We live in a world of artificial lights. They have become so ubiquitous that we can hardly fathom life without them. Some live every day with hardly any exposure to the sun at all. They do not need it. And all is well…so long as the lights stay on.
But one day, the electricity will be cut, and it will not come back on. And then we will remember the horror of the dark, and why we never outgrew the need for the sun.
There are things that I know are right to do, but which I do not feel like doing right now.
But when I examine myself, I realize that I will never feel like doing them.
And if that is the case, then they can only ever be done when I do not feel like doing them.
And then, I know that I must do it now.
You will at times be selfish. You will be unwise. You will believe wrong things. You will hurt those that you love. You will give in to fear. You will judge wrongly.
None of this is good, but it is common and accepted. Many of these sins will be committed without thought, without meaning to do wrong, but afterwards realizing that your behavior went astray. Do not worry. Christ has atoned for all of these and obtaining forgiveness is easy.
Much more significant are the moments where God has already granted you clarity, where you have a sure understanding of what is right, and you sin against that knowledge anyway. You feel the full weight of your conscience, and you defy it anyway. And you do so because following your conscience would come at great personal cost. You learn that your soul has a price, and you have just exchanged it for that price.
These are the moments that truly defile you. These are the infractions that darken the soul. These are the choices that sin against the light. These are the times that lead to true damnation.
Of course, even here, repentance is possible, but it will be at an even greater cost than what you first sold your soul for. You must go back and correct the very choice you made wrong, and the consequences for doing right will be even higher now. It will hurt, you may be sure of it, but you may also be sure that it will be worth it.
Back when I studied the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, I noted how Abraham tried to plumb the depths of God’s mercy, seeing if He would spare the city for the sake of less and less righteous. But as I noted at the time, Abraham wasn’t willing to go so far in mercy as God was! Abraham tapped out at requesting that ten righteous be spared, but God went beyond that and had His angels draw Lot and his family to safety when they were the only redeemable people found.
So perhaps Abraham was trying to haggle with God, and that would suggest he had a misunderstanding of who he was dealing with. God doesn’t just have good qualities, such as mercy. God is the good. God is the mercy. As for us, we only have a part of those qualities, and so we cannot have more of a good and merciful nature than good and mercy itself. God’s goodness is affixed and we only move in relation to it, not the other way around.
But Abraham was not the only one to make this error. What just occurred to me this morning is that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has a counterpoint to Abraham haggling with good. It is Lot haggling with evil!
When the angels come to the city to assess the number of its righteous, Lot hurriedly brings them into his home, presumably afraid of what mischief might befall them on the street. But the people of the city witnessed this and demand that he turns the men out so that they can be raped. And here, in the face of evil, Lot tries to haggle with them, offering his daughters instead. But that doesn’t work, in fact it makes things worse, with the people now breaking into the house, insistent on their initial plans, and further promising that they will now “deal worse with Lot, than with the strangers.”
So what was Abraham’s mistake? He was trying to get good to be more good, but good was already more good than he could he ever want. And what was Lot’s mistake? He was trying to get evil to be less evil, but evil would always be more evil than he could ever want. We have to recognize is that good is just good, and that evil is just evil. And they are so perfectly. They are immovable. They are constant.
It is not for man to try and define or shift what good and evil are. It is a vain exercise at best, and dangerous at worst. Good and evil have already been set for an eternity. They have been explained to us as they really are, and their nature will not change. All that remains is for us to decide how we wish to orient ourselves to them.
Being a person of conscience means being willing to stand up for truth if no one else will. Obviously, we hope it doesn’t come to that, we hope that our society will be a buffer against the waves of lies and sin, but if they will not, we still will. If nowhere else, the buck stops here. We are the last line of defense. The iron plate that will not yield while everything else breaks in pieces. We cannot bear the idea of having to face our Maker and having Him ask of us, “but why didn’t you say anything.” And so, whether we wanted it or not, we are the bearers of our generation’s public conscience, the ones who will not give silent, implicit consent to what we know is wrong.
The fountain of youth is simply having a purpose.
A man with nothing more to do is already dead.
The fact that you can recognize wisdom in others, means that those same insights already exist within you. If they didn’t, you would have no reference to recognize it in others. All the realizations that we find by exploring the world can also be found by exploring within.
