Clouds

                                                             Silver linings in the sky                                                     

                                                            hiding angels from the eye                                                 

                                                           distant longings tug the heart                                               

                                                          cleverly displaced by one's dart                                            

                                                     what is now unseen will then be known                                     

                                                         in the final moments of this world                                         

                                                                      I will be free                                                         

                                                              once again just to be me                                                 .

                                         

Linear Time + Biological Cell Death = Death (but Just add water) Holy Spirit = Eternal Life

      I have always been fascinated with the idea of time. I was a fan of H.G. Wells and his Time Machine story and of numerous thoughts and theory  about time travel from Star Trek shows to popular shows on discovery that portray many side by side dimensions or realities that could exist at the quantum level. Perhaps I was fascinated because I wanted to believe in other realities other than my own demise at 70 years of age or so.
     I remember reading a small obscure book when I was 7 or 8 years old, called "Ruins at Pueblo Bonito." Thumbing through the pages and coming upon a black and white picture of a skeleton that was unearthed in an indian grave of a small boy I was horrified! Is this what happens to me?  I did not really comprehend death yet. So began my questions of mortality and my search for answers to my BIG questions at the early age of nine!
     Over the next 17 years I was exposed to many different types of religions that wanted me to join or give my allegiance to something invisible but had not made itself known to me.  These included groups from Hare Krishna, Sung Yung Moon and their followers, "The Way MInistries" who if you wanted to join them you would have to become a "twig" ( I guessed a part of a branch of a larger group) and even U.S. mainline churches...Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Soul Savers and fundamentalist groups and on and on the list goes....! All of them represented something on a scale that required some form of commitment from me that I was curious about but never convinced of.  All of them promised some form of tangible reward or reason to join them but still I was not touched where I needed to be touched.  The main line Churches were more concerned about numbers and programs, The Eastern religions were more interested in working your way to either the next incarnation or meditating to a point of "nothingness" The U.S. Churches wanted my $$$ and time and membership for life!  What was I to do?  Throw caution to the wind, and try all of them and then decide which one fit?  Which one answered my basic question of W H A T* H A P P E NS *T O *M E and why don't you have the answer I want?????  Undoubtedly a very self centered stance! But nevertheless important to me.

     Only one did fit the bill and that turned out to be the unalterable words of Christ.  NO not the man made multi-denominational- institutional morphs of what we now call Christianity but the Word of Life incarnated God that cared for me personally and swapped his life for mine.  Distill out all of the many gazillion ways to attend Church today and there you will find the Gold you search for in Jesus in simplicity, the way he wants to be found.  With a non-judgemental stance in terms of Christianity one can worship God in Truth and Spirit if God has deposited His Spirit within you.
   Just like Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well...we Jews know who it is we worship but in time all will know this too.
   
     And so back to the earlier question of time being linear and biological cell death...the answer is resurrection and yes I will die but  I will rise again just like Christ......What body will I have?

        The answer to that is in Corinthians and Paul's answer to his fellow new babes in Christ!

   

Power, Unrest and The Death of Men

     See, the Lord rides on a swift cloud
    and is coming to Egypt.The idols of Egypt tremble before him,    and the hearts of the Egyptians melt with fear.

“I will stir up Egyptian against Egyptian—    brother will fight against brother,

    neighbor against neighbor,    city against city,    kingdom against kingdom.

The Egyptians will lose heart,    and I will bring their plans to nothing;

   

       These words are the Prophet Isaiah's written well over 2,500 years ago yet what we are witnessing today may very well be the culmination of what God is doing now in our time.  Open up the NY Times and read the sadness of what is happening before our eyes, their military just killed over 70 people who protested against Morsi's ouster.  Peaceful demonstrations turn deadly when arms are brought to bear and innocents are killed for a just cause?  Yes we here in America understand our freedoms are hard fought and won yet how do we feel these things with a just heart being so many miles removed yet so close with the advent of our modern media?  Whose side do we take? And how do we rationalize the bloodshed?  The powerful will always take power in a vacuum and it is almost always bloody.  Witness Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and almost all of the Islamic nations going haywire at once---"The Arab Spring continues."  Is this of men or of God?  Hard to say....yet we watch with eyes of tears as innocents die, Children, mothers, fathers all with the same hope of us here in America. we want to live, eat and have dignity.  God knows this and has plans we do not know of. Our temporal problems will be of no consideration  when a new heaven and earth are created and this one of many sins are washed away.  

