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This post also appears on ALTARWORK.com.
This isn’t ideal: to be the outsiders,
to be outside of your inside;
yet here we are, some by choice, others by circumstance;
all of us, sadly, by purloined precedent.
This is not the practice He inspired, nor the pattern
you likely intended.
Over seventeen-hundred years …
Since you were granted power, you’ve abused it
mishandled it
wielded it.
Remember, He laid power down.
Not like you.
We are the outsiders who wanted so much more for you;
we wanted God’s dream for you.
The invisible and the visible are no longer in harmony.
Now, we must live on the outside witnessing your discordant tones;
some of us are prompted to name your tragic flaws;
so you label us the iconoclasts, the prophets, the disrupters.
Remember, His spirit has always been disruptive:
you cannot contain it,
nor subdue it,
nor silence it.
No amount of your weekly hyped events can change it.
No amount of your calls for offering to you what we were invited to offer to Him can change it.
No amount of your forced structure,
your unnecessary bureaucracy,
your feeble power-grabs,
your perpetual forgetfulness
will ever change it.
The wind moves where it will …
And so we outsiders stand with our fists high,
our hearts breaking,
our tears streaming,
for you.
Though you are creeping further away from the kingdom,
you still have a toe in the fringe.
We know what the edges are like.
We’ve navigated them for centuries.