No Place to Get Comfortable

Tonight as I am listening to music I used to love, I find myself going from one time in the past to another and feeling that I can't settle anywhere.

This brings to mind the last moments our cat Poe spent at home before we rushed him to the vet at the end of his life. He couldn't move his hind legs, but he willed himself from chair to chair under the kitchen table, trying to find a place of comfort. They had all been satisfying before, but now nothing worked.

That's how life feels now. Something drastic has happened, a tragic change, and there is no way to get comfortable or if there is, it won't last. I feel I will be torn from it... like Poe trying to grab the final chair and hang on as I picked him up to head to the car.

Now I feel sick to my stomach, not about the past so much as the present and the future.

In seminary we discussed civilizations under collapse; people try to recapture previous times, idealized and romanticized versions of the past, or just anything at all different from their present circumstances. Those backing Trump, Clinton and Sanders are all doing that in some way or another. 

Bernie Sanders is the continuing illusion that we can capture what the 1960s radicals longed for; that we can make socialism work this time and that it will be the panacea for all of the ills of the modern world. He sells this vision to the millennials, a generation who never knew a world with the USSR in it, who were never told the truth about it in school, and on whom lessons of the past in most ways seem to be lost.

Hillary Clinton is imbued by her followers with the false vision of the 1990s as a golden age which was entirely to her husband's credit (forget The Contract with America- they don't count, though they made the best things of the late 1990s and 2000s possible). They imagine they can return us to those halcyon days if only they put her in the White House, a second return to Camelot and DNC "royalty."

Donald Trump is the answer to the cry of those who want,"Something, anything, as long as it's not what we had before." They have forgotten, perhaps, that Obama was elected for the exact same reason in 2008.

Collapse is surely coming, and I mean the collapse of this society. Perhaps the economy will collapse first, or maybe World War III will manifest out of Syria or the insanity of North Korea. No one knows what will come from external forces, but internally it is clear that this nation is deathly ill, that there is disintegration at work, and as all who work for peace, reason, and unity are attacked, healing the rifts seems impossible.

Again, Poe comes to mind. He ate a bunch of green onions in early July and it didn't dawn on me until recently that this was probably the base of his troubles, causing hemolytic anemia. He was dying from that point on. Then the fleas got bad, worse for him than for the other cats, despite treatment. He was transfused at the vet and that caused massive clotting from blood incompatibility. His death was a foregone conclusion, as there were too many major things wrong with him. Recognizing that, in hindsight, has given me a greater peace about having to let him go.

I can see only one possible way out of the path toward societal breakdown and revolution, and that is if God pours out His Spirit and revival sweeps the nation. However, after years and years of praying for revival I see none coming.

While it may seem the rejection of the gospel by so many and the rejection of God's people by this nation is a betrayal of our prayers and faith, it may only be the final proof of the incurable and fatal sickness which spells the end of the American experiment. Perhaps this will give us peace as we look back and recognize that there was no other way and it was time.

Until that moment arrives, I have no place to get comfortable.