     Daniel's golden vision of kingdoms still stands as testimony of those many great empires brought low by God's mighty hand in our affairs.  The last kingdom feet of clay mixed with iron being shattered by a great stone from heaven.  Is this democracy being shattered? The hope of men's hands?

God's Strength Made Perfect in Our Weakness

          The Bible is replete with stories of men who have come to the end of themselves only to call upon God and see his strength revealed at the last moment.  Why does this happen more often than not?  And why does God seem to derive a certain pleasure in bailing us out just in the nick of time?  It is because he wants us to be in a position of humility or meekness (not in a bad way) so that we can see just how faithful he is towards us.  As a created being with free will we have a way of exalting ourselves to the "highest heavens" and to make monuments to ourselves to last forever!  Take the re-building of the twin towers or the site of 911 disaster, a very very sorrowful experience for this nation and a humbling one at that as we had never been attacked on our own soil before but still there is an ability to want to "rise again" from any ashes we have experienced with out any reservation at all. There is a need to "keep on truckin" and shake off the bad feelings so that we can continue on our way.  And without calling on our God for help.  In that posture there is always a certain danger because we leave out the one who desperately wants to be with us and show us his favor.
     Take for example the story of Samson and Delilah.  Here we have one of the strongest men on record a Nazirite from birth and consecrated to God.  His great strength was attributed to his uncut locks and his devotion to his God and he knew this from his earliest times as a young man.  He confounds the Philistines over and over again, sets two fox tails on fire, releases them in a field and proceeds to burn up hundreds of acres of field and defeats a thousand men with the jawbone of an ox.
     Yet when in a moment of weakness he tell a deceiver and his lover what the secret of his strength is and is taken captive, blinded and put in prison attached to a millstone for a period of time long enough for his hair to grow out and long enough to be humbled by his God.  Samson calls out to his God one last time and in a" pure heart" so that once again the Philistines would see the acts of the Israelite God and a God who personally intervenes on behalf of one who was not only humbled and restored but shows a nation just how close a God he is to an individual. God will move nations on the account of one man.
     Rome was an exalted empire, yet was unable to defeat  the early preachers of the Gospel  who followed one who preached "The Way."  Christianity still stands, Rome has eaten the dust, like so many other empires before it.
     The Word will not pass away not one Jot or tittle until the fullness of times and we see again the risen Christ descend to the Mount of Olives with the glory of his Angels at his side.  

You Bake The Cake: God does the Icing!

     We may have been given the dominion over the earth and all it's creatures and do all manner of creative things with what we have been given, but it is God who puts on the icing on the cake so to speak.
     When is the last time you got out and directly walked in the marvelous nature around you?  Looked at the heavens and wondered where it stops and where all the stars go in the daylight?  I happen to live at the base of a fourteener (that is a mountain to those who are flatlanders) and see it's glory nearly everyday.  To  the see the magnificent flowers of the high plains in all their  distinctive colors is breathtaking as well.
     And yet some looked to Solomon in his day to see his glorious robes of purple and scarlet and abundance of gold and yet Jesus said not even Solomon was arrayed as lovely as the numerous fields of flowers in and around the Holy Land.  Nothing outdoes God and his wonders either in the heavens or here on the earth.  Ever remember seeing Jacques Cousteau and his amazing underwater pics of all the fabulous sea creatures and fish?...what an imagination God has and  we could never hope to come close to creating his beauty. What do we create that is fantastic.  Ferengi, Vulcans, Andorians or aliens that are ugly! What about that Roswell famous Alien with the big slanted black eyes? Yeech.  Oh well I like science fiction too..but I prefer the amazing variety he has already given us....pencil fish? walking sticks? and on it goes...

