Unsettled

On the whole I avoid talking about or considering current events.  I find that in general it tends to make for either breathless blogging (where every next event is "the great plunge") or blogging that is irrelevant in years to come (for example, read any blog in the last eight years that repeatedly predicted martial law).  And ultimately that is hardly what I am hoping to accomplish here.

That said, something feels afoot in the world. 

We have not been this close to an actual outbreak of hostilities with North Korea in all the years I can remember.  Whether you are for or against, we have re-entered the Syrian Civil War.  Turkey has essentially voted itself willingly into a dictatorship.  And acts of violence seem to have become almost common place in the daily news, to the point of not even causing the slightest stir when we read about them.

Or, as that great philosophy collective Aerosmith once said.  "Something's wrong with the world today, I don't know what it is".

In the back of my mind it feels like a threshold has been crossed, the sort of thing that one only realizes has occurred looking back.  The great events of one's lifetime are almost never started in such a way that one looks and says "Ah, this is it".  For the most part they start as small events, perhaps far away, that only resolve into a the great changing event after time has passed.  Like small rills that turn into large rivers, the source is often only guessed and and intuited, not seen fully.

I have honestly started to look at individual events and say "What if this is the last time I ___?  What if this is the last time I speak to _____?"  I would say that I am working to get my house in order - and it is true - but is some ways getting it in order simply means making do with what we have (for better or worse, we finally seem to have turned the corner on the acquisition of things and are starting to move the other way).

There is a rather unreal peace about this entire thing, oddly enough.  In one very real sense I have been confronted (rather visibly, as it were) that He is ultimately in control of everything in my life; in the other, there is an acknowledgement that all of these events are far beyond any ability of mine to influence.  What will come will come; my job is to face it head-on.

All civilizations crumble and die of course, but up to this point we have only had these happen regionally.  For the first time ever, we have the opportunity to observer (perhaps unfortunately firsthand) the decline and fall of a global civilization.  An unsettling thought indeed.