Not an Apocalypse

Those of you who live in or near America, or just enjoy watching what goes on here, should be prepared for something other than an apocalypse. The coming tribulation will most certainly be the end of the US as we know it, but that’s not to say it’s going to be anything like the dystopian nightmare stuff of movies and fiction. Things will be tough for awhile and daily commerce will be disrupted. Set your mind on being adaptable.

People ask me why I’m so quick to change my computer OS. They act like there’s some unspoken expectation of brand loyalty or something silly like that. I switch around in part because it helps keep me sharp on the various tasks, such as assessing which OS works with which hardware. However, the real issue is that I sense a change in the context that signals a different set of needs. None of them are perfect, but they each have unique qualities, and each runs differently on the varied hardware I get to use.

So right now, I’ve had to ditch Win7 on the laptop and Debian seems to work right now. It’s not as if I simply blew off the huge time investment putting Win7 on it; I made a recovery image before switching to Debian. Someone remarked once that I must have a system for keeping track of files and configs. That’s true; I keep backups on several media and I’ve gotten pretty handy at migration.

Crazy or not, this is what I do folks. It’s not a question of being flighty, because I manage to keep track of my stuff and keep writing these blog posts just about every day. In my world, computer OSes are fungible and I consider it a minor task to switch around. This is one of the ways I adapt quickly to the changing context. I’m a technology chameleon; it’s my calling from God.

I’m sure you have your own range of things for which you adapt quickly. By the same token, some changes seem to be more painful. I’m no different on that, but my background is probably quite different from yours, so the mix is my own. We pray that God carries us through the things ahead of us so that we can keep our minds focused on the mission of His glory.

This the vision that drives me: By manifesting a wholly different approach to dealing with life, and showing a harvest of blessings from God, we help to dismantle the lies that hold everyone else in prison. This world sucks, in the sense that “world” means the vast collected human imprint on Creation. And Creation is just begging us to show the world how it really does work.

We are up against a massive global system that denies our truth. Our primary task is to ignore that denial as much as possible. We keep right on doing stuff according to our radically different outlook, never mind what the rest of this world thinks makes more sense. We aren’t trying to make sense; we are trying to reflect God’s glory.

So on the one hand, most of what you do right now is unlikely to change. That is, the circumstances themselves won’t force any changes. Rather, whatever changes we institute will answer to something most people cannot perceive. We already knew that there was a rise of natural disasters coming, so we set our hearts on seeing what God wants to say through those disasters. We knew that social turmoil was coming, and that the Western social fabric was rotten. We knew this would also see political turmoil, because the cumulative sins of Western Civilization can only produce global war.

But it’s not the End of all things. The vision of the Apocalypse was never what most people read into it in the first place. We have to rid ourselves of the Jack T. Chick nightmare scenarios about tribulation (a reference to some popular evangelical cartoon pamphlets). It’s time to go back and reexamine what your mind has been taught to expect and keep your eyes on what God is doing in your personal life. The sense of conviction and calling is the key.