January 18, 2010

A Century's Change

Every time I think about Martin Luther King's speech, in 1963, I remember that Abraham Lincoln freed the southern slaves in 1863. Amazing. It took a hundred stinking years of "freedom" before the March on Washington could even have an impact. And that, folks, is history.

The next two things I think about are MLK's namesake and his own predecessors. The original Martin Luther nailed up his 95 Theses in 1517, but John Huss had been burned alive for much more radical things in 1415. Likewise, John Wycliffe preceded Huss by less than fifty years and Tyndale by almost one-fifty.

Sometimes change takes a long time to occur. Sometimes, for us radical visionaries, that can actually be very encouraging. Not that I'm being Utopian at all - God's Kingdom is not of this world. Still, even in the church, the change that we work towards is usually going to take time.

Time. Ah, my good friend and enemy time.

No comments:

Recent Posts
Recent Posts Widget
"If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient observation than to any other reason."

-- Isaac Newton