An audible heartbreak.

I walk a quiet life. Internally, everything’s abuzz, but on the outside, I wonder how nondescript I pull this whole thing off. I was raised on pleases and thank yous and don’t know how to handle voices that accelerate beyond a normal mode of volume.

I wonder if this stitching in my fabric will be my undoing. If I can’t stand up for what’s right to simply maintain the peace, then I think I’ve met my ledge, and there’s nowhere to go but down.

I’m listening to Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. The whole thing’s an audible heartbreak, but the part that drives me to sadness is how the author’s no longer a Christian because his father introduced him to evangelical Christianity.

This speaks volumes. Oh, how my ears hurt.

The political scope intertwined with worship. The can’ts and cans (the can’ts being an absurdly long list) that keep a small boy in his own little circle, a cage really. The well-meaning misunderstanding of Revelation and one eye always being glued to the clock.

Two minutes until the apocalypse.

It frightens me how Scripture is abused and taken so far out of its context, it turns a heart to hate the very thing Christ died for. Freedom.

Freedom from the sin that shackles us. Freedom to live within God’s beautiful order in a sea of chaos. Freedom to choose the just path when injustice is the only language spoken.

We think this world will become a beautiful place in the here and now, but no, it won’t. There’s only one beautiful thing that has ever happened, and it involved nails and flesh. So here we are. Trying to make sense of such a strangely glorious gift given to everyone who doesn’t deserve it. And what do we do with it? We paste a political candidate on it and call it a day.

We remove hope from a young boy’s heart.

I still have hope for the Church. Not the one you see on the street corner but the one that is comprised of God’s people. I know we can stand up to this world of wrongs because we have the world of truth in our sights.

And I know we we won’t lose heart, even when the volume’s on high with the windows rolled up.