![]() ![]() She has seen much, loved much, lost much. She told me about her family, avoided the topics of her health, and complimented my father’s recent sermon emphatically. She sat cautiously and told me about her grandchildren, especially about the one going to Bible school this fall. I hugged her gently, not remembering her to be this frail. Her knuckles are warped with arthritic pain and her once-gregarious hand motions are small and restrained. She is now elderly with withering hands and milky eyes. I was back in my hometown for my sister’s wedding last week, and I saw Jan, a former mentor of mine. Just this morning I received a message from a friend in a closed country (a country that doesn’t allow the Christian faith to be proclaimed in the public square), and through her encrypted words, reading between the lines of her carefully chosen verbiage, I wondered: how far is this from our reality? Is persecution coming soon? Are we seeing the end of free faith-speech? I suppose the real question I’m asking is this: Is the Church in jeopardy? I know Christians around the globe who live in nations that do not permit their faith to be spoken aloud. Dismissing my best efforts to keep my head and my faith, fear has tied itself in a knot in my gut and refuses to come undone. The messages were a call to man the gates, a last-ditch effort to save Christianity from liberal agendas that will allegedly snuff out our faith altogether. I received an overwhelming number of responses to my last article on the election the vast majority were overwhelmingly positive, but the negative responses were dripping with fear, urging me that the Church and our nation is quickly losing ground. Maybe it is the fact that I’m waking up to the reality that things are very likely going to change for the Church very soon, or maybe it is the realization that they already have (most likely, it’s a bit of both). Somewhere and somehow over the past several months of discouraging articles from every voice within and surrounding the Church, fear has sunk into my soul. And sitting alone in my room in the wee hours of the morning I realized: I am afraid. As the navigation bar sank lower and lower on the page, my heart was fit to match. One candidate’s aggressive proposal to further abortions in our nation, the other’s ongoing dismissal of those who are different than he, and an apparently endless supply of Christians who say the sky is falling. Each headline built on the one before it, their all-caps all-bold typeface seemingly screaming at me from the screen. ![]() I flicked my phone screen, scrolling down, down, down through an endless feed of political news. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |