Chapter 13 – Kingdom: Wheat Among the Weeds

I don’t think that I am the first or only person to think this way, but I have felt alone in my ponderings. We are too comfortable. We have been too comfortable for a long while. And we need something to spur us off our haunches.

If we are not willing to sell our things off, take up our cross, live in community and bear each other’s burdens, then perhaps we need a cataclysmic event to do the job for us. Think September 11^th, but nationwide and exponentially bigger.

Even saying this, I’m slightly frightened of it actually coming to pass. Suffering is not something that we ask for lightly. Who is to say that I or my loved ones would even live beyond the event to survive let alone recover?

I have another blog where I review books. If I were to read books that only I like, and not what I need to read in order to recommend from a solid and diverse collection, I would nearly always gravitate towards what I call dystopian literature. Such books are usually post apocalyptic and sometimes even pre apocalyptic. Something bad has happened and humankind is recovering. Unfortunately, the new societies tend to over-compensate for past mistakes …

Where am I coming from? Where am I going? This chapter touches on the Visible Kingdom that the first century Jews were anticipating versus the Invisible Kingdom that Jesus left us with.

Christianity tends to thrive and exponentially increase where it must be hidden – China and Russia. Where Christians are persecuted and martyred, there you will find strength in hope, faith, and love.

But where Christianity rules … these United States … the Kingdom that Jesus wished to establish, suffers. We are viewed as UnChristian. Many non-Christians love the idea of Jesus, they just don’t care for the people who call themselves followers. I agree.

We could/would do a much better job if we were the persecuted minority.

My heart longs for the Spiritual Warfare rhetoric. I wish I could tame my meandering mind and remember …

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.”

C. S. Lewis The Weight of Glory