Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

And an essay entitled, After Ten Years, German pastor, theologian Dietrich Bonhofer asked his former seminary students,

have there ever been people in history who in their time, like us, had so little ground under their feet,

people to whom every possible alternative open to them at the time appeared equally unbearable,

senseless, and contrary to life."

His question certainly resonates today in a civilizational moment like this one so much seems

up in the air. Every option can seem compromised to us. What is the

way forward? Or to borrow a phrase, how shall we then live? Even more, it's easy to doubt that we

have any role to play in God's unfolding of human history. It's easy to thank, who am I to make a

difference? After all, I'm no Wilberforce, I'm no Bonhoffer. I'm not one of those

kinds of great heroes in history. But of course, what we do not know, what we cannot know,

is whether this moment that we're in is a Wilberforce moment or a Bonhoffer moment. Think about it.

Both men found themselves in pivotal cultural moments and places where all seemed lost to be

falling apart. Both men worked for change. And in the case of Wilberforce, there was renewal.

In the case of Bonhofer, there was collapse. But both men faced evil to oppose. Both men saw

brokenness that they were called to help restore, and each man faithfully responded

to the calling of God. So neither man was a failure. The results were, as T.S. Eliot once put

it, none of their business. Instead, the results always belong to God. In his book, the call

Oz Guinness observed that most Christians miss a full understanding of calling because they failed to fully reckon with the seriousness of the hour to which they've been called.

In other words, we're not just called to a ministry. We're not just called to a particular vocation, even not just to a set of relationships.

Scripture says that we are called to a time and place, this time and place, by the God who

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