Our path is communion with Creation. We don’t have wisdom so much as we participate in divine wisdom. Sometimes we can communicate that wisdom to other people as a way of signalling that we can offer something worth their attention. We are most alive as part of Life.
The first symptom of senescence is not forgetting things or disconnecting from current reality; it’s to stop growing. God help me if I have not changed, if I have not grown in some way, during the past week.
Caveat: I stand by my prophetic statements. Very few of them were offered as “thus saith the Lord.” Most of them were carefully rendered as my best estimate of what my heart saw. I’ve always tried to warn readers that a prophetic gift is not flawed; the failure is in our making sense enough to tell others. It’s guaranteed that something I’ve shared in the past will not work out because I didn’t quite grasp the moral thrust involved. If I don’t fail, it’s because I didn’t try at all.
In the past few days I’ve stepped through a door that was not previously visible to me. It’s not significant to you; it cannot be. It is to me. The moral lesson is what matters here, but the narrative of my experience is the parable through which you see the truth of God’s moral character.
That parable narrative includes me watching a few videos. I generally hate videos because they are designed to weaken your moral boundaries. It’s not that you cannot resist, but that the danger is quite real. I don’t make rules about avoiding TV and movies; I offer a warning that you dare not let them inside your credibility defenses. Always view them with a cynical eye; steel yourself and never relax. If you understand manipulative conditioning, you know how to watch videos.
So I tend to watch videos that capture something not otherwise available to us as experiences. I like the “caught on tape” stuff that isn’t highly edited. For example, I studied traffic collision forensics in the military. I’m not at all interested in human verbal conflict, so I don’t care for the up-close and personal road rage videos, but I do like to watch traffic incidents from surveillance or helicopter cameras, and it’s not too bad from dashcams.
In a similar vein, I don’t mind fictional stuff aimed at portraying real events in military history, but I’m always very skeptical, looking for a hidden agenda. Recently I branched off into watching military themed game videos. We all know how you have to exercise a great deal of suspension of disbelief in that genre. Even without direct combat experience, having handled real weapons teaches you a lot about how far the video game makers will stretch things.
Most of them are shoot-em-up stuff and I tire of that in minutes. Those with an actual story line may engage me for a while longer. Unfortunately, the story lines are shot full of contrived and well-worn, low brow TV plot dramatic devices. Very few video game companies employ a genuine fiction writer with talent. Way too many of them force the story in such a way as to snatch back from the player’s character everything he/she has gained up to that point in playing the game. You end up in scenarios where something that should be easy by now isn’t even permitted, and you can bet this frustrates the players. But every game maker is doing it, so there’s no avoiding it.
Once or twice I’ve run upon some half-way decent attempt at character development, even if the plots are full of holes. But then it always hangs on wholly unnecessary drama, anger and hatred. The story line intertwines major characters as long-time enemies, when in reality it never happens like that. Trust me; the people who work in the likes of Delta Force have many human flaws, but if they ever let something personal cloud their decisions, they are dead by now. The real story of heroism is never a vendetta.
Real military heroes are people who managed to push themselves against the odds to carry out the mission, and they are generally flexible enough to accept a sudden change in the mission falling down from above. I know that’s disappointing when you have invested moral energy into something, but it does happen and the professionals suck it up and keep trucking. The secret operations troops are professionals who know the limits of their discretion. They don’t require regimentation and discipline because they are disciplined internally. You don’t see that kind of thing in very many video games.
After watching a few different game video series, I was really turned off. I can handle the juvenile moderation of threats in the game. Side note: The so-called “expert” difficulty options in game settings are no less unrealistic because it’s the kind of threat to the protagonist that is wholly unrealistic. They are frequently slanted against creativity, trying to force the player into decisions nobody would make in the real world. But in general, what I found most annoying was the utter lack of realistic characters; they are always supermen too psychologically messed up to qualify for the high-end secret missions.
So after about the fourth or fifth such disappointment, it hit me why I’ve always felt that strong draw to the military as a mission field. To be honest, it’s really not the fields of harvest I know I’ll find there. Working those fields is a really sweet blessed thing, but it’s not the point. It’s the opportunity for me to walk by my true calling and nature. This is what’s in my heart, my “true will” as some would say. It’s the core of obedience to my Lord.
That doesn’t change my prophetic visions of the future mission adventure; I still believe what I’ve written about it is in front of me. It changes how I’ll face what is coming. It’s not the field of labor that matters, but the labor itself. I’ll take that heart-led commitment wherever my Lord sends me, and I’ll bear it like a soldier. It took a little prodding and exposure to folly to remember that it’s not a matter of the atmosphere I’m hunting for, but it’s all a matter of the atmosphere I bear with me. Creation is alive and responds to me personally, as it does to all of us. If I am in communion with the moral fabric, I am God’s man for the job, whatever the job is. The moral truth in us changes what is around us.
