“The horizon reveals day by day; with each revolution we compel the outcome we choose and still we question; why.”
This phrase is an excerpt from a manuscript that I plan on releasing some time this coming year. In part, it is the work of a lifetime of observations, ponderous inquiry and study yet it is to a specific event from this soon-to-close year that I will share with you now. Its impression was quite severe, its revelation was significant in such a way as to cause me to rethink the entire manuscript and ultimately to refine its ultimate form.
I had just completed a thirty-minute presentation and a brief twenty minute follow-up Q & A and was preparing to autograph a few books when a woman approached me and said (my portable H2 digital recorder was still “live”): “You wear your faith quite boldly don’t you. I mean, well, I guess what I mean to say is that you really have a profound sense of positive outcome…but I just don’t seem to be able to understand, I mean you comment about what’s going on in the country and the problems we face and it really is unsettling.” Then she really through me a curve ball! “I just think that God is really angry with what we’ve done to the planet and to one another and I believe we will all suffer from his vengeance.”
Let us be clear, I am no evangelical commentator; yes I have strong convictions but I try not to broadcast my beliefs, I try to live them. However, stirred by this woman’s words I now find myself faced with a group of people staring at me anticipating a response. Looking for the right words I closed my eyes and thought for a moment and here is what I said though I confess, at the time, I had no idea were they came from:
“I don’t believe in the Angry God theory, I subscribe to the Gracious God theory one which if God were to speak it, I would hope it might sound something like this:
I have made you to be precisely as I designed you. I have equipped you with all things necessary to pursue and bring to the physical realm the potential of my own hearts desire. I’ve created all including the process and order of things, thoughts and events enabling each to occur and like ME, you must follow the structures in order to yield the intended outcome. After all, remember always these are My doing (not yours), the product of My mind and ones you must discover to be unchangeable. I will wait on you as I too must yield to the truth that while I have provided you great strengths in mind and form, I have also imbed within you one significant risk – the ability to discern. Having done so, know that I will surround you with an infinite device; my eternal grace. Still, be compelled by this fundamental absolute; in the processes of your discerning understand that in my resolve I have left the outcome, ultimately, to you.
So there you have it, this is how I see the world, this is how I see you and this is how I see me; surrounded by choices that we each have to make and then life is what occurs from that point on until we make another. We are, I believe, inextricably linked to one another by the law of cause and effect.”
Strange as the moment was what occurred next was even more peculiar. Not a word from a single mouth only faces who’s expressions, for a brief moment, were somewhere between comfort and torment then each resolved to a gentle smile as if to say, I hope you’re right!
With these words as a precursor, let me close this offering with two quotes, both from Thomas Jefferson, which I believe are a marvelous insight to the choices that, as a Nation and a People, lie before us:
“When we reflect that the eyes of the virtuous all over the earth are turned with anxiety on us as the only depositories of the sacred fire of liberty, and that our falling into anarchy would decide forever the destinies of mankind and seal the political heresy that man is incapable of self-government, the only contest between divided friends should be who will dare farthest into the ranks of the common enemy.”
And,
“How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object — the happiness of man — to the selfish interest of kings, nobles, and priests.”
In the roads we all have yet to travel and the myriad of choices we will all most assuredly face, my hope for the New Year is that we all will be moved by what The horizon reveals day by day and each be drawn closer too the fullest possible expression of that which your choice will forever record as remarkable and lasting!
Curtis C. Greco, Founder
