Thursday, October 4, 2012

The Exchange

I look at our culture and how we have need for nothing. Everything you could ever think up to meet the most crucial needs to the most superficial needs, exists. We are kept alive, not because we can feed ourselves but, because we are being fed. We have little motivation to spend time learning about self-sustainability because it's unnecesarry in our present life and, we assume, in our next life. And since we are duped into being ever fed, we cease to grow beyond this keeping; we fail to mature.


We have this unspoken idea of what the new earth will be like and within that idea lies an assessment of what we will be like; we will be perfect in a perfect world. Well what does that look like?

What if the new earth is a blank canvas left to our creating? If that's the case, have we been adequately preparing ourselves for life in the new earth?

In the forests of Belarus during WWII thousands of Russian Jews fled to the forests and lived there in hiding. It came to be that intellectuals became of less value than the tradesmen. Learned men who had looked down on the common men now found themselves fully dependent on those "lesser" skills for their survival. It was the upperclass, educated men and women who were found to be of less use in this new life.

Building a house or a shelter, hunting, fishing, collecting water, gathering, making our own tools, etc. What if all these skills will be necessary in the new earth? How useful will we be?

Or do we expect that, in our perfection, we will be equipped with the knowledge to perform any task we might face?

Is that God? Is that like Him? To just instantly endow us with everything? Or is that our "cultural theology" talking? The culture that performs for us. The culture that has spoiled us. Handicapped us. Stifled us.

So if this new earth will have need of such things, oughtn't I be preparing beyond, what we compartmentalize as, spiritual? In my preparations, striving to be a good steward of my time, on this earth for the next, will I not also find a better me here and now? In seeking to be better for what lies ahead am I not becoming better for the present? Learning to farm, to sew, to build- tapping into the Creator's intimacy with creation- rather than buy, buy, buy.

He told us in this next life the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Could this be the exchange; that we would find ourselves without the skills and the abilities to be co-creators in the new earth because we wasted this life for ease?

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