I was sitting watching a video and thinking about my “1st world” problems, which are so embarrassingly trivial that I would never even mention them in print out of respect for people that have real problems.
There is a gift I believe God has given me, that as far as I know is fairly unique. I call it “the gift of enough”. Ever since I first became a Christian in my late 20s, no matter how ridiculously broke I was - and I scraped the bottom of the peanut butter jar with a carrot a couple of times for dinner back then - I always at the very least gave a 10% tithe on my income. And then after a while of things being rough, I always seemed to have “enough” for everything I needed, even though I have really never lived on a budget other than just being aware of bills that were coming and not spending everything I made. I’m not saying that this is for sure what it’s about or that it would work for anyone else, but at least for a couple of decades I’ve never had to worry about money, health, or the things that I know most people have - I’m not bragging or embarrassed by it, but I am well aware that it’s certainly remarkable and I am definitely very grateful.
So as I was thinking about my “nothing problems”, like I think all humans do to some extent or another, I heard this phrase in my mind: “Quit thinking temporally and start thinking eternally.” I didn’t know what it really meant, but I knew it was something I needed to explore, so I wrote it down. I have the feeling that this saying might be for more people than just me, so I am going to “unpack this” (I really dislike this term but it came into my head and stuck there, so oh well) here and let’s see what it might look like:
Everyone I hear from this month is asking the same question: “What the heck is going on? Are we all going to be force-vaccinated? Is the Tribulation period of the End times starting?” Those are all legitimate questions that very few people can actually be certain they know the answer to, but they concern the here and now, and have very little to do with eternal life after we graduate from this Junior High School type existence on planet Earth to the one of eternity in the next life.
Of course, what we do here that is really IMPORTANT is anything that helps others and ourselves prepare for that, but what kinds of things would they be? Obviously, what we do here is temporal, but if we base those things with the eternal as a priority, I think we will make different choices, and that’s what I am talking about here.
Here are a few ideas, maybe they will birth some ideas of your own as you ponder - one of my favorite words that Pinky & The Brain always used…
I run a Zoom session on Sunday afternoons with some of the researchers from my Facebook group, and one guy told me yesterday about an exciting new thing he was seeing happen, and I just love this and want to try to spread it. He said that there are currently some pastors of sizable churches that are putting their pulpits on hold to go into politics. Yes, go ahead and go rinse out the bad taste that just got into your mouth, and then come back and read on and think about this: If a pastor of a couple thousand member church in a mid-sized city decided to run for office, the chunk of automatic church member votes that they would get might well be enough to ensure victory. There’s just not that many overall votes in a lot of these kind of burgs that anyone could beat them.
I was surprised at how much I had been brainwashed by the whole “separation of church and state” BS that isn’t in any law anywhere but everyone thinks is, that I had actually subconsciously believed this wouldn’t even be allowed. I mean, maybe I would have thought about it being allowed had it ever even OCCURRED to me, but the thought of someone crossing over from the church to “public life”, as politics has been called, just seemed “not done”, to borrow a phrase from the snooty society movies we’ve all seen.
Who better to have in office than a “Christian Soldier” to war against the Soros backed leftists that have invaded governments around the world from the most menial level to the top? How do the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. take over a country? Little by little, starting with the out of the way impoverished places like Dearborn, Michigan, by voting all of their candidates into office while the weary population sits out elections thinking that they don’t matter. There would be no “Squad” in Washington had they not started small.
While we’ve seen politics as too dirty to get involved in, we have left it for only THE dirty to GET involved in. And that is why we are in the situation we are in - apathy and laziness.
But besides pastors, maybe there are many of us in the general population that should think about running for anything from the school board on up. When I lived in LA, I got to hang out a number of times with Larry Elder; a man who has been a successful conservative talk show host, but is now the accepted front runner for governor of California. I’m sure he never ever thought of doing something like that until recently, but it’s my understanding that he has all of Liberal-LaLaLand shaking in their sandals because they know they have NO ONE that comes anywhere close to Elder and his flamethrower logic-lobbing tongue.
A friend of mine just described the current social and political climate of California as “Hell with nice weather”, and I just had to steal that being a former Californian and seeing the rabid ravings of many of my increasingly lunatic leftist neighbors on Facebook. Yes, these people seem to be 100% “Koolaid vaccinated”, but what if someone like an Elder got in there, and then put that together with this scenario….
If it’s true that there really is a Trump led Military Tribunal going on right now - and again, few know for sure on that either way - then that would mean that very soon, many very bad people may no longer hold political office, simply because they may no longer fulfill the most basic requirement of such - that of having a pulse and drawing breath.
If that is the case, then there will be room for a whole lot of people to fill offices; many of whom will never have done anything like that before - and some could well be you or anyone else you know. These people will have a profound effect on the eternity of conservatives, liberals, leftists, socialists, anarchists, satanists, atheists, and everyone everywhere; both born and unborn, for years to come. And THAT, to me, is a very worthwhile way to spend your time, be it temporal or otherwise ;-)
One more thing, speaking of churches: This is weird for me to say because I was an “every Sunday and more” sort of Christian for so many years, but I haven’t had a church that I have attended since a bit after Covid hit. I’ve looked around, and I just can’t go to a place that requires masks or social distancing, or doesn’t even acknowledge that the whole world has been plunged into an undeclared civil war for years.
OK, I am not saying that church needs to be about politics, but I can’t be in a place that either pretends none if it is happening, or worse; doesn’t even see it as a problem. I’d like to go somewhere, but so far the random “going to different churches based on some feeling or something someone might have told me” has felt like a series of very bad blind dates, and that’s another thing I am not interested in anymore.
Many people have said that we are coming into a time where the mega-churches we have known will disappear, and small home churches will replace them. I think that’s exactly what is going to happen, but right now we are in a transitional time between the two; with the old model not yet really gone, and the new one not showing up yet.
But that’s another thing that I think we can do that feeds the eternal right now: try to reach out and support people while we are going though this period of flux. If you know people that “get it” and are worried about what’s going to happen, contact them and help them process through while we wait to see, and pray for the cavalry to show up soon.
If the people that you know are all “normies” who think you’re insane (like about 85% of the people I deal with on a daily basis), pray that the truth bomb will go off soon and that God will use you to help them cope with the complete re-imagining of the world that they thought that they knew, but suddenly have found out were all wrong about.
We all know the “white hat” predictions for August, and we all see the writing on the wall of what will happen if they don’t come true, and we are hung out to dry on a nasal swab. This too shall pass, but the decisions we make now will affect the eternal. To quote one of my favorite sayings, “the only thing you can say in life that’s always true is ‘We’ll see’ - we will.”
Uncle Ben Ghazi
Flyover Country,
August 9, 2021
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