rep on most things. When I got home for the last few exercises, I was whipped — just how it should be.
But somewhere during the day I exposed myself to some very nasty allergens, and by mid-afternoon my head was about to explode. It sneaked up on me. Keep in mind that I cannot take any decongestant or over-the-counter allergy medications, because all of them provoke my tachycardia. So I used our vibrator to get things loosened, and then a full sinus flush. I’m feeling better now, but it put me in mind of what’s happening around us.
You see, we are headed for a crisis; I remain utterly certain of that. But it will almost surely sneak up on us. That is, while we can see all sorts of things going in a bad direction, no one of them will bring a full crisis by itself.
Maybe you’ve read that we are under siege by yet another Windows computer virus (a worm, actually) named Petya. And there will be another and another and another coming over the summer. Antifa still has plans to riot in a week or so. Despite everything the Syrian military does at avoid conflict with the US, our government is determined to find an excuse to mobilize against them, yet it’s supposed to be all about Iran and Russia. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party keeps eating itself and the MSM are transparently attacking the majority of the population with disinformation. The banking system continues to crumble, the dollar will collapse any day, and we have any number of natural disasters just biding their time. All of this stuff is going to get worse.
You get the idea. I’m not expecting any single point of departure. It’s going to build up layer upon layer, because God is quite thorough with His wrath. Don’t forget that God does things in such a way as to allow people to deny the obvious, and that people can refuse to see the moral truth wired into Creation. It’s what we call “plausible deniability” — If you don’t want to see it, you won’t. Still, God always offers an escape from His wrath. But at any give time, the majority of humanity has no clue what’s going on in the moral realm.
This is a time of change. We who walk by the heart of conviction have been saved up like arrows for the day of battle. Our targets will be relatively few in number, though. We’ll be shot in all directions, and most of the time we’ll be surprised by who will respond when the time comes. Keep your eyes open for people who sense that everything they’ve trusted and relied upon folds up on them. Not all of them will panic, but folks will be looking for something stronger. And we have it.
“And we have it. ” Amen to that, brother! States of confusion and anxiety seem to be oppressing many around me. Keeping peace in one’s heart is the only way out. And that is not always easy to do when one’s life is constantly under attack. The devil is hard at work.
“If you don’t want to see it, you won’t.”
We see what we want to see, by default. How can we know if we’re self-deceiving? Material logic fails at this point.
Material logic fails at this point.
Precisely, Jay. It requires moral logic, which arises from our convictions, and such logic is not easily packaged in cerebral terms. We have to teach our minds that moral logic is knowing a Person, and accepting from the start that such knowledge is personal and relational. It means doing our best to adopt the will and character of that Person, and it starts from the assumption that no two of us could possibly have the exact same relationship. After you go down that path, you can easily look back and see the times and places you were self-deceive. And while you may not be too adept at seeing it in your future, you can never forget that it’s going to be there. This is behind my comments about “not taking yourself too seriously.”