Useful Information about Your Future

Transhumanism, the government, and God.

When contemplating your future, what concerns you the most? Growing old?  Achieving a certain level of success? Being financially fit? Healthy enough to enjoy retirement? I’ve tried to avoid aging, but now it’s

happening. I never worried too much about success—until I got published. I don’t think about money. It scares me. Enjoy retirement? I don’t think about that either. It’s enough just to get through the day.

Writing about transhumanism hasn’t greatly altered my forward thinking. If it happens, we’ll accept it bit by bit until it’s not only perfectly normal, but strongly preferred. I’m not worried about getting microchipped. If my heart gives out and gets replaced by one grown in a lab, I’ll be comfortable with it. After all, I wrote about the lab-grown heart. And machine-mind interfacing. And super powers. If anybody should be prepared for the coming improvements, it’s me. Google transhumanism and you’ll find the picture of a middle-aged housewife who writes Christian fiction.  Well, that’s me.

At first, I wondered how I got dropped into such a strange world. Did I do it to myself? I’m the one who let transhumanism into my head. I’m the one who wrote Wake the Dead . It is our future—at least to some degree. But when I think about the future, transhumanism is not the dominant theme.

More than comments on the transhuman stuff, I get remarks about the futuristic government I’ve imagined. It demands control. It provides everything—even entertainment. It doesn’t tolerate religion. Are we headed in that direction? Again, to some degree, the so-called New World Order will affect our future. But that doesn’t fill me with trepidation.

So what do I worry about when I think about the future? I’m too stuck on today to think much about it at all. Today is a new wrinkle, a pain in my joints, a mortgage payment to make. A book to promote. Today has enough worries of its own. Twenty years from now? I might have some government-issued, bio-manufactured joints that I got free of charge! Or I might be meeting in secret with other frightened Christians who have forgotten their mission.

That’s it. The future. The mission. When I wonder about the future, it’s the mission that persists in angling its way into my thoughts and dreams. I’m not one who likes too much travel—give me a quiet room and a laptop, and my imagination will take me all sorts of places. I don’t want to go on a short-term mission trip, though I know God might send me on one anyway. And I will go. But we all have a long-term mission. For some, it’s life in a foreign land filled with danger and discomfort. For most of us, it just means living redeemed and holy wherever God plants us.  

But isn’t there more? Does every believer have a mission? I can only wonder about my own. Shouldn’t I have fulfilled my mission by now? The past is over so I won’t worry about that. Am I living it right now? Will I fulfill it in the future? Will it mean more writing? More going places I don’t really want to go? More occasions to forget I’m an introvert and put the needs of others first? I think the answer is tied to all of these questions. Will I end up in some weird place the way my picture got dropped into the Internet’s top picks on transhumanism? Maybe my mission field is the future.

What’s yours? Do you even have one? If you don’t know, remember what Jesus said to His disciples after His resurrection:       

     

      "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you." 

                                                                                                                                                      John 20:21

Seems like a contradiction. Jesus set peace on them, then set His fate them. He breathed on them. Peace filled them. And they spread out and preached the Gospel. The mission led to their violent, bloody deaths. All except for John, who wrote down the Revelation of Jesus Christ while exiled on the Isle of Patmos. It’s believed he died a natural death in Ephesus. But he gave his life just like the others, and he did it with God’s peace.

So the best advice I can give you about the future is not to embrace or avoid transhumanism. It’s not to  prepare for living under a despotic government. The only useful information about your future that I can offer is to tell you that Jesus instructed His followers to peacefully go where they were sent. If you don’t think God is sending you anywhere, then maybe you’re already on your mission field. Go outside and be a missionary. Live like you’re going to die. Die like you’re going to live again. Because that is your future.