Below are my thoughts that were inspired from watching a YouTube message from Timothy Tennent on living in a “seam of time” – between a change not just of government, or of financial status, or of global economics… but a change from the paradigms that have silently under-girded those systems for the past hundred years into a new paradigm or philosophy for the future.
If one would look closely at the landscape of our world, they will find that we are living between two folds or epochs in history. Despite our best efforts to sedate the symptoms of this paradigm change, we are faced everyday with the symptoms of a violent change in how we view reality.
The change isn’t just the gradual change of a season: the snow slowly melting away, the green grass returning to life, the sun radiating new heat, and spring flowers slowly break the surface. No these are tumultuous times of change: financial uncertainty, government incompetence, transnational corporations working a shadow agenda, and global wars and revolutions … all of which appear in stark constant to the serenade of the entertainment industry that lullabies us to sleep in the minority world (the West).
But what of faith? Do we have faith in anything anymore? Faith in each other, our neighbors, our sexuality, our government, our industries, our economy, our secularized culture, or our sanitized Christianity? Do we even have faith in faith anymore? How do we talk about truth for instance when we no longer hold to commonly understood categories of truth. What is truth? Even in the scientific community there are competing definitions of truth and conflicting findings from studies. There is a change that is happening (and has been happening since the 70s) in metaphysics (how we view reality). Are we still modern? Are we Postmodern? What, why, how, and who is truth?
Whether we stand like Pontius Pilate in judgment asking “What is truth?” or like Saul of Tarsus as one blinded by the truth, or like the Gerasene Demoniac as one delivered by the truth, or like the person outside of society who found acceptance in the truth, or like the nameless blind man who was healed by the truth, or like Peter who while fleeing from persecution was convicted by the truth… we stand not alone on this seam of time, but are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses to the truth: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
We are called not merely to consider, contemplate, and categorize claims about truth, but to embody the way, the truth, and the life of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are called to incarnate the truth, to resist and subvert the current folds of time that seek to zipper out our witness of the Gospel. We cannot help but to be what we behold, despite what idols seek to stand in-between.
