Swords

It is almost too easy to categorize something, anything.  Business solutions can be defined within or on the edges of yesterday’s framework.  Music has boundaries, defined and articulated by yesterday.  Relationships are the same as they always have been, women and men, generations, and cultures exchanging ideas, falling in love, being friends.  Everything is a continuation of what has gone on before.  Things are, at some level or another, the same as they have always been.
 
The counter to this includes examples of New York and almost every major city in the world.  Everything is changing, life is exploding at the edges in new ways!  Music evolves, business learns and improves, and relationships are more sophisticated.  Things are not the way they were yesterday.  Lessons are there but must be adapted.  Conversations are helpful yet it is the individual who must decide.  Institutions don’t need protecting they need changing.
 
Perhaps neither view is completely helpful or accurate.  What if both are true?  What if both are clouded by the lack of seeing what has, is, and will go on?  Our parents could be as blind as we are about everything which is going on.  We may not see all that we think we see.  Forces may be at work, relationships may be influenced, and life may shift through something unseen yet felt, often unknown yet very real. 
 
When I hear that “Assyrians will fall dead, killed by a sword-thrust but not by a soldier, laid low by a sword not swung by a mortal.  Assyrians will run from that sword, run for their lives, and their prize young men made slaves.”  (Isaiah 31.8)  I find myself taking a fresh look at what I think I have and do see.  There is more going on that I realize.  Great ideas may be in a battle where you and I are the soldiers.  We could, I believe are, on the front lines of this conflict. 
 
Today I walk out the door with the swords of compassion, mercy, and acceptance strapped to my side.  I intend to use them.