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bookoformon · 6 months ago

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Ether 14: 1-3. "The Shelf."

The iniquity of the people brings a curse upon the land—Coriantumr engages in warfare against Gilead, then Lib, and then Shiz—Blood and carnage cover the land.

A Bar "The Field" is the moment a man realizes the benefits of the feast at the end of the week. It can also mean failure to realize the meaning of the Words of God resulting in violence.

"The verb ברא (bara' I) is probably one of the most curious and hard to understand verbs in the Hebrew Bible as it denotes the creative activity of God (Genesis 1:1, Isaiah 42:5, Jeremiah 31:22). In contrast to verbs like יצר (yasar), meaning to fashion or form (something out of something else), or עשה ('asa), which means to make (again something from existing elements), the verb ברא (bara') denotes creation ex nihilo.

Such creation is very difficult to imagine but perhaps a well or a spring that produces water from nowhere was an apt metaphor to any Hebrew audience. The verb ברא (bara') may not be etymologically related to the verb באר (ba'ar), - meaning to declare or write, with derivations that have to do with wells and springs — but on a poetic pallet, these verbs certainly represent closely kindred colors.

The action of our verb ברא (bara'), therefore, has far less to do with either יצר (yasar) or עשה ('asa) and probably a lot more with the verb דבר (dabar), meaning to speak or pronounce. We know that God creating and God speaking occur in tandem. After all, in the beginning was the Word, and all things came into being by him (JOHN 1:1-3), and Moses taught us that man does not live from bread alone, but from every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord (Deuteronomy 8:3, MATTHEW 4:4).

All this would be wonderfully complete, if it weren't for the identical root ברא (bara' II), and far worse: four occurrences of our verb that have nothing to do with God creating anything, but with guys chopping down trees (Joshua 17:15 and 17:18) or other guys (Ezekiel 21:19 and 23:47)."

The cure for the curse of the presence of men that hack at each other with weapons due to their faltering understanding of God's Words is named above, Gilead, Lib, and Shiz, "The Joyful Testimony from Within the Heart."

Do you bring joy to others? Or are you some kind of asshole? Can you even tell?

1 And now there began to be a great curse upon all the land because of the iniquity of the people, in which, if a man should lay his tool or his sword upon his shelf, or upon the place whither he would keep it, behold, upon the morrow, he could not find it, so great was the curse upon the land.

2 Wherefore every man did cleave unto that which was his own, with his hands, and would not borrow neither would he lend; and every man kept the hilt of his sword in his right hand, in the defence of his property and his own life and of his wives and children.

3 And now, after the space of two years, and after the death of Shared, behold, there arose the brother of Shared and he gave battle unto Coriantumr, in which Coriantumr did beat him and did pursue him to the wilderness of Akish.

Whether we become a saint or a psycho depends on the nature of one's shelf. How one's shelf is built determines what it will be able to support. Is it a spice rack or a pantry? It depends on the premise.

Religions draw people to their pews and to kneel under their roofs based on the premises for their shelves. Those that draw people in for wealth, to articulate hatred for others, or sell holy salvation in another realm will put tools pertinent to their wayward missions on their shelves. We call these tools the dipshitz.

Faiths that do what God wrote down in explicit terms, to curb mankind's tendencies for wickedness in order to grow the footprint of civlization, use a shelf and tools which are correct.

We need peace with each other in order to survive. Competition for survival, to deliberately create a struggle is witless and diabolic and easily avoided.

The Values in Gematria are:

v. 1: And now there began to be a great curse upon all the land because of the iniquity of the people. The Number is 11377, יאגזז‎ ‎, yagzag, "what is forbidden for the young."

When you went to Church or Synagogue, did the Rabbi or Priest teach you his "signature move" or did he explain how shagged off God got over all the violence?

v. 2: Wherefore every man did cleave unto that which was his own, with his hands, and would not borrow neither would he lend.

The Number is 15832, י״החגב‎, "the grasshopper."

The Value in Gematria is 10832, "will celebrate a grasshopper."

One cannot just memorize the list of Kosher and non-Kosher animals named in the Torah one must be able to visually inspect the animal in person and know for sure. Grasshoppers, generally speaking are not Kosher, but there a few species that are edible:

"Nevertheless, certain species of locust happen to be kosher. The Torah identifies them as those that have four wings that cover most of the body, four legs for walking, plus two upper legs with joints for leaping. One Talmudic opinion says they must also be known as a “chagav” (grasshopper – see Chulin 59a)."

So before one eats a grasshopper one has to know the characteristics of the Kosher version, inspect it in order to know for sure it is edible and then one can prepare and eat it.

A grasshopper in Gematria is "the ability to translate the Torah". It has a value of 531, "instantaneous passing."

Adonai has decreed now that we are in the modern age and can all speak to and know each other at once, that all Jews become knowledgeable in the Gematria as well as correct and proper translations of the Torah. All of this must be the means to the end of a new Constitution for a new Kingdom of Israel that is at last and finally sovereign and recognized by the rest of the world.

Grasshoppers are therefore also "Civil Defense".

The greatest defense the people of Israel will always have is their ability to know how to use the Torah to cast and mold our future civilization. This effort will always require all of us if it is to come to pass and last. Otherwise heretics and outsiders will find ways to use it against humanity as we have seen for so long.

So one must not loan the Torah to anyone but a Kosher bug.

v. 3: And now, after the space of two years, and after the death of Shared, behold, there arose the brother of Shared and he gave battle unto Coriantumr, in which Coriantumr did beat him and did pursue him to the wilderness of Akish.

