GPS Journal - April 27, 2011

 

His reflection on dealing with Nazi evil during Christmas really struck me.

GUIDANCE 

Maybe the idea of "going back" to a time before trouble and death was itself a false notion.  A very sobering thought.

PERSPECTIVE 

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer's biography, author Eric Mataxas quotes from a Christmas letter Bonhoeffer wrote to the Finkenwalde brethren in 1940 to make the chilling point.

"Just as time-lapse photography makes visible, in an ever more compressed and penetrating form, movements that would otherwise not be thus grasped by our vision so the war makes manifest in particularly drastic and unshrouded form that which for years has become ever more dreadfully clear to us as the essence of the 'world'" (p. 373).

STRENGTH FOR THE JOURNEY 

As Bonhoeffer said:  "...war makes all of this, which existed already apart from it and before it, vast and unavoidable to us who would gladly prefer to overlook it all" (p. 373).

Or as Paul put it:  "...our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" (Ephesians 6:12 NIV).  And this constant, cosmic war continually breaks into our world on all kinds of levels in many different ways.

So until we go home or until the return of the King, we will remain at war here.  Naively forgetting this does not make it go away and can only result in more casualties. 

Tony