We Have a Crucial Role to Play…
In this desperate hour we have a crucial role to play.
That is the Third Eternal Truth and it happens to be the one we most desperately need if we are ever to understand our days.
For most of his life, Neo sees himself only as Thomas Anderson, a computer programmer for a large software company. As the drama really begins to heat up and the enemy hunts him down, he says to himself, This is insane. Why is this happening to me? What did I do? I’m nobody. I didn’t do anything. A very dangerous conclusion… though one shared by most people today. What he later comes to realize later – and not a moment too soon – is that he is “the One” who will break the power of the Matrix.
Frodo, the little Halfling from the Shire, young and naive in so many ways, “the most unlikely person imaginable,” is the Ring Bearer. He, too, just learn through dangerous paths and fierce battle that a task has been appointed to him, and if he does not find a way, no one will.
Dorothy is just a farm girl from Kansas, who stumbled into Oz not because she was looking for adventure but because someone had hurt her feelings and she decided to run away from home. Yet she’s the one to bring down the Wicked Witch of the West.
Joan of Arc was also a farm girl, illiterate, the youngest in her family, when she received her first vision from God. Just about everyone doubted her; the commander of the French army said she should be taken home and given a good whipping. Yet she ends up leading the armies to war.
You see this throughout Scripture: a little boy will slay the giant, a loudmouthed fisherman who can’t hold a job will lead the church, and a whore with a golden heart is the one to perform the deed that Jesus asked us all to tell wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world (Mark 14:9).
Things are not what they seem. We are not what we seem.
Of all the Eternal Truths we don’t believe, this is the one we doubt most of all.
Our days are not extraordinary. They are filled with the mundane, with hassles mostly. And we? We are . . . a dime a dozen. Nothing special really. Probably a disappointment to God.
But as C. S. Lewis wrote, The value of . . . myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by “the veil of familiarity.”
You are not what you think you are. There is a glory to your life that your Enemy fears, and he is hell-bent on destroying that glory before you act on it. This part of the answer will sound unbelievable at first; perhaps it will sound too good to be true; certainly, you will wonder if it is true for you. But once you begin to see with those eyes, once you have begun to know it is true from the bottom of your heart, it will change everything.
You do have a crucial role to play. Don’t miss it.
(Waking the Dead by John Eldredge, p. 33-34)
