Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. You either know exactly what the title and those four names mean or you’re totally in the dark. In their song “Love the One You’re With” they state “And if you can’t be, with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.” Here, if you can’t be in an environment that allows heaven to invade earth, be content to live where it doesn’t.

What’s “venue” got to do with accessing the power from heaven to achieve the impossible, such as healing? Venue is location. My location is in the U.S., or better, in the developed, first world, as opposed to the underdeveloped, third world.

So?

We are infected with a spirit of apathy and comfort. We have too much to lose; Jesus’ call to “sell everything you have and follow me” is seen as figurative, not literal. He’d never really expect me to do that, would he?! We also don’t care; we don’t care that the rest of the world is going to hell, literally and figuratively. As long as we have what we want, who cares about anyone else, especially outside our borders.

That makes it a bit on the difficult side to access the supernatural. We don’t need it (or we merely wish for it, not as something that is real, but only untheroretically possible, e.g., if Superman existed, the world would be a better place); we make our own destinies, we take control of our own lives, we just do it. It would be nice if Superman showed up, but we know he won’t.

Interview someone living in India, Uganda or Brazil and you’ll get a different answer. The amazement for them is that we first-worlders don’t believe in the reality of the supernatural as daily invading our existence. We don’t believe it, we can’t access it and so we diminish it… an absolutely amazing stance to a rural worker in India who has experienced the supernatural world at work and wants desperately to have some sense of appeasing it so it won’t destroy him.

If our environment says it doesn’t work, why would we think that we could move within the supernatural?