A few days ago, while visiting some friends of mine, I was reminded by an interaction that took place more than a decade ago when I was a student at the Ambassador Bible Center. It was lunchtime, and one of the former professors of that august institution made a comment that in the Great Tribulation that there will be some leaders who may have to sacrifice themselves to preach to the lukewarm, and who would presumably receive a greater blessing because they belonged with the zealous and faithful counted fortunate enough to escape those evil days. My reply was rather direct, and seemed to take the professor off guard, in that I did not believe that there would be any shortage of people with titles and positions who were lukewarm to minister to the brethren in that condition, while those ministers and leaders who were zealous and passionate for the truth would likewise have sufficient people to help teach in safety. Nothing I have seen in the last decade has changed my own thoughts on such matters, although they remain my own thoughts.

A great deal of my life has been spent around people who believed that God put others where they belonged, not merely in the world to come, but in this life. Whether this conviction came from a misguided belief in karma and reincarnation that held that the mistakes or merit of a previous life led to the life that is lived here and now, or whether the conviction came from a temperamental conservatism that disliked to see others rise beyond the station of their youth, and that especially did not like to see those whose birth and family background provided for elite status to fall below those of obscure and even dishonorable family backgrounds, this tension between a conservatism that tends to disparage many types of change in the world that was around me and my own ceaseless desire to end up where I belong because I have not arrived there yet has played out in my life, with a considerable amount of frustration and difficulty on all sides. To be sure, this has led to my own difficulty with the political order of some nations and with some regions of my home nation, because I refused to be content with the boxes that others placed me in without reflection or without later revision, leading to intense conflict.

One of the tensions that we must accept in our lives, if we are people of faith, is that both growth and contentment are commanded of us. We are told to be content with what we have, not to be motivated by greed or envy or impatience or selfish ambition, all of which are difficult for us to accomplish. We are told to avoid comparing ourselves with others, to avoid treating the blessings of this life as a matter of competition in that we cannot rest until we have equaled or excelled the blessings given to our neighbors or brethren. This is wise advice, and true, insofar as it goes. Yet at the same time we are told, equally fervently, to devote ourselves to growth and change, to keep our vision on the world to come, and to accept that change in this world and growth and overcoming are natural and proper for us as believers. And yet these two elements are at odds—to overcome and to grow and to change all lead to greater capabilities, greater fitness for opportunities, and these in turn ought to change the way that we are viewed and treated by others. An adorable small child who grows into a capable baptized man or woman, with growth in all aspects of life, should expect that their growth leads them to be treated with respect, and for them to be given the opportunities to serve others based on the capabilities they have developed through much time and effort with the God-given gifts they have been endowed with by our Creator.

In the tension between growth and contentment, both are necessary. We need to be content because the place where we truly belong may only be reached when we blessed dead awaken into eternal life, and we may never fit in precisely as we would wish in this life, simply because the world around us has not prepared a place for us that suits our experiences, our temperament and personality, our gifts, and our character the way that Jesus Christ has in His kingdom. Often, the world and its institutions do not even try to prepare places for others based on who they are, but expects us to adapt as a matter of course to the world that is, no matter what difficulty is involved. So, given the fact that our truest selves will often be in tension with the world around us, no matter where we may be, we need to be content to recognize that this dislocation and foreignness and strangeness is only a temporary phenomenon, but that our feeling of belonging when we truly arrive where we were created to be will last for all time. At the same time, though, in order to reach that blessed state of belonging we have a lot of work to do to work out our own salvation with the help of God and the encouragement of others, so that we become what God truly created us to be. This is not always a straightforward or easy process, and it involves a lot of suffering and many trials and sore tribulations.

This is true not only of we ourselves but the world around us. When we look at a grubby caterpillar, do we forget that it was created to be a butterfly, and that after much chewing of leaves and times of repose and the struggle to escape the confines of the cocoon, its true form is eventually revealed in beauty and delicacy? So it is with us. We too dwell this earth in our larval form, and it is easy for us to think of others as merely grubby worms and not particularly impressive in any way, and to forget that we are dealing with the messy beginnings of what has a glorious destiny. This greatness comes about not because we are worthy of such glory, for it was not a part of any of our own designs or plans, but because we have a great destiny from He who created us and formed us in the womb, with all of our quirks and odd ways. There are some aspects of our ways that were created in order to fit a larger balance of which our knowledge is at best vague and partial, and there are other aspects of our ways that we must overcome as they are an aspect of the grubbiness of our fallen world and its rebellion against our Creator. And after the tension between that which must be preserved and that which must be left behind, that which is a shadow of things to come and that which is a darkness banished by the light, we become who we were meant to be, and in the end, everyone winds up exactly where they belong. Clearly, we are not yet there.