The biggest problem in acquainting Westerners with truth is their lack of a sense of paradox.
Yeah, they can learn it, but to make it instinctive is what is so difficult. Without that predisposition to expect paradox, truth remains elusive. It’s not a question of what you know or can say, but what you are willing to do in a much broader sense. The essential flexibility of quantum moral reasoning is simply beyond intellect.
Truth is invasive but only to volunteers.
An encounter with truth makes you contagious. Silence is not an option. It makes you silent about yourself — something our current society considers criminal — while truth burns like fire in your mouth. At the same time, you can’t simply remove yourself from the expression. The moment you forget that truth will always be your truth, it becomes a lie. Truth is only incidentally content; it’s more at Life itself. It’s the opening of a process, a discovery of something too big and too deep for your lifetime. Truth is the person of our Father Creator.
You can master the facts but truth masters you, or you don’t have truth.
I’m caught in a bind, folks. We all know the Great Commission as a verbal expression of truth blowing us wide open. The fundamental nature of our existence has not changed since the Risen Lord said those words to His friends. What has changed is the context. At times I feel like Paul having been kicked out of every synagogue and most towns because the one place I ought to be free to share this message is the first place to close its doors against me — the churches. For me, I finally figured out I don’t belong to them and they don’t belong to what I’m doing. Characterize it as you like, but I’m not a reformer. I’m an alien building a new world entirely.
It leads me to consider the old as dying and dead, the zombified institutions of a previous age — an age of falsehood, at that. But I can’t simply walk away without starting to shout in some other place, some other way. The Great Commission includes a whole range of possibilities those institutions exclude at some fundamental level. So here I am blogging and writing books about this alien kind of faith and religion.
What should I do with my meat space life? I’m willing to carry my own cross and face the inevitable end of this, but it’s not my time. I can sing “This World Is Not My Home” and mean it in more ways than one. What’s left is that quiet one-on-one in a few rare opportunities. The human context is so horribly, deeply perverted that it’s as if I can’t even plow and plant seeds before first removing the vast mountain of rocks sitting atop the field. The fields are not white unto harvest; people aren’t thronging out of their homes seeking something to fill some emptiness. Miracles are few because nobody recognizes them as miracles, so I can’t get their attention to this message.
I am not blind; the world is. I didn’t make it like this, but I’ll be damned if I allow my message to be stymied. The question is not whether I’ll spread it, but how. It’s not as if I haven’t tried everything I know here in my neighborhood. In my prayers, the Voice of Heaven has warned me I will be sent away to another context where I’ll spread the message in a different way than is even possible here. If the field here is to be planted, it will be someone else’s field. I have fields elsewhere, and I’m just waiting.
One last missionary adventure, I suppose, but with an appearance utterly unlike anything I’ve seen before. There’s nothing here to carry the sound waves of my shouting, so the ongoing voice only seems to be silent. Here’s hoping I will soon have stories to tell you, dear readers.
I certainly do hope so, Ed. Where else will I find a like minded Spirit? Father knew of my search and there you were. I can always walk alone as I have, but it is so much more meaningful and helpful following someone who has cleared some of the path ahead.