been involved over at zalm's in a dicussion that was really long and fairly good.
i am currently facing a bit of hopelessness for the whole thing (american government, the church, etc.) can people really not see how screwed up everything is? (i think my wife mentioned a fish saying "what water?")
at one point today i actually pondered looking up other countries to see which ones might be nice to move to.
but then i remembered the message of the movie "Robots" and Samwise Gamgee's speech towards the end of "Two Towers"
"It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something. . . .That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for."
i wish i could fix it. all of it. i would even settle for being one of those that starts a revolution. i wish i could speak in the words of the preamble to the declaration of independece and have it apply to the whole world. i wish it would actually do some good to bust into every church board room in america as a prophet of old, jumping up on the table and yell with the voice of rage against the machine, "WAKE UP!"
i don't know what all of the answers are, but i do see where we've made mistakes. wouldn't it be great if we actually did learn from those?
so this goes out to all of you who feel that beating your head against the wall really is foolishness.
hang in there.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Dufflehead,
We do have to hang in there but we don't have to take everything so seriously. You act like the weight of the world is on your shoulders, it isn't. All you have to do is let go and let God. Sure that sounds like a platitude but you know, it really isn't.
I remember when I had that breakthrough, personally. I had been trying so hard to be "good" to be Christlike, to not sin, to live a good life when it hit me at a church service at my Dad's church when I was visiting him. Something the pastor said really spoke to me and I realized I had been trying to do it myself instead of letting God work through me. It's simple, yet difficult, just as nearly everything having to do with Christianity is, know what I mean? At any rate, I think you take things too seriously, I think you are a good person who needs to laugh more. :P
Jacke, this post was from a few weeks ago. If you had bothered to read more recent entries and clicked on the links, you'd (I hope) surmise that dufflehead actually has a great sense of humor and laughs plenty, thanks.
Honestly, I don't think you should presume to know him well enough to give him any advice, especially when it's so ill-timed.
My advice to you, Jacke, is that you print out your comment to Dufflehead and pull it out of your pocket every time you feel hopeless about something.
As for Dufflehead, he and I regularly trade comedy links and goof off on each other on IM, so I can give some 3rd party confirmation that he's not the gloom and doom type.
So consider that you might have fallen into the rush-to-judgment trap that's so common to Churchianity. We walk around with our prescription pad, giving 60-second diagnoses and scratching out prescriptions far too haphazardly, and we regularly end up dispensing pablum and even harmful medications. And note the we here, Jacke.
Post a Comment