Saturday, November 9, 2013

No Reserves, No Retreats, No Regrets.

In one of the most moving sermons I have heard Ravi Zacharias preach he draws on the story of Daniel and how he drew the line when it came to being assimilated into the Babylonian culture. This is a message for our time, whether young or old or somewhere between- it is never too late to draw the line, to begin afresh and ask the Lord for wisdom and strength to shape our lives according to the fashion of the master builder. the master potter.

He gives a special emphasis, or at least one that spoke personally to me, about shaping our appetites- what do we give our time to? What captivates our imagination? What hungers are we feeding?

He also considers a world bereft of wisdom, with all our sophistication, knowledge and imagined superiority over other ages we as a culture are dying of malnutrition of the soul, being poor blind and naked.

In a recent incident I was driving home after visiting a friend and I was on the open road going at a good clip down a straight section and a woman by the roadside arrested my gaze. She was just standing there oblivious to me as I sped past in a rush of metal and wheels- she was weeping, just standing there weeping without any care or thought for what strangers might be a party to her inmost sorrows. At the same instant I recognized the object of her anguished heart.

Lying prone on the road was a small furry black cat.

Looking in the rear vision mirror it appeared she could not bring herself to leave the side of her furry friend, but neither could she bring herself to deal with the body. At the nearest opportunity I pulled up, turned around and stopped at a nearby wayside. It was a pretty obvious story, in fact earlier in the day I had seen the animal lying there as I went to meet my friend. I didn't have many words to comfort so I just gave her a hug and offered to walk her back to her home. I could have used the opportunity to give a gospel message or offer prayer, but it just seemed wrong and rude to take advantage of that vulnerable moment, words just seemed superfluous. I walked back to my car and found a large bag and picked the cat up and carried it back to her house. The woman lived there alone and the cat was apparently her only companion.

What was saddest to me was the reality that the loss of a domestic pet could be such a hard blow. She was devastated. Where was her family? Who cared for her? Why is she so alone? What forces had shaped her life to the point where she should feel the need to place such dependency upon the friendship of a cat? What choices had she made to bring her to this?

Until we seriously take stock of the "collateral damage" caused by a culture in a headlong rush to cut all ties with the past and continue to blindly chant the mantra of the spirit of the age we will continue to reap a terrible harvest. As a farmer I know only to well the problems that ensue when a fence has been removed without any thought for why it was there in the first place. We live in a culture where boundary after boundary has been moved or totally destroyed and we will continue to suffer as a people the fallout from this.

“Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives.” 
Mary Balogh, Simply Perfect

“But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without her conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, Poison found one day that she had come to know her choice.”
Chris Wooding, Poison