A Heavy Loss)

There was a project that I once loved very much. It was a program oriented towards connecting men with God, helping them to bring their hearts back into His light. It was small and local, humble and unpolished, but it did truly miraculous things in the lives of those who attended it. Lately, though, I’ve found myself struggling to recognize that same institution from what it has become today. At some point, after about ten years of operation, the institution became a for-profit organization, and changes started being made for the betterment of the bottom line, not for the betterment of the men it served. Several of the original founders quit, due to personal disagreement with this new direction.

This has been a heavy thing for me to come to grips with, but as I have reflected on it I’ve realized that it was always going to go something like this. The special spirit of the old program had to meet its end one way or another, because that’s just the nature of things.

Tale as Old as Time)

I am reminded of the story of the tower of Babel. In it, a nation of people decide to build a great tower, reaching all the way to heaven. Bold enough to make themselves gods, they toiled and labored on this great elevation of man until the whole thing toppled to the ground.

We do not know exactly how high they built their tower, only that it fell before they could achieve their aim. Their construction became destruction, their order became ruin, and the people were returned back to the level of the fallen earth.

This, of course, is a type for all manner of structures in the world today. And I don’t merely mean physical structures, either. Even more so it applies to structures of law, of government, of ideology, of any edifice constructed by the wisdom of man.

The Way of Things)

Every club, organization, corporation, and ideal is laid with ruin in its foundation. On the one hand, this might be because they are laid with carnal and earthly motivations, such as focus on profit or notoriety. Once making money is one of the organization’s pillars, then it is tied to the natural things of this earth, all of which decay, erode, and finally collapse. Through the years we have seen countless companies over-exploit their workers, consumers, and intellectual properties, killing the golden goose just to get a higher profit in the short term. We have seen countless governments siphon power and wealth to the highest class until they became too top-heavy and collapsed under their own weight. The compromises that were deemed necessary to make the enterprise possible eventually make its continued existence impossible.

But even without a foundation of earthly motivations, every structure of man is still doomed to fall due to our fundamentally flawed nature. Even our organizations that are built on ideal, and virtue, and purity of intention, gradually erode and eventually go wrong entirely. Even if a core principle is worthy, if it is taken slightly too far at the beginning, it will magnify and accelerate over time, eventually becoming a great evil. It is like stacking blocks to build a taller and taller tower, given enough time and distance every structure leans too far one way or the other. Given enough time and distance, every little flaw becomes a crushing error, and the whole thing will topple. So an organization founded with a focus on discipline will eventually become fascistic oppression, whereas a focus on liberty will eventually become gross hedonism. We sow the death even in the birth, it is simply our nature.

Even God’s church, once entrusted to earthly stewards, is tended toward ruin. The world was in a state of apostasy in the time of Noah, and in the time of Abraham, and in the time of Jesus. God has to refresh His word among His people repeatedly, not because His word has deteriorated, but because we people just keep losing our grasp of it. We know that even the believers today will once again be on the brink of ruin when God will have to refresh everything with the second coming.

What Lasts)

Ironically, what truly lasts is what seems most transient. Though man’s works are doomed to fail, along the way they house occasional sparks of something pure and genuine. There can be a nugget of God in the midst of all the stone. And though that nugget seems momentary and transient, it is only because we are perceiving it through a shifting lens. In actuality, each of those nuggets is anchored in something realer and truer than the structure it was found within.

There is an entity behind all those sparks, a constant certainty beneath every brief wonder. By fastening ourselves to these pearls, and following their threads to deeper things, we tie ourselves to the only thing that is actually eternal.

The man-made program I once loved may be gone, but the experiences I found within it have not. Those experiences introduced me to the One who hasn’t changed at all, and never will. In reality, I haven’t lost a thing.