Mark 13:21

“And at that time if anyone should say to you ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ ‘Look, there he is!’, do not believe it;

---

I know
I’m to believe
things known
to be true

I know
you believe
what you know
to be true

I know
belief
knows
it’s not true

I believe
what we know
stands between
our truths

I know better
than to believe
I know better
than yet unknown truth

---

In the process of trying to cut a time of tribulation short there will be many opportunities to take short-cuts away from the learning of mutual service.

Every attraction to someone taking care of things for you is a short-cut that will eventually be rued and found to have been a lie. Their short-cut lengthened the time we spent in an unproductive wilderness.

Taking a longer route through Wisdom and arguing with past verities to find a way through the brokenness of today to find a more whole tomorrow is actually a more efficient process. Compare the short-cut of yelling at a kid to “Come here” and the longer but better way of going to the child for another moment of teaching and learning. Yelling sets up further resistance while presence reestablishes a relationship.

There are plenty of people who desire nothing more than having you look up to them for guidance and their subsequent fleecing of your time, resources, and energy.

Short-cuts in a time of travail are described by Myers₁₇₅,

Because we so often find these negative feelings [of response to a chaotic world] intolerable, we are constantly tempted to displace them with aggressive behavior toward an “enemy” who becomes the object of all our fear and rage. Or we turn our frustration inward in self-destructive behavior—deadening the pain with alcohol or food or drugs. Or we respond to the complex and disturbing challenge of our world with panaceas, simplistic solutions that excuse us from deep or nuanced analysis. But the most dangerous temptation of all is not to look, to narrow our awareness, to enter into psychic numbness, to become passive and withdrawn.