A Philosophy in Process

I realized this weekend that maybe I just needed to start blogging (or heck, even pen-in-hand journaling) a vision for holistic sustainability. I know it might sound presumptuous, and maybe it's mostly just to work out my own thinking versus being a prescription for others; but I need a vision, a target to aim for. I know it might take a long time to get to, and I know that even if the Lord grants me a perfect vision I still won't do it immediately or perfectly. But I feel like without something to set before me, I'm just bumbling from idea to idea, from one new talk and new reading to the next, without any frame work to guide me.

Now, part of me thinks this is my need for control talking, my need to know everything before I go there. It might be a lack of faith, it might be putting my own human perceptions out there and calling them God's word. I hope he will guard and guide me so that what I write honors him and is suffused with a trust in him for everything, a giving over of everything.

Bron Taylor (a speaker at the conference I attended this weekend - www.yaef.net) just said that utopian thinking is not useful; we have to deal with the real world. I don't know if I can agree with that; I guess it depends on what he means for that. I'm not sure how he can say we need to rethink everything if he's being all, "Only limit yourself to the realities of the world." A reality of this world is that people rarely want to rethink anything until they experience a crisis/choice situation; so isn't it unrealistic to think that the necessary change will be made to avert catastrophe? I don't think that envisioning the ideal is utopian; we can acknowledge that human nature not yet submitted to God will fail in reaching justice, but that doesn't mean that we stop pursuing justice, acknowledging equally that we can only attain it by divine grace and provision.

I feel a building frustration, a building impatience, a building radicalism. But my life has not changed radically, although it is changing incrementally; but I feel so many forces calling for a much larger shift, and I don't know how to respond. In the end, I suppose that's what this whole writing thing is about.