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The End of France: A Meditation
By Lee Duigon
MichNews.com
Nov 11, 2005
This may seem like an odd question to ask--but are we praying enough, these days?
How many of us really trust in God? Let's see a show of hands. By "trust in God" I mean to do things that our best common sense says are unreasonable, unprofitable, unsafe, or just plain daft. Like offering up your only son as a human sacrifice. Or giving up your cushy job as Prince of Egypt to wander around in the desert. Or, less dramatically, soldiering on through the 21st century in the firm belief that God will redeem this messed-up world someday--maybe tomorrow, maybe a thousand years from tomorrow.
I see a lot of your hands went down.
Watching France go up in flames, we can't help thinking, "There's just got to be a solution to this problem! Our only problem is that we haven
9;t found the right solution yet."
But we look at Europe an
d see whole nations that are going to disappear from the stage of history: they die, without a weapon having touched them. They're dying off because they simply won't reproduce themselves, aborting babies at a rate that exceeds the population replacement rate, embracing homosexuality as if it were a cure for cancer, and making sure that many of the babies that they do have grow up without anything which the general human experience recognizes as a family, let alone a church.
These are the great nations of Western Civilization, once Christendom, that bestrode the world. And they're dying--not from war, or famine, or the avian flu, but succumbing to sheer lack of faith. They're dying of ennui.
As the Muslims put their cities to the torch, these once-great nations can't even find the will to defend themselves. With their backs to the wall and the sword's point leveled at the
ir h
earts, they propose to buy off their attackers with welfare programs. If France as we have known it still
exists by the year 2100, and is not called al-Faranja, we will have witnessed a miracle.
As we speak, the car-torching phase of the intifada in France is tapering off. The French government has shown its weakness. The incipient jihad has shown its strength.
But what about us, in America? Haven't our feet already found the same road that Europe travels? Here, we call it multiculturalism.
If only we elect the right leaders, enact the right laws, and spend enough money...
It has to be here somewhere, that solution. Embryonic stem cell research, maybe? Raising taxes; cutting taxes? This new social program, that new social program...
Are we praying enough?
God is a ship so big that we can't even see it as it steams through the waters of eternity, propelled by a force so mighty that it doesn't eve
n raise
a ripple. Because we don't see it, we forget it's there, and coming our way. Because God's schedule doesn't conform to our notions of time, we make the
mistake of thinking that He's never coming. Because it pleases Him to use the powerless, the obscure, the lowly, and even "things which are not" to accomplish His purpose, we never see Him working.
We lean on our leaders, and they break. We trust in our human institutions, and they fail. We search in vain for what we already have, frantically trying to discover what we already know. Or else we abandon the search altogether and decide it's Party Time. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall have aborted, sodomized, and euthanized ourselves out of existence.
Much better we should be praying.
----------------------------------------------------
Lee Duigon is a Christian free-lance writer whose work can be seen regularly at www.chalcedon.edu.
<a href=
'http://ww
w.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_10277.shtml' target='_blank'>http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_10277.shtml</a>
By Lee Duigon
MichNews.com
Nov 11, 2005
This may seem like an odd question to ask--but are we praying enough, these days?
How many of us really trust in God? Let's see a show of hands. By "trust in God" I mean to do things that our best common sense says are unreasonable, unprofitable, unsafe, or just plain daft. Like offering up your only son as a human sacrifice. Or giving up your cushy job as Prince of Egypt to wander around in the desert. Or, less dramatically, soldiering on through the 21st century in the firm belief that God will redeem this messed-up world someday--maybe tomorrow, maybe a thousand years from tomorrow.
I see a lot of your hands went down.
Watching France go up in flames, we can't help thinking, "There's just got to be a solution to this problem! Our only problem is that we haven
9;t found the right solution yet."
But we look at Europe an
d see whole nations that are going to disappear from the stage of history: they die, without a weapon having touched them. They're dying off because they simply won't reproduce themselves, aborting babies at a rate that exceeds the population replacement rate, embracing homosexuality as if it were a cure for cancer, and making sure that many of the babies that they do have grow up without anything which the general human experience recognizes as a family, let alone a church.
These are the great nations of Western Civilization, once Christendom, that bestrode the world. And they're dying--not from war, or famine, or the avian flu, but succumbing to sheer lack of faith. They're dying of ennui.
As the Muslims put their cities to the torch, these once-great nations can't even find the will to defend themselves. With their backs to the wall and the sword's point leveled at the
ir h
earts, they propose to buy off their attackers with welfare programs. If France as we have known it still
exists by the year 2100, and is not called al-Faranja, we will have witnessed a miracle.
As we speak, the car-torching phase of the intifada in France is tapering off. The French government has shown its weakness. The incipient jihad has shown its strength.
But what about us, in America? Haven't our feet already found the same road that Europe travels? Here, we call it multiculturalism.
If only we elect the right leaders, enact the right laws, and spend enough money...
It has to be here somewhere, that solution. Embryonic stem cell research, maybe? Raising taxes; cutting taxes? This new social program, that new social program...
Are we praying enough?
God is a ship so big that we can't even see it as it steams through the waters of eternity, propelled by a force so mighty that it doesn't eve
n raise
a ripple. Because we don't see it, we forget it's there, and coming our way. Because God's schedule doesn't conform to our notions of time, we make the
mistake of thinking that He's never coming. Because it pleases Him to use the powerless, the obscure, the lowly, and even "things which are not" to accomplish His purpose, we never see Him working.
We lean on our leaders, and they break. We trust in our human institutions, and they fail. We search in vain for what we already have, frantically trying to discover what we already know. Or else we abandon the search altogether and decide it's Party Time. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall have aborted, sodomized, and euthanized ourselves out of existence.
Much better we should be praying.
----------------------------------------------------
Lee Duigon is a Christian free-lance writer whose work can be seen regularly at www.chalcedon.edu.
<a href=
'http://ww
w.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_10277.shtml' target='_blank'>http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_10277.shtml</a>