04-16-2019, 08:52 AM
This week I'm mostly taking short bike rides to prayer chapels. There are plenty of things we experience in prayer that cannot and should not be shared. But there are some things that can help other souls.
Yesterday's prayer session was on the south bank of the North Canadian River at the mouth of Crutcho Creek. One of the things that came to me in that quiet time was a fresh reminder that my future mission is not based on something I know, but simply who I am. For now, what that means to me is that I remain a military man. My mission field has always been the military. It won't matter that I have very little to offer the military bureaucracy that they could use; this is who I am. I can't pretend to know how I might find myself among military people again, but for now, it's the only thing I can see as the most plausible mission field still.
Today I'll be going to another place on the river, farther upstream at a dam. There I'll start praying about all the missed opportunities. Too long I was under bondage to the idea that "evangelism" meant I had to make a sales pitch. And I remember all the times when it simply wasn't possible to do that, so I didn't try to witness at all. I bore with me the same unspeakable spiritual powers that I bear today, but I never knew it. Granted, it was all because of very bad teaching, but I still regret all those times when I could have done so much more to help people see the power of God. Instead, I frittered away those moments in distractions of the flesh. If we regret nothing, we learn nothing.
I still see the shining vision of a parallel society, something not too far different from the Brotherhood in my fictional writing. Certainly their fancy technology wasn't the point; it was their cohesion and grip on the truth of things. I envision a lore of teaching and experience that people simply cannot forget, that they share meaningfully and yet subtly by the divine power of the Spirit working through them.
Our part in this is to establish the first steps along that path. We have been marking those boundaries that separate us from the rest of the world. We have begun building the lore of what it means to live from the heart, pulling that great life back from the ruins of forgotten truth. I still have the vision of helping just a few folks in each generation to find their true identity in Christ. I want to build something that will far outlive me, but without the encumbrance of plastering my name all over it.
Yesterday's prayer session was on the south bank of the North Canadian River at the mouth of Crutcho Creek. One of the things that came to me in that quiet time was a fresh reminder that my future mission is not based on something I know, but simply who I am. For now, what that means to me is that I remain a military man. My mission field has always been the military. It won't matter that I have very little to offer the military bureaucracy that they could use; this is who I am. I can't pretend to know how I might find myself among military people again, but for now, it's the only thing I can see as the most plausible mission field still.
Today I'll be going to another place on the river, farther upstream at a dam. There I'll start praying about all the missed opportunities. Too long I was under bondage to the idea that "evangelism" meant I had to make a sales pitch. And I remember all the times when it simply wasn't possible to do that, so I didn't try to witness at all. I bore with me the same unspeakable spiritual powers that I bear today, but I never knew it. Granted, it was all because of very bad teaching, but I still regret all those times when I could have done so much more to help people see the power of God. Instead, I frittered away those moments in distractions of the flesh. If we regret nothing, we learn nothing.
I still see the shining vision of a parallel society, something not too far different from the Brotherhood in my fictional writing. Certainly their fancy technology wasn't the point; it was their cohesion and grip on the truth of things. I envision a lore of teaching and experience that people simply cannot forget, that they share meaningfully and yet subtly by the divine power of the Spirit working through them.
Our part in this is to establish the first steps along that path. We have been marking those boundaries that separate us from the rest of the world. We have begun building the lore of what it means to live from the heart, pulling that great life back from the ruins of forgotten truth. I still have the vision of helping just a few folks in each generation to find their true identity in Christ. I want to build something that will far outlive me, but without the encumbrance of plastering my name all over it.