I’m in Vancouver tonight having spent a day enjoying two excellent meals, reflecting, some creative space connecting this new blog to my books at Amazon and to my visual podcasts on YouTube, followed by a very frustrating day working and closing numbers on the WSCN Development project (surprisingly better that I thought) and some cursed time on a government website attempting to obey the law only to run into a beauricratic wall of impossible hoops to jump through just to prove I have the right to jump through those hoops. Who, tell me, creates a 21st system that relies on snail-mail invoicing to get the code for inter-net access (which I had) only to discover that my code had been accessed by one of the other pastors and thus was no longer good and now I needed a second code that was delivered on a post-card automatically generated. I remember the post card. I held it, knew it was reminding me to do the very thing I was doing and threw it away never thinking it was initiated as part of some bureaucrats vision of Internet security! I tell you it’s right down evil!!!
Its not evil, ofcourse. Neither is Trump or Democrats or Biden or Republicans or thank God any system beaurocratic or otherwise in the modern American experience. Unjust? Yes, a plenty.
I sat with a gentle and good man recently facing a legal choice of pleading innocent to save his integrity or copping a guilty plea and costly restitution in order to spare his family an additional two year legal battle that would bankrupt his family.
As I’m sitting out under the darkness of the sacred ground, my cars lights peering into the darkness upon a tree next to which my mom and dad are buried, I feel the weight of broken hearts—just the ones I’m aware of; multiplyIng Covid deaths, frightening surgeries, the complete loss of all you thought you had as age creeps up reminding my beloved—letting go is the last great battle—before? What?
Then there’s domestic arguments, violence, addictions that drive we humans into corruption we in our saner hearts would not even consider. Minutes ago I bought three meals for persons on the street. God, where does it end? When does it end? Will your Kingdom ever come, fully into the earth so that the woman or man who can’t afford the first two years legal costs—forgetting the last two such as my friend faces—doesn’t have to plead guilty because she simply can’t afford the American system of both justice and injustice?
All these weigh so deeply in my heart and have for weeks together with the daily grind of ministry and family and my own inner battles. Friends, for very good reasons, move on. I’m almost afraid to pick up my cell phone.
But as diverse as descriptives each and all of these are—sorrow upon sorrow, they are not evil. That is the stuff of Pol Pot and his million dead, Hitler and his six million dead and hundreds and thousands on their way in the death grip of Auschwitz. Evil is the forced slavery as young men and women are captured on the tribal grasslands of Africa to be sold as property in the cotton fields of America or the annihilation of whole indigenous tribes.
To be sure when I lust for the attention of a woman who may herself be the victim of the modern sex slave industry then evil’s whispering may be drawing near my own heart.
All i know as I peer into the night is two things, no, three:
1) I will remain open to the multiplying impact of past or present injustices and not turn away from their reality; be it an economic system that needs to widen so that all may become full participants or the most vulnerable pre-born whose life can legally be extinguished at full development just because she‘s on the wrong side of the 1/32nd inch of skin. I will keep learning, setting aside income, aware.
2) I will not reduce the very real power in this world of evil or racism or dictatorships by calling everything and everyone evil, racist or dictatorial. Instead, using language artfully, I choose to live in such a way as to nuance the fact that life is full of sorrow, pain, struggle as well as love, art, joy, children, laughter. No matter how vulnerable or privileged we will experience both—though perhaps not in equal measure.
3) I will ever keep in mind that my own heart and mind is capable of good and bad, justice and injustice, acceptance or arrogance, peace or judgment. I do not fear God, only my own heart if God is not at or near the center of my affections. When God is first, as no other, even though I may be unaware I will not be evil. Awareness is sharpened.
When I serve only myself even my pursuit of justice becomes a weapon of hurt.
So when my grandson Tanner sits in a dark and sacred park someday peering out into the darknes, his heart keenly aware of loss, he will be able to say of me as I know he can Joetta. “They we’re not perfect, indeed imperfect. But they knew how to love and it started with God.“
Blessings!
09-27-21
Happy anniversary son and daughter.
note: These reflections are illucidated briefly in my podcast “Two World Views ShapIng the Human Story“ LIB1-5
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