My last post, being focused on the political and international scene, could give one the idea that my concerns are solely with the impending regime change in Washington, DC. That isn’t the case, though. While the foreboding I’ve been feeling is certainly partly due to the political situation, there are a number of personal elements in play as well; I just have the sense of some combination of things coming together, and I don’t know just what, or to what purpose, and it’s been weighing on me.
That’s why Sara and I, even though we’re still feeling the effects of this stomach bug that swept through our family, decided we needed to get up to South Bend last night to see Andrew Peterson in concert. He’s touring solo (absolutely solo, without even Ben Shive) in support of his new album, Resurrection Letters, Vol. II (apparently Vol. I will be coming later), which released on Tuesday. It was a joy to hear him sing his new songs, and a lot of fun to hear him talk about the stories and Scriptures behind each of them; it was a greater joy to be lifted up by the theme running through them, the celebration of the power of the resurrection of Christ in our lives.
This is critically important, because the gospel isn’t about empowering us, or fulfilling us, or satisfying us, or any of that; all of those are effects of the work of God in our lives, but they aren’t its essence or its purpose. The gospel is about a living God raising dead people to life. We were dead without him, we are dead without him, we become less alive every time we turn away from him; and every time we do, his Spirit is at work in us to raise us back up out of the depths into which we keep trying to cast ourselves. He isn’t simply changing us, he’s remaking us, and indeed has already remade us; he’s making all things new, and he won’t stop until he’s done, no matter what this world might do to try to stop him.
This is the answer to my foreboding: whatever may come—for our nation, for our world, for me personally and my family—it’s all in God’s hands, and all accounted for in his plan. It’s all a part of him making us, and all things, new. It’s all a part of the process, begun and sealed in our baptism, by which he’s putting our old selves to death and raising us to new life in him. And in him, by his grace, though things may be dark and troubled along the way, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we need fear no evil, for he is with us; and we may be sure that in the end, as that great saint of the church Julian of Norwich put it,
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.