"Safety"?

"They say there's a place for those who are good
With it's pearly gates swinging wide open
The rest of us here are just knocking on wood
Quietly, piously hoping".  Elysium by Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Security cameras were installed last week at the site office not far from me, as two neighbors eagerly informed me how they'd 'watched' me walking home a couple of times on their own new camera systems.

All part of being one the most surveyed populations I guess.

Such 'security' has reached pandemic levels. 

In China,they are busily installing a.i. systems that will allow every single person to be identified by facial recognition across the country.

When millions of Face Book accounts fall prey to another attack, or the NSA engage embedded malware, or the next financial crash shakes the world to its knees, well, at least we'll feel secure behind our cameras.

Such notions of peace and safety are hollow, because they ignore or perhaps excuse the miserable estate in each of us.

Anyone familiar with the Milgram research of the 60s or Marina Abramovic's terrifying 'Rhythm zero' performance experiment in 1974 will know just how vile and insecure we really are - there is an inner sickness that, when prompted, will bring out the worse in most of us. With dreadful ramifications.

We look through our surveillance systems, our social media and our tablets and phones, and make our judgements and act accordingly, but the poison we so often deem as evidently seen in others is blindly ignored in our own veins.

We think we're the ones who 'are good' - safe in our own conceits and contrivances... fit for those heavenly gates via our piety and purity.

We're simply not.

Surety must rest in a grace, a mercy, beyond the swamp of our egotistical devisings.

We're as incomplete as the observations we so readily make about pretty much everything - as blind as someone, holding a tail of some creature, thinking that's what defines the whole.

Partial truth is a murderous lie. Poison that makes us focus only on what we think at the expense of so very much more.

God is certainly watching us. Playing our games of peace and safety with the blades, ever ready, behind our backs. He felt the full death of our malignant evil, and gave all in return, that we might see His kindly face, in spite of our cruelty.

His grace is the only sure gift, certain hope, enduring love that can free us from our own 'security'.

By Christ alone, we are made free.