A couple of weeks ago the gardener came around to the apartment building where I live and gave all the jasmine bushes a haircut.  They all had neat square edges and corners, and of course all the blossoms and little green shoots were gone.  Today, they're sprouting already, and with the new green leaves, the signs of life, there comes some disorder.  That perfectly neat shape has been disturbed.  Life has a way of doing that.  Resurrection will disturb us every time. 

 There seems to be a kind of force in human nature that wants homogenization - wants everybody to think and act the same. For example, when I'm on the road sometimes I just want McDonald's or Burger King.  There might be a really good, unique local restaurant right in front of me, but when I'm tired I don't feel up to that.  I want something that I can predict and control.

Wouldn't it be nice - or would it, really? - if we never met anyone who disagreed with us, or spoke another language, or had another temperament, that made life unpredictable and challenging.

 I'm joking of course.  It would really be rather horrible if all the food everywhere was exactly the same, or if everyone talked or acted the same.  God didn't make the world like that.  But there is a force that seeks to impose order. 

Mission has a bad name because of certain times, places, incidents in which a conquering power has attempted to impose Christianity, and often a new culture and language as well, on a nation as a whole, by force and oppression.  It should not be about that

but about the outreach and conversion of hearts, one unique person at a time.  The action belongs to God ("I will gather"), and to the ones being converted ("they shall come," "they shall see.")

This has something to do with democracy, too, but that's for another day.