The Gospel of Victory

(First order of business:  The King is born, long live the King!  But read on)

Over at Jr. G.  they’ve started categorizing some posts with a tag I heartily approve of:  “gospel of victory.”

It can be hard to remember, but “gospel” means “good news.”  And that good news is: we’re going to win.  Cleanly, triumphantly, gloriously, and unambiguously.

Pay no attention to empirical evidence suggesting otherwise.  Life is too short to count anything that happens in it as more than an anecdote.

Accepting ultimate victory as the null hypothesis—something to be believed until disproven—throws present obstacles into perspective.  “The problem” is rarely just the problem.  Tiger parents don’t worry about their child being denied by Harvard because they want their child to learn surrounded by ivy, but because they see Harvard admission as a determinant of future success or failure.

Remove that threat, by remembering final victory, and setbacks and sacrifices shrink in significance.

“Son,’he said,’ ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why…the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”

If the present can reach back into the past, I see no reason the future shouldn’t reach back into the present.