What would it be like if belonging to a community meant that you had a place of refuge and a place of responsibility to others?
What would it be like if public and private (if they even existed) where more about physical modesty and less about belief and values?
What would it be like if today was the focus, knowing tomorrow may or may not come?
What would it be like if life was ruled by purpose rather than chaos?
What would it be like if relationships were more important than individual goals?
What would it be like if the spiritual was as much a reality as the physical?
What would it be like? Look at the above list again and imagine your life with the proposed changes. While some, if not all of these changes would make for messy complicated lives, wouldn't they add to life? Wouldn't they make for a fuller life? One would be hard pressed to say that they take away from the experience of life on earth.
The above attributes would be quickly associated with primitive cultures by anthropologists, that is to say that such cultures haven't been modernized. Darwin called the people of such cultures savages (and he was only a hundred years into the Enlightenment!) Now look at the list again, how many of these things wouldn't you like to have, or at least the possibility of, in your life? Some of these you may have even been trying to instill, but besides some small glimmers of hope, it seems like you are swimming upstream. That is, because in our society such ideas do not fit the Enlightened/Modern model.
Here is my proposition: "Modern society" has been actively pushing God out for over 300 years, therefore we have lost God-given aspects of how to live our lives to the fullest and now we aren't sure how to get them back. The problem is, we can't. Not without God. We can't do it without Jesus and his Spirit. The above attributes are all over the message of Christ, just waiting for us to turn and take him seriously.
What would it be like? I don't know, but I am going to keep pursuing it until it happens.
