30 January 2022
The Lord makes this possible; I can do it.
It calls for a totally different orientation. Popular response has no meaning; it's never a factor in deciding what you must do. If anything, mass appeal is a bad sign (Matthew 7:13-14). But it works best to simply ignore any calculus of such things until you get to the part where you consider what kind of clean-up your operations require. You should always do what your convictions demand, and simply recognize that there will be fallout you'll have to handle.
How do you structure your life when you know that pursuing the Lord will isolate you from the rest of the world?
It makes some decisions a lot easier. It reduces what you need to consider going into it. You already know it's fundamentally unpopular, so there's no need to think about that part. The only question you really need to ask is what your convictions demand, in isolation from the rest of humanity. You alone standing before the Lord: What does He require of you? Nothing else matters.
This is one of those meta things. It's not a question of teaching and persuading folks to do anything in particular. It's a question of how you arrive at the decision to act in the first place. It's the case of, "This is what God requires of me. Want to come along?" Experience tells me that there will be very few who feel moved to participate at any level. Once you accept that as your normal, it makes a lot of things much easier.
Gone is any possibility of changing the course of human affairs. The Word itself warns us not to go there. The vast majority of the time, anything you feel called to do serves only to warn folks that their choices are evil so that they have no excuse when facing the Judgment. In broad general terms, we should expect that what God calls us to do with be futile in that sense. Our witness will fall on deaf ears. See Revelation 6:9-11 and Isaiah 1:9. We already know the sword will come to devour them in God's wrath.
We don't have to understand the mission intellectually. It doesn't have to make sense. We have nothing to accomplish; all we have is obedience.
All we have is the truth. This is what motivates a Christian Mystic. God is the only one we must please. Everyone else has made themselves of no consequence; their lives are forfeit and their doom is sure. God alone can pull them out of that fire; we can do nothing except point out that there is a fire.
There are thousands of ways to satisfy this calling. God alone knows what you should do for Him in seizing that mission. We are to go into all the world; we should be found scattered around in almost every human occupation, every human endeavor. But we are there only as a cover, a way to put ourselves where our witness will be seen. The thing that occupies our hands we will do with all the excellence we can muster, but that's only because the way we do it is a part of the witness. God holds us to no expectation of success as humans measure such things.
And when we do manage to encounter each other, all we really have in common is the meta of how we go about this mission. That is the grounds for fellowship. Don't get hung up on the particulars; that's the fallen way. Rejoice together in the Lord who calls, not in the calling itself. Your heart will know me when you see me.
We can do this.
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