"... when he had heard that John had been put into prison... he departed to... Galilee of the Gentiles... and [said], 'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand..."
There is something about death that focuses us. Suddenly we are no longer on random paths, competitors and dreamers of our own games and selfish ambitions. Death is everyone's common destiny. It's acute awareness strips us of everything. It has the power to surface what's truly Important and discard spiritual superficiality to its proper place.
Crises works like that too. We may have our Call, buried deeply within the mish-mash of daily "priorities" and activities. But such deep streams burst to the surface through immense personal, or corporate, crises. It doesn't necessarily have to be our crises, our death, or our personal catastrophe that gets the Call going. It can be the affiliation of someone else's crises.
When Jesus heard his cousin, John, had gone to prison for unabashedly living into what he really - deep down inside - believed in, it affected him in a significant way. Real Life kicked in. Excesses fell to Creation and he was clothed with the outranking priorities of the Creator. And where did the priorities of the Father bring him? To the second class, half-breeds - neither Jew nor Gentile, but those in a theological stew of mish-mash - living in Zebulun and Naphtali. The Call lead him to me. It lead him to you.
Living Real Life affects people forever.
And there he preached the same word as John preached - the same message that John had been imprisoned (and eventually would die) for, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." You see, my faithful one, when those we love are forced to go to prison, the Lord raises that same Call, that same Spirit, in the hearts of those remaining behind. The Remainders are empowered by the Call lived out in others. As things once valued - things now revealed to be hinderances to the Call (though never thought as such before) - fall to the earth, within us, the greater Priority emerges.
Indeed, it is our responsibility to carry on the Call for the well-being of the Remainders.
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