The red, hot Spanish Armada boils with the Spanish Inquisition cresting on England's horizon, ready to crash over Queen Elizabeth's Protestant (non-Roman Catholic) Christianity. Elizabeth's Catholic cousin Mary is a few conspiratorial letters and an assassin's bullet away from inheriting England's throne and "saving" England from the clutches of the Protestant devil. Elisabeth's beloved citizenry and court ravish the possibility to see their "virgin queen" hook up and knocked up. Her own desires for true love and friendship increasingly lurk around every corner of her private chambers...and actually mug her heart in public. Cosmo would certainly have a royal feast! "That is the difference between you and I ... I find the impossible far more interesting," Queen Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett) pointedly suggests to her loyal chief advisor (Geoffrey Rush). The impossible is poignantly captured in the recently released "Elizabeth: The Golden Age." In a word this film is powerful, and is so precisely because flawed, but real, human flesh painstakingly clothes the painfully naked realities of the real world in which the real Queen Elizabeth once lived. Simply glossing over an air-brushed history book often cloaks the tenuous high wires on which history's models have balanced their struggles, fears, hopes, and dreams. While our world is certainly under the ever-watchful eye of the Almighty, the consequences we have to live with spawned from our all-human choices are all-real.
As believers, whether we like to admit it or not, we live in God's very real world inside very real human flesh. Tenuous are often our choices that are fraught with very real consequences and entangled in very real, intricate, and often intimate contexts. This may not be "super spiritual," but it is super scriptural. And we are still yet commissioned for Gospel, cross-centered Mission. What will we do with our days (or opportunities) given to us by God? Will we succumb to the same-old, same-old? Will we give up out of desperation? Or will we dream God's dreams of Spirit-empowered ministry and world-transformation. Every choice is fraught with risk. Personally, I find the impossible far more interesting.
As believers, whether we like to admit it or not, we live in God's very real world inside very real human flesh. Tenuous are often our choices that are fraught with very real consequences and entangled in very real, intricate, and often intimate contexts. This may not be "super spiritual," but it is super scriptural. And we are still yet commissioned for Gospel, cross-centered Mission. What will we do with our days (or opportunities) given to us by God? Will we succumb to the same-old, same-old? Will we give up out of desperation? Or will we dream God's dreams of Spirit-empowered ministry and world-transformation. Every choice is fraught with risk. Personally, I find the impossible far more interesting.
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