I’ll Get To It Later
And that’s what I told myself. Because, I DID intend to get to it later. The leak got worse. Going up there to look after it was going to be a task that would interrupt my fun on Saturday, my football game on Sunday. Or interrupt the other tasks that I would rather tend to that may require less effort or not have the possibility of turning into a bigger commitment than I want to make.
My neighbors had leaks also and got around to it after it cost them greatly, or some got to it too late–after it collapsed. You need a roof, you need a covering. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, first are water and food. Then comes shelter. Yet, in the pursuit of reward and glory, men forgo these needs. While small and humble, men seek water, grow food, and build shelter. But when man achieves those, their necessity becomes distant, as though each will appear before him without effort. Water is natural, but it must be brought from the stream, the crop must be harvested, the meat hunted for—and the shelter must be erected and maintained.
But then the day of no water arrives, the stomach growls from hunger, and we shiver from exposure to the elements over which we have no control. We are vulnerable to failings in our secondary and tertiary needs: security, then fellowship. Our morality is lost, for without the foundation of water and food and shelter and rest, nothing else stands.
The other tribe he is at war with suffers not these lacks. That tribe still appreciates water and sustenance and values the building of shelter. He still values fellowship and he still propagates. His morality is intact. He prays to his God five times a day, and builds Mosques to invite other men to pray, who do so by the thousands, by the millions.
Sunday morning I silently meet eyes with the people eating brunch on the sidewalk outside the pub, begging with my gaze that they come to church and congregate with other Christians. There are less and less of us, and we are not building—we are crumbling. Not just our sanctuary, our hearts crumble as our numbers thin out while we try to speak to a world about a God we seem to have no time for until it is time for a baptismal blessing or to cry for an end to suffering.
The Sunday morning that was sacred is now youth sports, the soccer field is full, while the Sunday school class in the basement is sparse. We celebrate a Christmas that no longer recognizes Christ, just the sales and bargains and selfishness. We desire morality that is no longer the compass of our travels and we speak of a God that we see as a distraction from daily life.
Yet we are confused at what has happened in our institutions. Our lamentations to the passing winds are fruitless, our exhortations to the young are in vain. What happened to our civic organizations, what is going on at the universities, what happened to our sports leagues? All have been compromised, pressing you and I into smaller and more distant corners of existence, favoring the refuge of absence over the confrontation of being present.
Every time we are shocked at what is happening around us, to our order and structure, remember the institutions have died from our neglect. The church we walk past and never enter is one of the support columns of the nation but is now crumbling from inattention. The fraternal organizations that held the standards of culture for manhood are dwindling away because we are not there. Sports have been swayed into a culture that is not built on the construction and strengthening of men, but on the pacification of social revolutionaries. The music of inspiration has given way to the soundtrack of demonic production, same as the films that no longer capture the interest of men because we are portrayed either as evil enemies of anything and everything, or as hapless dumbasses that can’t get anything right.
There are days I feel like the last man on the parapet at the Alamo, fighting back the hordes.
This is not what we intended, but this is what we got.
