still small voice

"Take no thought for the morrow:
for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

Matthew 6:34


Perspective is put to enormous challenges when human hope takes root against the backdrop of fear and paranoia. Threats come insidiously, in both overt spectacles and as subliminal suggestions. How shall we proceed in a profound sense of forward-looking, without selling out to cynicism? This society is increasingly obsessed with a fortress-mentality. Not to be mistaken with public safety, and even apart from what has become popularly known the Post 9/11 World, intense energies are devoted to personal security: alarms, locks, ostentatious gates and vehicles. Perhaps were not even sure whether we have imposed this upon ourselves- or if this trend is something of a reaction against uncontrollable hostility. Whatever the case may be, we are fed daily doses of being told we are a nation at war. Like the Cold War had woven itself into our collective angst, so now we are acting out our anxieties even as we relate to one another.

The term balance, though it may sound cliché, represents the harder, humbler, higher road. The moments and todays are gifts of spaces in which we move and breathe, dispensed to us from a supply of unknown amounts. Engaging the challenge with courage is to resist the currents of hysteria. We have had to stand for a kind of societal masochism long enough. There are surely other choices. The offer of candor. The daring of confidence. The surrender of a loosened grip, in exchange for buoyancy.


You go outside
You see the Holy Spirit burning in your trees
and walk on, glowing with the same glow.
Still you tremble out and in.

~Brave, by The Innocence Mission