Full Glory

There is a full glory that is yours even as someone that you think is marginalized. Or that the world says is marginalized. Or in any case, is not dominant. 

That doesn't mean that those with more obvious power are bad or evil or that there's been some kind of misunderstanding. God certainly calls men to a different standard than that to which He calls women. 

Sorry, but patriarchy isn't the problem. 

The problem is that you're unwilling to accept yourself as something other than a patriarch. 

That's what I want to say to those who are super-busy trying to deconstruct the world around them because they haven't figured out how they fit into it yet. Instead of looking to change themselves, they are trying to tear down the rest of the world because something doesn't fit. 

The truth is that when you understand yourself, it all fits. 

It starts here: by understanding that nothing is the way that the world has lied to you and says that it is. Power isn't really power; it's force. Human beings are not neutral. Victory isn't all it's cracked up to be. And it turns out that most of the folks who are losing by the world's standard are actually winning on all the measures that truly matter - the very things your soul tells you you're looking for. 

The poor, the marginalized, the afflicted, the affected, the weak, the foolish, the lame, the "cringe" - they're the ones who already have it. 

Hmm....I feel like I've heard something like that before...

Way before we were even having this conversation, pretending we're the only ones to ever have it. Pretending we are the ones "enlightened" enough to see what is really wrong with the world after all. Pretending we're the ones who are finally gonna fix it. 

Friends, we're not the first ones. We're not the only ones. We're not going to fix it. Left to our own power, we're going to do what every other generation before us has done - we're going to promise ourselves the world and shift pieces around until it feels like we have it, only to be shuffled to the side a generation or two from now when someone else realizes the world we made for us doesn't work for them. Kind of like you're feeling right now. 

Because the truth is that we aren't really at odds with the world. 

We're at war with it. 

We don't belong here. We weren't made for this. And the world keeps trying to press in harder and harder and tell us that we were. It's the enemy pushing in and trying to take over Sovereign's territory. And we feel it. 

But we won't fix it by pretending we're gonna tear it all down. That's not how we get back to it. 

We get back to it by being more fully ourselves, not by making the world around us less. We tolerate by filling the space with the glory of the way God made us, not by eliminating all the space that there is until we somehow think we're going to climb triumphantly from the rubble. 

We get back to what we were made for, to the way this world was supposed to be, by being more of who we were designed to be. As God created us, not as the world defined us. As the embodiment of His image in us, His wisdom, His design. 

That's how we get there.