True connection with another cannot come from surface-level interactions. To have a bosom friend requires knowing one another at the level of the soul. Real connection like that comes only through vulnerability, and vulnerability always involves risk. If there wasn’t risk, it would not, by definition, be vulnerable. This is why making true friends is not easy, it is a dangerous business. It means giving others ample opportunity to really hurt you and hate you, but trusting that they will honor you instead.
And, of course, some of the people that we are vulnerable with will let us down. They will betray our trust; they will wound us in our tender places. Being willing to still trust anyone after that is hard. It may go against our natural instincts. It is like being struck on one cheek and then turning the other. But, of course, that is exactly what we are called to do.
True connection with God is no different. It comes by going with Him into most vulnerable of places: our shames and our sins. By acknowledging and confessing these worst parts, we give Him every justification to hurt us and damn us, but we trust that He will forgive and heal us instead. Coming to God is a dangerous business, but it is the only way to become His true child.
For a society to function properly, its people must cooperate with one another. They must share a ruleset. They must have mutually beneficial expectations, and those expectations must be honored. All of this is necessary, because the world is too large and too complex for each of us to handle all aspects of it on our own. The advantage of a well-functioning society is that certain people can dedicate themselves to understanding one particular system and then disseminate to everyone else the essential information without them having to repeat the work. Shared rules also allow us to take complex interactions and reduce them to simple predetermined actions.
From what movies we watch, to how we navigate the road, to how we prioritize world affairs, “trusting the experts” and following predefined rules is the optimal strategy. I do not have enough time to watch every film, so I read reviews to only watch the best ones. I trust the rules of the road, so I can navigate complex group operations, like two lanes merging into one. I listen to news reports so that I know which issues I want to help my society overcome. I have not personally verified all of this information, but I trust in those that have, and assume my life will be optimal as result.
But implicit trust is the most valuable commodity in the entire world, and the exploitation of it can be very lucrative.
What if a movie studio realizes that it can buy falsely positive reviews? The trust of the people will lead to increased ticket sales.
What if a driver realizes that he can hurriedly follow the car in front of him during a zipper merge to advance a space in traffic? He gets to his destination faster.
What if a news agency realize that they can sensationalize the news and fabricate outrage? Their ratings and ad revenue increase.
In each case, trust is turned into advantage, and one party is progressed beyond what could be achieved by honest means. Perhaps the short-term gain is justified by the assurance that one infraction is not going to break the whole system. The general populace will still benefit by trusting the institutions, and this one dishonest gain will amount to little more than a rounding error in the ledgers of society.
But when trust is exploited by one party, others will realize what has happened, and some will want to tip the scales in their favor also. Experience has proven that when the bond of trust has been broken once, and successfully profited from, a mass of other bad actors will soon follow.
And what happens when trust is broken repeatedly? It dies.
I watch a string of bad movies that came highly recommended, and I stop going to the movies altogether.
I get cut off in traffic repeatedly, and I start competing with every other driver on the road.
I realize the causes I supported made me a pawn in some party’s power grab, and I stop listening to the news media entirely.
I do not “trust the experts” anymore. I do not engage in the systems and rules as designed. And I am not the only one becoming cynical. Once enough of us are bitter and disillusioned, the movie industry collapses, violence becomes rampant on the roads, and conspiracy theories abound. The society stops being a society, and becomes instead a mass of angry individuals, all distrusting of one another. Divisions and public violence increase, and eventually the entire nation faces its demise. Perhaps strangest of all, there might even still be a majority of people who want to be honest and want to engage with the systems as intended, but the risk of trust outweighs its benefits, and so separating, not uniting, becomes the new norm.
When one is raised in a cohesive society, it is easy to take its trust systems for granted, but in truth, they must be guarded most carefully. For when they are broken, everything is lost. I do not know how far things can go and still be repaired, but at some point, the death of the nation must become inevitable.
When you do what is right and suffer for it, what follows will reveal the purity of your motivations. Either you will feel regret, and know that you are only a fair-weather disciple, or you will feel conviction, and know that your commitment is true. Without being tried like this, your sincerity is only theoretical.
Spiritual Wanderings 