[picapp align=”left” wrap=”true” link=”term=beg&iid=5095143″ src=”2/c/9/9/Young_woman_cupping_c228.jpg?adImageId=11158329&imageId=5095143″ width=”234″ height=”205″ /]Hurricanes, earthquakes, famine, war and the coldest winter in the northern hemisphere in several decades:  it shouldn’t be long and the “end times” folk will once again be hanging from every chandelier, lurking around every corner.  I will not begrudge creative individual’s ability to handsomely profit from their perspective on current events.  What really upsets me is that such talk distracts from the many primordial opportunities to be living beyond “the end” that are so readily found, nearly everywhere.

Come let’s reason together.  For the first time in a long while the American ideal is being universally challenged.  Over the past eighty years our culture incrementally adopted an entitlement mindset.  The American minimum is no longer a place to sleep, a meal to eat, clothes to wear, a job to do, someone to love and happiness to pursue.  Absolutely not!  We require climate controlled palaces, satellite television, internet connected mobile devices, amusements of all sort ready for our consumption, jobs suited to our personalities and interests and not requiring our hands to get too dirty.  We require unlimited access to motor vehicles and good roads to drive them on.  We demand a constant flow of electrical energy at a price even the poorest among us can afford.  We expect doctors to heal us from the damage of our years of recreational pursuits and insist on the right to sue them for pain and suffering when they err.  Our government must pay for crime protection, natural disaster recovery, health care, retirement care, educational institutions, national parks, national defense, food chain testing, addiction recovery, industrial development and much more without taxing the proverbial “pants right off us.”  I could go on, but I am already running the risk of a rant.  The minimum is so far behind that should we pass it again we most likely would not recognize it.

My perspective is imbecility, I know, but I will proffer it none-the-less.  This day of not getting everything we want now is the favorable time to see beyond the lies of our expectations and recast our vision to do something revolutionary.  For instance, my not being able to pretend that I can afford to spend $80 per month on television service will let me see that there is a real world outside of my man cave.  There are actually real people to befriend.  There are actually billions who would consider it a significant upgrade to reside in our garages.

Yes, during the “greatest recession since the great depression” there is actually huge, big, enormous, large, colossal, prodigious, opportunities to love people.  Whether it is someone just down the street who is mourning the end of a marriage or an earthquake survivor in Turkey, Chile, Haiti, a tsunami survivor in American Samoa or a war survivor in Congo; we actually have the privilege of being able to do something about it. 

Less than forty years ago we were told that we cannot have everything we want.  Most of us who were alive then seem to have completely forgot.  Doesn’t anybody remember the early seventies or the early eighties?  Just twenty-five years ago we crooned “We are the world.”  Did the catchy sentiment prepare us at all for today?  Can we waste another ring of the alarm?  Will those who claim to be living for eternity begin to act like they believe even a syllable of the promise to have a custom room in “Daddy’s House?”  Will we say “no” to returning to the way things were (which some of us no longer are able to do) and “yes” to living for something far better than the satisfaction of our own appetites (which all those who belong to Jesus are called to do).

“This is the message you have heard from the beginning: We should love one another…So don’t be surprised, dear brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. If we love our Christian brothers and sisters, it proves that we have passed from death to life. But a person who has no love is still dead.” (1 John 3:11, 13–14, NLT)