Reality

 I embrace levity whenever and wherever I can find it. I am not averse to it, nor do I have an objection to it. I like to laugh, and so should you. Laughter is good medicine, and anyone with laugh lines gets preferential treatment in my book. Too many today take themselves too seriously, and they’ve come to believe that if they crack a smile occasionally, their world will crumble into nothingness.

The other day I spent almost an hour snickering at a conversation I overheard between my daughters; the younger asking her older sister if she believed in USOs, her sister correcting her and saying it was UFOs, then proceeding to tell her that yes, she does because there was a Chinese water balloon passing over America that is considered a UFO. She’d learned about it in school. She’s in the third grade. I need to have a talk with her teachers.

As with all things, there is a time and place for levity, for mirth, for tittering, and sniggering, and even belly laughs. If, however, you walk around laughing all the time, don’t be surprised if you get a few sideways glances and see parents trying to pull their children away from your general vicinity.

We must have the appropriate reaction to the situation at hand, and anyone laughing or smiling at the world's current condition, or the church’s for that matter, is not having an appropriate reaction, far from it. We are watching the world descend into chaos in real-time, and that’s nothing to laugh at. We are seeing the church remain silent when it should be vocal, and being vocal on matters that are tertiary at best, and do nothing to help further the kingdom of God.

If you’re church leaders, whether bishops, pastors, deacons, or elders, are foaming at the mouth about social justice, but refuse to declare that the murder of innocents is wrong and immoral, then maybe they should stop calling it a church and be done with the farce already.

I’ve been getting messages from friends lately asking if I was okay. Whether in listening to the radio program or reading what I write, they say the joviality I once exuded seems to have been curbed of late, and they were just concerned. It was nice of them to reach out, and I assured them I was neither depressed nor despondent, but to laugh now while we should be mourning is not something I can bring myself to do.

The joy of the Lord may be our strength, and it keeps us from becoming ambulatory wrecks, but one’s soul can still be vexed by what they see occurring while simultaneously retaining the joy of the Lord. The two are not mutually exclusive, meaning if you have one, you can’t have the other. They can coexist and quite often do.

We can see the reality of the situation, acknowledge it for what it is, even be heartbroken over it, and still retain the joy of the Lord in our innermost being. If, however, we saw and acknowledged the reality of what is happening and our reaction was laughter and merriment, then we either don’t understand the devastation we have brought upon our heads or are wholly removed from reality.

Some mornings, if I finish reading through and considering a passage I’d planned on the previous evening and still have time before the kids wake up, I’ll open my Bible randomly and begin reading. No, I don’t make a habit of this or believe that whenever I open my Bible to a particular book, it’s an instruction or a targeted message from on high, but some mornings it hits.

Some days the passage speaks to you on so many levels that you wonder, if for a breath, whether there was something more to it than just randomness. I believe there is. Not every time, but sometimes, God chooses to speak to us in such a manner, whether to encourage us, correct us, edify us, or confirm something to us.

This morning I opened my Bible to the seventh chapter of Micah, and if you haven’t read it in a while, it’s a doozy.

Micah 7:2-4, “The faithful man has perished from the earth, and there is no one upright among men. They all lie in wait for blood; every man hunts his brother with a net. That they may successfully do evil with both hands – the prince asks for gifts, the judge seeks a bribe, and the great man utters his evil desire; so they scheme together. The best of them is like a brier; The most upright is sharper than a thorn hedge; the day of your watchman and your punishment comes; now shall be their perplexity.”

I must have read those two verses a half dozen times, astounded at how precisely it describes our day and age. It’s not a new thing we are witnessing, far from it, because human nature is stubbornly rigid and incredibly consistent all at once.

None of what we are seeing unfold, take shape, or play out today ought to surprise us. It’s happened before and will happen again because men with power will always want more power, princes will always ask for gifts, and the ruling class will always scheme together. The only difference is that with each iteration, the price tags are bigger, the gifts are grander, and the scheming is more in your face. This is the reality we are living, and all you can do is shake your head in dismay and say even so, come Lord Jesus!

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.