What You See Is What You Get

     We'll I know, I know, I know , I know, I know, I know, I know ,I know, I know ,,,etc. etc. etc......    (set to the tune of Bill Withers old song in the seventies!)  Twenty-six times over and again he sings the same two words each time with a slightly different intonation to make it not so boring but even interesting.  
      What is it about that song that stuck in my head so many years? What did he know?  We'll for me I know that Jesus even though he spoke in parables and often seemed like he contradicted himself with his own words, he did what he said and he was who he said he was.  There can be no doubt about the way he carried himself or the way that history has born out his truths.  There were no hidden aspects of  his life any longer after the resurrection.  Maybe his followers were confounded by him and even frustrated because he was completely on a different plane of intent and action and thought than they were.  There was no sin to cover or twist in him his nature so that he could mislead others.  He was no false messiah and because of that very one thing he had, he was worlds apart from us.  However he connected in a way that people were either hateful of him or adoring of him like Mary Magdalene.  I at first when I was introduced to his teachings was of course skeptical. Only after following for a while did I then see that it was possible and even desirous to keep on doing so.  After the reception of the Holy Spirit even those who were of a weakened state of mind and body did they begin to act and take on the authority of their Lord.  So when I received the Spirit myself, I knew then that even I could be different because of the indwelling closeness of God.  This difference was a sure found peace in knowing that I had finally come to the place that "I know." And because of this life would never be the same.  A journey had begun.   To finish this journey is to run the race Paul tells us about in his letters.   This race can be like a serpentine road and has many blind spots but we come to trust in the one who already walked it for us.  Faith is like and ice cube in the hand, it melts and then you think did I really just hold onto something?  
     What anyone who finds faith in Jesus can be assured of is this.  You get what you see and that is the truth.  NO misleadings, no hidden traits like in men, no lies or back stabbings, just light and  transparency that is refreshing like a cold glass of lemonade in the heat of summer...that continues throughout your lifetime.  Of course much more satisfying......

FREEDOM

     We in America just marked the 237th year of this country's freedom.  For most of the world's population this cannot be also said.  While we have faced in the last decade or so some of these freedoms to be taken away or infringed upon we are still markedly free compared to other developing nations.  With the advent of Radical Islamist Jihadist's  rising to oppose western thought and our "decadence" we have become a nation on guard against the possibility of attack on our way of life.  Nothing is the same since 911.  Hence the fight to capture immense amounts of data hoping to intercept the next big thing.  We have become caught in the middle of ideals and overt intelligence warfare in this America of ours.  Those in power do not wish to cede any ground to the ideologies that are opposed to our way of life and in so doing some freedoms diminish.
     Born an American I am grateful for the freedoms I experience and I know it comes with cost, some of which I never paid for in terms of service to the country in a military service.  I also know that I had no choice in where I was born and so realize that I could very well been born in an Arab, Jewish or African nation.  It was my parentage only that determined the outcome.
   So I must go back to the story of one Saul of Tarsus, born a Jew, zealous for his religious heritage, who studied under Gamaliel and later was a major persecutor of "The Way."  In his way of thinking he was doing God's work in killing the heretics that were spreading a false religion. One that directly competed against Judaism.  Everything he was taught and studied came into play just at the right time to destroy the Christians that followed one who claimed to be the Son Of God and raised from the dead.  It wasn't until Jesus himself interrupted him and had to blind him for three days to get his attention and change the man's motivation forever and forevermore change history of the world.  Without that this nation would not be the same.  We get many "freedoms" from the Jewish culture and have infused many of their morals into our Judeo-Christian society.  And so our beliefs are forever infused with that past heritage.  In saying this it is not hard to understand how hard it is to fight the Jihadist's who themselves believe they are doing God's work however far  removed it is from the Koran's true teachings are.   The replication of anything is hard to eradicate once it is started.
      So I say that the freedom we enjoy now in this country is valuable and must be kept with a view in mind that any type of repression of rights tends to quash the spirit of anyone no matter what the repression concerns.  Those early Christians that were persecuted died hoping in one who guarantees the ultimate freedom of the human spirit and a life eternal in his kingdom, of course one not seen with the natural eye.  It is that hope that( I) now labor for.  Going back to the issue of defending this country I was never of a mind to join even though my father a Marine served for 20 years.  He was a technical Veteran of WWll having just entered in 1946 and served until 1964. He saw Vietnam up close and it ruined him for life.  Yet he invited marine recruiters to our home on my 16th birthday to persuade me and some of my buddies to "join-up".
    I was of a different mind and did not wish to fit the profile he wanted for me.  The very thought of killing someone else in their own land with their own beliefs was abhorrent to me.  I was not even old enough to understand this Constitution of ours.  And so his indoctrination of his belief system to me never took hold.
      And so it broke the chain....I became a believer in the one who promised a well-spring of life up from the belly,  and would never thirst any more.  One whose eyes were seeing something different and one whose mind changed it's position on many issues of life over time......
                   
