Today, my erstwhile kinsman, Malachi Montroy, who travels with me solo when we kayak, wrote, “we haven’t even begun to see the beginning of woes.” That is not because he is excited about it, and it ain’t because he is a prophet. But you can look at things in the natural and see that there are some hard times possibly coming.
And then after that, after Madge and I had our devotional this morning, we started that back when covid hit and its the highlight of both of our days before she goes to work or I go to work. Afterwards, when we have time, we talk. This morning she was reading me an article out of the Epoch Times by Annie Holmquist titled “Finding Hope As Gas Prices Rise and Society Tanks“. Holmquist noted, sometimes when tough times hit, it isn’t anything like what we want, there is nothing pleasant, but out of that can come more spirituality.
Madge was reading the article to me and it mentioned Malcolm Muggeridge’s name. I hadn’t thought of him in awhile. When I was in bible college back in the ’80’s, I remember hearing a speaker that came through who mentioned Malcolm Muggeridge; it was the first time I had heard his name.
The speaker gave an analogy of what Malcolm said sin or lust was like. Muggeridge had been in the Indian Ocean swimming and looked in the distance and saw these brown, gorgeous women swimming who he thought were nude. He swam over there in a hurry, full of lust, and when he got there it was a leper colony of women. That is not to diminish lepers. Jesus sure loved them and wasn’t scared of them. Muggeridge went over there thinking they were these gorgeous women and they were all disfigured and missing noses and ears and arms.
It shows that often what we lust after isn’t what we get. How often does that happen? Like, all the time.
Malcolm Muggeridge is quoted in the Holmquist article a good bit. Essentially, Muggeridge was a complicated cat. When Muggeridge was in, he was all in. His dad has been a big socialist and politician in England back in early 1900’s.
Muggeridge as a young man went to Russia. He was enamored with communism in the ’30’s and early ’40’s, during the Stalinist era. He got over the Russia and figured out, socialism and communism wasn’t quite what he thought they were. So he became a rabid anti-communist.
Basically the article was saying that Muggeridge said that our western lifestyle is going to end up being the undoing of us. I think that is true. We have got so much prosperity and we are used to so many amenities. But this article talked about how Muggeridge was moved by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn had been in a gulag for many years and ended up being demonstrably anti-communist. I have read one book by him (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and started another one but it was just too big, called The Gulag Archipelago.
Sometimes, until we lose our freedom we don’t appreciate the fact we have freedom and in losing our freedom, I think Muggeridge quoted Solzhenitsyn saying that he and other folks that had been through the gulag system, in the eastern block in political prisons, often when they lost their freedom is when they found it and that is when they looked to their spiritual man and not just the physical.
In looking to the spiritual, your spirit is saved, and possibly, your body. But if you take care of just the physical, and not the spiritual, then both are lost.
Muggeridge went through a Christian conversion in the ’60’s. He was the guy that introduced Mother Teresa of Calcutta to the world.
Y’all have a good day.
—Chilly Billy Howell
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