The blog is titled, notes from the dying city, and will be an attempt to answer that charge I keep hearing stir in the heart of me: that burgeoning darkness, and the responsibility I might have—indeed, any of us might have—to answer in the direction of its exposure.
My dad forwards a newsletter every couple of weeks that is edited by a man in the town wherein they live. It includes snippets of information from several local churches, as well as devotional material, which he pulls from a wide range that often includes inspirational work from books he is reading.
I read it and remember a quiet place and a focus on evangelism—a world not at all like the one I have been tracking, these many years now. As I have mentioned elsewhere, when I was a young mother, and began to teach Scripture and the ways of our Lord to my two young children in our home school, I began to wonder what the last hour would look like.
What could be so terrible that it was like no world had ever been, or would be again.
What would a time look like that is so horrific, it has to be cut short, else mankind would not survive. After all, tracking the history of the civilizations of man since the Advent of our Lord here (as much as those years and civilizations and nations before), one finds many horrors. Yes, the ante went up substantially, as we all know, when the first nuclear bombs were dropped.
Too, the full extent of the items that loom so perilously now cannot be captured by even a horde of us, carefully handing on our buckets of precious water, hoping to put out the fire.
The fire will not be put out. To be sure, it may be that, one day, giving up when we could have done more will be a charge we must answer. I can hope not, however, and as I quote often, Jesus Himself said, we must work while it is day.
For the night cometh, when no man can work.
I have been watching, actively, since those days of young motherhood. My two are grown to their own lives now, and one of them is a father of a young girl who will turn five this month.
And I am not the only one watching. As I frequently mention, Transfigurations has been tracking the darkness for a number of years. Too, I have bookmarked in my private files a large number of other blogs and sites who likewise track the darkness (from whatever lens each chooses).
The dilemma, for me, in setting out for others what I see (because it is far darker than can be easily wielded), remains the distance between that quiet place that can readily be headed under 'evangelism' —and a 'building up' into the stature of Christ from this darkness, which absorbs, as much as it agitates and seethes.
Which is closer to the way Christ left for us?
The only answer I have for that concern remains that the coming darkness is made of an item that has the power to derail the belovéd of our Lord.
To lead them into a destruction that is non-reversible.
A place is coming wherein some will make choices that cast them back into the clutches of the one from whom Christ our Lord has freed us. Clear sense of that within the Church itself (whatever denomination under which it is headed) is already present.
I track the madness, as many do, to post warning signs along the way, as our Lord Himself did, and the early Church did.
It will take some while to build up a library—for this is what it will become—of pointers. A lot of the material I have read is not so much oriented to dated news articles but websites with information.
Too, on both sides of the battle that is our troubled land now, so very much back-biting and attack mode and sneers begin to taint the news that a course in separating news from commentary is most needful: some sense of recognition of words that remove fact from its plainness and adorn it with something that is not fact at all...
The new blog becomes for me—not a new weight but rather—a balancing of calling. It is presented, as several of my blogs, using a pseudonym. While it will pretty much require tending on a daily basis, its choice of which news stories to 'reblog' will work from several parameters, which I go over at length at the blog itself.
I am looking forward to the new avenue for the handing on, a la the bucket brigade already begun, of a clearer awareness of the hour.
