The Winds of Change

"For every season turn..turn.. turn." The seasons are changing. Capitalism is dead, Communism is alive. In my country, nay my city stores that have been around since I was a child now close their doors. A new era is beginning and its depressing. Its depressing not such much in that it is negative but rather it feels like death. Change is natural they say. We all must adapt to it and get with the times. Technology can't seem to stop changing. Well I for one am weary. In the Scriptures it says, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow." (Hebrews 13:8). At least with the Almighty nothing changes, except us. We inevitably grow in our connection to Christ and we never look at the cross quite the same each time. We may find in a year ourselves clinging to that rood or running around it with praise on our lips.

No one is quite prepared for change. I think of the Crusaders and how they must have thought their kingdoms would last. I think of the Military Orders in particular, how they lived for four hundred years with impunity and then suddenly they found their world was gone. It was abrupt when Acre fell to the Mamlukes in 1291. They didn't know it yet, but that would be the end of the Crusader States and the beginning of a new dawn. In the wake of change the Templars were taken by surprise. On Friday 13th, 1307 the members of the Knights Templar found themselves seized upon and forced to disband or die. The Hospitallers during the shifting changes hurried to Malta and Rhodes where they became the Knights of St. John and continued their mission of healing for many more centuries.

The Knight found a changing world of gun powder. The crossbow had been a threat to the cavalier since its advent, but as the Age of Chivalry began to come to an end, the musket rose in the hands of militia and slowly mounted combat which had dominated warfare for millenniums was no longer necessary. Technology is not always the force by which change is administered. Economics have the same power. It was the economic weakness of Europe that plunged it in the Great War and then Germany's bleeding economy that gave the Nazi Party its power politically to create The Third Reich and thus plunge the world into another war.

With each falling leaf, rain drop, and ray of the sun our world weathers the changes. Nothing is spared by the sands of time, though men may cling to conventions there is no stopping the winds of change. Even following Christ has changed dramatically since Jesus roamed Judea. Our faith began humbly with Thirteen Jewish men. Since then there has been Constantine, The Great Schism, Monasticism, Crusades, Hussites, Luther, Protestantism, Wycliffe, Tyndale, Puritanism, John and Charles Wesley, The Great Awakening, Billy Graham, Joyce Meyers, iChurch, and more. With each century Christ reveals himself to His followers, and movements spring from the revelations.

We cannot be enemies of change, but there is something natural inside us that does not want to let go. Like the Hospitaller in his hostel, we want to hang on to what is familiar. A part of us is in defiance to change and this child within is from God. Our faith in the Lord must be fixed like a rock that is immovable. What we believe about the Trinity, The Church, and the Scriptures must stand the same in our hearts throughout all the ages, while new revelations are allowed across the draw bridge to our minds. The Old and the New can coexist. Part of us will never change, like the romantics and the historian who obsesses over times past, a part of our heart will remain in that time and never move on. But another part of us must plunge forward and learn to harness the winds of change to sail to new horizons. The Knights of Old are long dead. Their effigies and tombs are but ruins. And yet they are still with us. Children in the Twenty First Century still take up swords and pretend to be crusaders and knights of Camelot. Historians and scholars pour into the script of those who knew knights and retell the stories to new generations.

Even now with technology of my time I can find the picture above and share my love of an age long since pasted. The old and new are one in these times. Thanks to the new tools of technology we can discover more about those who came before than ever before. It seems time is not as linear as we thought, but instead the more we go forward the more we can look backward. As men invent new devices, we can delve with those devices back into a dawn of time far removed from our own. In this way we make a bridge between the past and the present.