Ordination Charge

Doug was ordained, believe it or not. Stacia made the awesome stole pictured at right. I gave the charge which went something like this:

Doug, you have been, since your childhood, a walker of worlds. You have explored the continents and oceans of secret planets and private universes, some of which you have shared with me, but some are known only to you. This is good. It will help you with what I am about to charge you with.

I charge you, Doug, to tell a story... or rather to live a story of two worlds. Two worlds that from the beginning have longed to be one.

I charge you to be a walker of both of these worlds. The one a realm of Shalom, where all is mended, all is full, all is joy and truth. The other... well, it's pretty good too.

But this is no mere hero's journey where you get to go through a wardrobe, have an adventure, and go back to exactly where you left off. This isn't even Frodo's story where you discover upon arriving back in the Shire that you are too changed to stay there anymore.

The story I am charging you to live isn't one where you go on a journey to a different place. It's one where God took two vastly divergent worlds and with wood, nails, chutzpah and blood hammered out a bridge between them. And now you've got to take people across that bridge and show them the world you have walked in. And you've got to teach them to build more bridges, and then shorten those bridges, and close that gap and bring those worlds together.

I charge you with making the fantastical actual.

I charge you with making the miraculous tangible.

I charge you with making one day right now.

Go, walker, and tell them that the consensual reality of the Technocracy can be bent and broken.

Go and show them how by laying down their swords they can confound and defeat Leviathan.

Go and teach them to believe that when they pray "Thy kingdom come" it actually does and we get that much closer to the day when every tear is wiped away.

As John says in his apocalypse:

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I hear a loud voice from the throne saying:
"See the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples,
And God himself will be with them.
He will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
For the first things have passed away."

Go because this isn't a fairytale about a distant realm. This is the far country. Here there be monsters. But this is also our eternal home, for this is the very place where that other world is breaking through, and it falls to you to help peel back the barrier, to use your expertise as a walker of worlds, to show others the way, the truth and the life.

Go, walker, and may the Holy Spirit go with you.