“Of Ambition and Destiny.”

H,

There is always the problem with practicality. How do we feed our children? How do we make a way in the world for our voice to matter? How do we become the exception to that old quip about lazy Christians and poor church rats?

Now only the first may have any real significance. We do not need to have a voice in the world beyond being more and more like the things we profess. The old slanders hold no water when one is really engaged in the business of heaven.

Still, there is a material reality that has to be faced. The world, like Caesar, demands its coins. This is a difficult one to answer because words cannot capture the desperation, fear and compromise that poverty may bring. There are so many questions that money can answer quite well. It is a lie to say otherwise. In our own experience we can only point to the esoteric nature of our walk and say: we got by somehow. There is not one single practical answer to the question of how to live the spiritual life with material awareness. This is the wisdom we are given though. We are to walk the higher path of having but not having at the same time. The things that we have must be seen as transient so we can truly appreciate the things that we will always have.

Jim Elliot said it best: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”  And he paid the ultimate price for that belief. We have no answer to that. There are no half measures here. The  Spiritual and material must merge in our minds so effectively that the former always leads the latter. Not in tithes and offerings and silly “prophetic seeds” but in how we value the wellbeing of our family, how we balance the books in favour of the needy and how we treat money and wealth as a tool and not a destination.

Our ambition and destiny is to be more like a person we know and have come to accept as way, truth and life. Once we grant that first premise, the rest will follow suit.

We will not be perfect in anything at the start. This is a lifelong thing. We should not give up because we will fail at it many times. We must keep our eyes on the prize of becoming that other person written into our hearts as forever. We will learn to share as they did. We will learn to feed each other. We will learn that sacrifice is the great currency of the kingdom. We will learn that love takes everything and purifies it and gives us everything back again.