Scatterplot on Eternal Perspective
I hope you have found this “twisted” series valuable. Feel free to share your thoughts with me and our other followers here at the site. This is the last letter in the series, “Making the Most of Family Life,” as I originally presented them in a church class back in the fall of ’02:
My dear young tempters,
This will be the last of my lessons – for now. I expect you have gained an appreciation for how much fun family life can be when you approach it with an appropriate amount of seriousness in your scheming. You now have several new weapons to add to your arsenal of family life destruction strategies. Regardless of your preferred mode of unmaking the Enemy’s design for his little groups of creatures, today’s lesson will multiply your chances of success. Here it is, so basic and yet so powerful: keep your patients and their families living as though their time on that nasty little sphere is the only time in their lives.
Every time a human opens its eyes to the eternal reality of its life, it immediately begins searching out the Enemy and attempting to understand and obey his rulebook. Keep their pitiful eyes shut to the eternal nature of their souls. Darkness!!! Always keep their senses clouded in sweet Darkness. Although it is imperative that you keep them from seeing themselves in an eternal perspective, it is absolutely necessary that they not see their actions in this light. (I use the latter human phrase intentionally, because the only way for them to gain this perspective is to receive illumination from the Enemy and his confounded book.) As dangerous as it may be, many humans have stumbled upon the fact of their unending nature, but have been stupefied into living their temporary lives without acting as though there is an eternity. A brief example in the family setting is in order.
Picture a typical family in the delightfully deluded American culture. Now, without showing your ignorance and cowardice, imagine that this is a family of churchgoers. Father, Mother, Daughter, and Son Churchgoer all have enlisted in the Enemy’s ranks. Every Sunday they march like lemmings to sit on their favorite pew at the local “church of nothing special” to listen to a guy that they haven’t bothered to get to know tell them something about the Enemy that they have heard so often that there is really no need to listen anymore. As they sit through the service, Father notices all of the preacher’s comments that he would have put differently, Mother worries about whether her husband or her kids are paying any attention to this message that clearly applies to them but not really to her, Daughter is busy trying to attract the attention a certain young man a couple seats over from her, and Son is planning a new strategy to try on his favorite video game. All of them are eager for the last guy up front to get up and shut up, so they can go eat.
How easily their simple minds are dominated! You see now how you may quite effectively convince them that simply believing in an eternal perspective is enough to please the Enemy and give them some kind of victory over our Triumphant Kingdom of Eternal Darkness. Ahhhh…”faith without deeds.” That is the Enemy’s title for this wickedly beautiful way of life. Well, I would never agree with the Enemy. But I will say, GET OUT THERE AND GET TO WORK!!!
Your Adoring Instructor,
Scatterplot
