New direction.
I had originally envisioned Unreconstructed as a place where I would vent my frustrations with politics.
I published a couple of pieces to that effect, but something was missing.
To be frank, politics no longer excites me in the way it once did. And since I no longer have any social media, the Current Controversy™ barely registers. “Did you read the Susie Wiles feature in Vanity Fair!?” I couldn’t care less.
The problems facing us are not political—never have been. They are entirely spiritual. They concern our relationship to the Creator of the Universe, God.
This is why I have little regard for the constant stream of poo coming out of America’s newsrooms (and this app). No, I don’t want to read your thoughts on Candace Owens 4-hour-long struggle session with Erica Kirk. No, I don’t want to read your Spenglerian analysis of political violence in America. No, I don’t want to read your treatise on the psychology of Nick Fuentes. No, I don’t want to read your 15,000-word essay on why paganism is based and Christianity is cringe. And to my Catholic friends, please, I don’t want to read another essay on why Protestantism is a low-IQ backwater religion because TRADITION.
People are drowning. Young men are killing themselves because they can’t stop watching porn. Drug/substance abuse is skyrocketing. Life has become the pursuit of increasingly perverse ecstasies. Lonely? “Hey, Grok—”
There is only one answer to all this chaos, and His name is Jesus.
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”1
God is holding out his hand, and all you have to do is take it. Will you do that?2
Of course, becoming a Christian doesn’t mean your problems disappear—but it does mean God will walk with you through the fire. The beauty of grace, you see, is that there is nothing we can do to earn it. God owes us nothing, and still chose to give us everything.
Don’t get me wrong, surrendering your life to Christ will cost you something—a relationship, perhaps, or a job. It may even cost you your life. But failing to give your life to Christ will cost you everything. Please, I beg you, do not make that mistake.
Whittaker Chambers described his conversion this way:
[W]e do not simply step from evil to good, even recognizing that any human good and evil is seldom more that a choice between less evil and more good. In that transition we drag ourselves like cripples. We are cripples. In any such change as I was making, the soul itself is in flux. How hideous our transformations then are, wavering monstrously in their incompleteness as in a distorting mirror, until the commotion settles and the soul’s new proportions are defined. In that change, practicality and precaution are of no more help than prudence or craft. It is a transit that must be made upon the knees, or not at all. For it is not only to the graves of dead brothers that we find ourselves powerless at last to bring anything but prayer. We are equally powerless at the graves of ourselves, once we know that we live in shrouds. At that end, all men simply pray, and prayer takes as many forms as there are men. Without exception we pray. We pray because there is nothing else to do, and because that is where God is—where there is nothing else.
Only when we come to the end of ourselves can we fully surrender to God. Then, and only then, are we ready to be transformed.
“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”3
Talk to you guys soon.
John 14:24 NIV
“[For] if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Romans 10:9 ESV
2 Corinthians 12:9 NIV