It’s hard to know what to do some days. The world seems to spin very quickly and sometimes seems to be spinning in the wrong direction. It can very easily lead us to a place of feeling helpless, and it’s easy to find ourselves at a loss for what to do next.
Truthfully, most of the world’s spinning is out of our control. Most of what’s happening is the consequence of a whole bunch of choices piled up together over time. And like most complicated things, there’s no way to un-pile all those things at once.
That still leaves us wondering what to do, and in the face of all this spinning madness, the urge to do something can be pretty strong. Even overwhelming. It’s a good urge, though, and can lead us to some beautiful places. But we need to know where to start.
When you and I travel, we determine our destination, and we hit the road. We’ll think of the stops along the way, the time it will take, the route, and the flight times, but we likely won’t think about where we are because we don’t need to. We know where we are. We know what the starting point of our journey is. The starting point is here. It’s where we stand.
Asking ourselves what we can do, and what we must do, in a madly spinning world is like asking the where we’re going on a trip. We’ll need to plan the road ahead, have a destination in mind, and know how we’re getting there. And if we find ourselves at a loss for those details, it’s worth asking the first question:
Where are we? Where do we stand?
Citizens of Heaven stand, first, in God’s Country. We stand in a place where love is the law, and where compassion is the exercise of that law. We stand in a place where justice and mercy are never contradictory, and where glory and humility are mirrored in each other.
This is our starting point. This is the first point on the map. When we recognize that this is where we stand, simply standing becomes an act. It helps us see where we’re going, and it becomes a way of doing something in the face of a madly spinning world.
Standing in this place will never be standing still because, even though it’s our starting point, it’s also our destination. We stand in God’s Country, but we know that we don’t always live there. Knowing both where we stand and where we’re going, though, will make our next step more surefooted. They will be sure and certain, even if the steps we’re taking are small ones in a madly spinning world.