                  If I were in China I would probably be in jail right now....if my parents were Chinese.....

An Unholy Mix

     Whatever is your master you become it's slave.  Beware then if church is your master.  There is such a thing as spiritual abuse and it can come sometimes wrapped in a subtle package.
     Jesus came to set people free and if you are now yoked with things that tend to weigh you down even if it is in the name of doing good, then perhaps you're doing needs to be re-evaluated.
      I have thought much over the last 30 years of just what it is that Jesus wanted from me/us.  For most of those 20 years I spent attached to a community of believers with one man more or less directing 100-200 people in things that were at best questionable and I never in that time challenged it.  Why? Because I believe there was an unholy mix of spiritualism mixed with men's manipulation of what they thought God wanted.  In the midst of teachings on biblical principles there arose a tendency to start to manipulate people's lives in the micro managing aspect.  This caused major problems only seen "down the road" or with 20/20 hindsight.  People married the wrong spouse, took the wrong jobs, were counseled to leave jobs of security only to face disaster months later and others were counseled to" Wait on the Lord to  (mature) some-times years for their spouse...(that was me) and in so doing started to ruin the natural love and affections that were already in place long before "counseling."  There were divorces, deaths, severe injuries, miscarriages, and poverty.  This does not sound like a healthy church.  But yet there was great music, great worship, great fellowship yet there was so much trouble along with it and it never made sense.  Yes I knew the devil opposes us yet this seemed even more insidious.  Hidden and unexplained happenings that took it's toll on people years later.  This was the "other gospel being preached" that Paul warned about in Galations.  I wondered if God fought against us in the midst of this to break the yoke that was being laid on us in our ignorance.
     This type of "shepherding" was on a national scale in the late seventies and eighties.  Those who started this movement have long since repented of the damage it had wreaked in many non-denominational communities  and hopefully disbanded this type of eldership in the body of Christ.
    What Christ actually wanted was a people free of all the trappings of legalisms and all the bondage that came along with it.  In an effort to serve Christ many became slaves to performing for those above them in the name of supporting the ministry.  Paul warned the Christians in his Churches not to Lord over those who they had charge over.  A clear and distinct warning, because men tend to turn the gospel upside down and invert the true nature of it.  Programs, methods, prosperity doctrines and the like do not set people free, they are only additives that begin to take the place of a simple gospel.  (But a gospel infused with great power.)
     In order to follow Christ, pray, seek his peace, get humble, and find a Church that is gospel centered rather than man centered and you will begin to feel free.  Serve those you may not like, walk that extra mile, give freely if you can, and do not let pressure tactics be your motivation under any circumstances, even in the church.  Most of all spend time in the Word of God and it will re-orient you to the things that God thinks are important.
   Christ placed a warning in the book of Revelations: "Not to add or take away anything in the scroll to the churches.  He always knew men's hearts and it was a warning to us not to manipulate the word of God and thereby manipulate those under and in the house of God.
 16 “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you[a] this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”