It is an odd couple of days. Yesterday was a clinical examination day for the medical school, and I was working there. Overnight, there was a certain game of rugby, and my team is world champions again. And, no, one cannot change that team: if you are born in New Zealand (as I am) supporting the All Blacks is compulsory.
But in Casa Pukeko we did not get up early. We slept in. So we are off to Grace Presbyterian’s second service (they need two: they fill the hall they hire each time).
And in the meantime, we need to recall that there are more important things that what is in the media, or the moral panics of this day, or tomorrow. This world wants us anxious and fearful: all things must be amplified and emotional. To borrow from Vox Day, they use emotion or rhetoric as their mode of communication, rather than reporting the facts and using logic, or dialectic.
One has to use rhetoric with care. It can incite mobs. Not that they need much inciting at this time.
And he said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith! And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried. For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you.
On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the next day, and he prolonged his speech until midnight. There were many lamps in the upper room where we were gathered. And a young man named Eutychus, sitting at the window, sank into a deep sleep as Paul talked still longer. And being overcome by sleep, he fell down from the third story and was taken up dead. But Paul went down and bent over him, and taking him in his arms, said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” And when Paul had gone up and had broken bread and eaten, he conversed with them a long while, until daybreak, and so departed. And they took the youth away alive, and were not a little comforted.
I am not saying that we will be rescued. The current elite are actively against us: they may not last. Indeed the writing is on the wall in Europe as I write. I am not saying that our lives will be spared. Some of us will be martyred.
But we need not listen to the rhetoric. Stop your newspapers. Unsubscribe to those political newsletters that make everything a huge crisis. There is enough to do anyway, and having some zampolit chanting slogans when he should put down his bullhorn and pick up a shovel.
For we need to rebuild the church, and then the nation will sort itself out.