Gary Pollard
The status quo on this earth (including here in the USA) is deeply flawed. It can seem like most people are stuck in their own bubble and lack anything approaching self-awareness. Most people seem to be incapable of reason. It seems like all of our leaders are starving for war. The economy is not great, despite what some wish-casters would have us believe. It’s near-impossible to find a decent job. Most corporations are evil beyond comprehension. We have to doubt everything we see, hear, and read because AI has made sophistry available to the masses. The average person is burnt out, hopeless, oscillating between apathetic and angry, agnostic in all things, and overall done with reality.
Christianity acknowledges that evil controls this world. It outright prohibits violence as a means to rectify this evil, preferring instead to wait for Jesus to return bringing rescue to us and justice to them. This is especially hard to do when greed and corruption affect us personally, but Christianity calls its followers to focus on personal moral growth and altruism. We can only control what we do individually, though never perfectly and with often-herculean effort. Our responsibility toward other people is to meet their needs to the best of our ability.
Everything is scarier now as a parent. I don’t want to wait. I don’t want to be patient with other peoples’ lack of self-awareness. I don’t want to pray for the powerful whose self-serving decisions make life harder and the future bleaker for my son. To list all of the things I don’t want to do would take up several paragraphs. None of us want to do those things if we’re honest with ourselves. This may be why Jesus had to suffer as much as he did. Unlike us, he didn’t deserve any of what he went through — so he has the right to tell us to love other people, and to do all of those things we don’t want to do.
I’m not holding my breath for conditions to improve on this earth. The cat’s out of the bag and nothing short of Jesus’ return will fix it. He promised that people who believe in him and who follow his teachings will enjoy immortality on a perfect place (whatever that looks like) when he returns. This earth and its abuses (and those who do the abusing) won’t even be a memory in the paradise he’s prepared. Since our consciousness will be expanded (cf. I Jn 3.1-3; I Cor 13.12), I’d assume our capacity to explore (and the limits of exploration) will also be expanded. We won’t be capable of doing wrong, we won’t live in fear of judgment, we won’t have to work to survive, and we won’t have to worry about anything at all. There will be nothing but genuine, unforced, natural positivity. If there was ever a time to start taking our faith seriously, it’s now. Our greatest and only hope is in the Creator of this world, the visible image of God, the one who paid our existential debt, and the one who will rescue his global family when this earth burns.
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