We Live For the One, We Die For the One (Gabrielle)
September 27, 2005 by Gabrielle
So I was thinking about (what else?) Babylon 5 except this time I was thinking about the Rangers. The Rangers are a group dedicated to the defense of weaker people and to uphold justice and mercy. Take the Rangers out of Middle Earth, put them out in space and you got the idea. The Ranger’s code that they live by is “We live for the One, we die for the One.” The One is the individual who is in charge of the Rangers at the time. The Rangers live to carry out the orders of the One to fulfill their mission of bringing peace and justice and they are not concerned for their own lives because they live and die for the One. I thought that was a fine picture of what the Christian life should look like. We live and die for God. We live to obey His will and make all of His glory shown throughout the world. We should be bringing justice and peace where ever we go and death should not scare us because it will only kill our bodies. It seems like in America we have a slight grip on the last part, but we have almost completely missed the first. We have this idea that you become a Christian and then when you die you go to Heaven where you won’t hurt anymore. We at least have an idea that dying doesn’t have to be a scary thing, though it often is. It’s the living for the One part that has us stumped. Do I honestly think that everything I do from the moment I get up in the morning to the moment I get up the next morning needs to be deliberately subject to the will of God? Well, uh, yeah. I mean, that’s what it says in the Bible, right. “Whether you eat, or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God”, right? What ever I do needs to be devoted to my Savior and Lord. Do we believe that? Seth and Crystal spent part of Saturday at Pagans in the Park. It’s a time when Peoria pagans get together and they have workshops about what they believe and how that applies to everyday life. They were talking about raising children, how to incorporate them into their worship without being disruptive, schooling children when you have different concerns than the public school system and other day to day issues about living in this world when you live differently from the world. Everywhere Seth and Crystal went they saw generosity and affection for each other. What they saw should be characteristic of Christians, but I don’t think it is. We are too caught up in our individual lives to truly care about each other. We have a small grasp on the idea that we are different, but it hasn’t translated into we need to work at living differently. We kinda get that we die for the One, but we have nary a clue that we need to live for the One first. This needs to change. God rules every aspect of my life whether I want Him to or not. He has direct input into my hopes, dreams, decisions, thoughts. To say that He doesn’t is hubris and foolish. But it’s one of those things where you can fight God and lose or you can bow, kiss the Son, set about living for the One and be blessed. How are we doing at this? Can the world tell we are Christians? Would a group of us look different from a group of heathens? Would we look attractive to the unbelievers? Would we look different from a group of pagans? Better or worse? We die for the One yes, but how are we doing at living for the One?
i noticed that the rangers are a lot like samurai.. (who i have a dwindling interest in at the moment)… but being a samurai means fighting for your shogun.. or emperor.. and taking land from someone else.. it all seems well and good if life is that simple. i fight. but when you have to go to work in the morning, it’s a lot more confusing.
a friend of mine once noted that life would be great if darth vader were real… because then we’d all know what our purpose was.. to fight darth vader!
fighting (or living for) spiritual forces is more abstract than we’d like it to be.
Okay, this could be more information than you wanted and it won’t answer the real point of your comment, but…
The race of aliens that founded the Rangers, called the Minbari, are based on the old Japanese culture. The similarity of Rangers and samurai is intentional. After I wrote this blog post I was thinking about bits of the Hagakure I had read. The Hagakure is a book written to teach retainers how to be good retainers. It goes on and on about how you need to think about death every day so that when the time comes to die it doesn’t shock you. You need to serve your lord completely with your whole self. It is a very good book if you take it with a grain of salt the size of your head. There is much in the Japanese culture that is Godless, but there is much there that we would do well to consider.