It'll be Alright.

Image by Andrew Paranavitana via 500px.

Verbose title, I know.  But this is a thought I was having as I was laying down to sleep, and I feel like it’s important to record.  The quality of my pragmatism in life does not supersede my will in Christ.  In the short this means, simply because my life doesn’t seem to be in the place where I’d like it do be, doesn’t mean that bringing that into order comes before my call to Ministry.  

How I came to this conclusion:  I ponder, often times, at night on the situation and scenarios of life I find myself in now that I live in San Francisco with the purpose of perpetuating Christ’s Kingdom.  Often times, I’ll find myself musing on how I’d like my life to be, imagining the things I don’t have time for, the things I need to make time for, etc.  I realize, as I progress further in life, that a certain amount of things can fall into disarray due to the complexities of consequence and responsibility we begin to hold as we age.  When I was younger, it was easy to say that the world should be this way or that, because I had to some general degree a clean slate.  I had not built anything in such a substantial way that I couldn’t tear it down and start anew.  I hadn’t ever committed myself to – very much in my maturity probably wasn’t able to commit myself to – anything to such a degree that I was responsible to it regardless of my desiring to be, et al.  As I grow older, I begin to realize more the gravity of the importance of the things we give our attention to, or the responsibility of the things we decide to come behind.  To a certain degree I believe, there will always be people who will skim on a certain surface to life, always willing to pull a certain weight in some field as long as it doesn’t require them to commit too much of a hardness from themselves.  But I want to learn how to delve deeper than that, intentionally.  I believe often times people can be forced into situations where they are expected to maintain a certain level of responsibility as culturally required, and then they delve deeper into the further crusts of life, but perhaps against their will.  Perhaps this is why parenting is seen as such a noble pursuit in life, as it is one field in which a strong degree of responsibility is projected on the person involved even just by society, before the degree of hardship they encounter is experienced.  

What would life be like if a larger set of people were willing to work through a degree of hardship similar to or harder than that of parenting, perhaps with their self-imposed intentional convictions through the Life of Christ to fuel them in a way as society would expect parents to parent.  What great heros of the faith would we see then, even in this day and age where it seems no person can rise to as high a rank of remembrance such as people once did?

Because of this I ponder, there is a certain degree of things in my life that I can actively agree on are not in the order I would like them to be in, but in lieu of time, responsibility, pressure, and other factors, it’s not intrinsically possible for me to pull them in reign in a period of time I would be satisfied in (much because I desire for them to be aligned correctly now).  In my mind, the wishful thinker’s first desire would be to abandon what I do here in San Francisco, reject it as improper and not well formed, and move on to something else in my life where I can try to build a better structure.  But that’s where the statement hits me.  How many times in our lives have we forsaken our rightful responsibilities, perhaps even our call from God, because the outcome of our life didn’t fit what we believed was the correct way for a human to be?  

In our life, we have preconceptions about what society should look like.  No man, I believe, is ever fully able to reconcile the look of their desired society in their own mind with the society they see in life true.  I believe this too is a large aspect of The Fall: society is imperfect as the participants in it are subject to and/or acting out sin.  I think we can lose sight of this in our perception of life.  We find it a decent excuse, because it is reasonably justified when discussed with our peers (perhaps) to leave certain situations when they don’t line up with our expectations.  But are we leaving God’s desire?  

When I find myself in a place a friction, the structure and modes of the community I live in don’t suit my desire for how I would choose to live my life, Christ’s call is greater.  God may call us to places operating some degree of disfunction, in fact always will as we are all fallen.  It’s important for me to realize that while an ideal of life is a good thing to move towards, its lack of presence is at least the very representation of a fallen world’s need for a Savior, and my conviction transcends beyond the structure of the realm in which God calls me to.