Flying sledge-hammer

In 1984, an enigmatic female athlete appeared on television screens across America. She was swinging an iron sledge-hammer that she eventually releases at maximum destructive force, to the horror of viewers, as it flew overhead toward a giant megatron big-screen. The 60 second commercial* ended with the hammer-throwing athlete watching the total destruction of the big screen itself symbolic of an end of an era and the beginning of something new**.

The athlete is the only one that is technicolor. The rest of the people, including the security guards chasing her down the monochrome corridor into the big assembly hall, are all in black and white. The eye of the audience is trained on the hammer as it flies through the air in a predictable arc towards the coming explosion at the culmination of its flight path.

Ka-boom! Impact. How will you make an impact in 2019? What are the endless effects and outcomes as a result of the whole root and brain of a single decision you make on your trajectory this year with numberless outcomes into the new?

The flying sledge-hammer speaks with prophetic clairvoyance of a coming shift that is now, and not yet, a paradigm that is breaking away from the convention of the past and forging with new understanding of people, ideas and processes yet to be encountered or enjoyed.

There is an iconoclastic explosion of what used to be, and a promise of better things yet to come spoken of by the prophets of innovation and change. Like the shattering of norms as the sledgehammer finds the bulls-eye, the future detonates like a bomb that sweeps away the old to make way for the new and improved version of what lies beyond the chaos, dust and present confusion.

What does the flying sledge-hammer represent? It is the old order of things being swept away with rapidity of execution as a new and unexpected future breaks into and sets aside what was all along giving way to a climatic transition into the new.

So it is that 2019 will be a wildcard year, with fresh ideas that breakaway from the stale and idiosyncratic past that had only served to ground our chariots wheels into the sinking mud. God has opened a new way but we need to be willing to lay aside rigidity of thought and conventional stereotypes to embrace the explosive, new and paradigmatic change, moving us quickly with renewed energy and speed to join up with God’s people steeped in coming favor and evidenced by, “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”.

I am thanking God for the sledge-hammer ideas that have been prophetically launched by the instrumentality of unknown and sometimes unrecognised servants who use their gifts in modal excellence toward a predictable future as the old gives way in the wake of paradigmatic change where everything may, for a season look like the mess of a construction yard, but giving way eventually to a restored mindset of our elemental selves in all sobriety, dignity and efficiency.

*“The 60-second spot featured a female athlete running through a dystopian landscape inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, to throw a sledge-hammer at a TV image of Big Brother, meant, in this case, to represent IBM. It ends with the promise, “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.” (From Wikipedia)