Two years represent the amount of time it takes for mankind to realize he is embroiled in a conflict between right and wrong. This can happen at once, in a second. If it takes longer, people get hurt. The conflict in Ukraine is an example. No one thought the Russians were arming themselves and moving soldiers towards Ukraine to deliver pizzas. The rest of the world said, "it won't last long. Putin will get tired out after the Ukrainians fight back and go home."

"In 2024, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that displacement in Ukraine is expected to become protracted as the third year of war begins.

The situation in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine are particularly volatile as shelling and attacks on civilian infrastructure are a daily occurrence. Millions of people remain displaced by the war both within Ukraine and in the region.

An estimated 3.7 million people are currently internally displaced in Ukraine and 5.9 million refugees and asylum-seekers are spread across the European region. Women (47%) and children (33%) make up over 80% of the Ukrainian refugee population.

In 2024, 14.6 million people in Ukraine will need humanitarian assistance, including populations experiencing multiple vulnerabilities, such as people with disabilities, the elderly, and children. On February 21, 2024, the UN Resident Coordinator in Ukraine Denise Brown reported that the UN’s humanitarian appeal for Ukraine is only 10 percent funded for 2024."

The Russians are NOT getting tired out and the entire planet is drowning and being blown away by wind and storms being caused by an excess of heat being caused by the war in Ukraine. To allow any of this to happen in modern times given the ability America in particular to respond to its enemies is utterly blasphemous.

Now as the verse said, Shared and the sons of Shared, "The survivor and the sons of the survivors are now fighting in a wildernerss of Akish, a stinging wilderness. We were going to have to fight anyway, we could have done it in a blaze of glory instead of looking like a bunch of fukchucks.

The Value in Gematria is 9556, טההו‎, taho, "pray."

Prayer is for losers. Action is for heroes. Someone please rescue the people of this world from its undeserved suffering. The precedent this will set for future generations of mankind will create the proper shelving it needs should another tyrant dare to raise his hand ever again.

We could fight the Russians if we wanted to, and we could win:

youtube

#Youtube

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shop-korea · 1 year ago

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NEW HAMPSHIRE - ABOVE - AN - ORIGINAL - US STATE

13 STATES - ABOVE - BAKER ROCKS - NH - CAMP - YES

GROUND - THEY - USE - TUBES - ALSO - IN - THEIR -

RIVERS - PLYMOUTH - OVER - 6,000 - PEOPLE - IN -

THIS - TOWN - IN - NEW HAMPSHIRE - UGLY - YES -

NATURE’s - FLOORS - 4 - TENTS - NOT - GRASS -

REMINDED - OF - WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON -

APPRENTICED - 2 A - NEWSPAPER - EDITOR -

AGE 13 - PHILIPPINE - LAWS - I - STARTED 2 -

EARLY - PART TIME - HIGHLY - PAID - AS KID -

LATE - 1820′s - WITH - CO-EDITOR - BENJAMIN -

LUNDY - THEIR - PAPER - HE - CALLED OWNER -

OF - A - SLAVE - TRANSPORT SHIP - B 4 - PRES -

ABE LINCOLN - CALLED - THAT - OWNER - A -

‘MURDERER’ - PRISON - SENTENCE

6 MONTHS

AFTER - 7 WKS - FREED - WHEN HIS

SUPPORTERS - DONATED - MONEY

2 - PAY - HIS - FINE

ILLEGAL - ARREST - AND - PRISON

VIOLATED - FREEDOM - OF PRESS

TRANSPORTING - SLAVES - 4 - HARD - LABOR -

MURDER - RAPING - KNOCKING - UP BEATINGS -

STARVATION - EVERY - HOUR - WORKING - NO -

FOOD - DRINK - CALLING - OWNER - OF - SHIP -

‘MURDERER’ - FREEDOM - OF - THE - PRESS

POLICE - COURTHOUSE - JUDGES - SIDED -

WITH - OWNER - OF - SLAVE TRANSPORT -

SHIP - ILLEGAL - 1ST - AMENDMENT - KILLED

BACK - IN - BOSTON - GARRISON - LAUNCHED

NEW - PAPER - ‘THE - LIBERATOR

SLAVERY - DOMINANT - ISSUE - OF - HIS LIFE

ACTIVIST

CAUSE - OF - WOMEN’s - RIGHTS - LIKE RIGHT

2 - VOTE - TEMPERANCE - AGAINST CRUELTY

2 - ANIMALS - OTHER - CAUSES

13TH - AMENDMENT - RATIFIED - 1865

NEITHER - SLAVERY - NOR - INVOLUNTARY -

SERVITUDE - EXCEPT - AS - PUNISHMENT -

4 - CRIME - CONVICTED SHALL - EXIST US

OR - POSSESSIONS - TERRITORIES REV’D

HIM - ‘I AM - UNSPEAKABLY - HAPPY - 2 -

BELIEVE’ - END - OF - SLAVERY - AMERICA -

GARRISON - DIED - IN - 1879

HIS - WORDS -

‘I - WILL - B - AS - HARSH - AS - TRUTH -

AND - AS - UNCOMPROMISING - AS -

JUSTICE’ - NO - MODERATION WITH -

PASSION - 4 - GARRISON

‘TELL - A - MAN - WHOSE - HOUSE IS -

ON - FIRE - 2 - GIVE - A - MODERATE -

ALARM - TELL - HIM - 2 - MODERATELY -

RESCUE - HIS - WIFE - FR - THE HANDS -

OF - A - RAVISHER - TELL - THE MOTHER -

2 - GRADUALLY - EXTRICATE HER BABE -

FR - THE - FIRE - INTO - WHICH - IT HAS -

FALLEN’ - URGE - ME - NOT - 2 - USE -

MODERATION - IN A - CAUSE - LIKE -

THE - PRESENT’ - ‘I - WILL - NOT -

RETREAT - IN - A - SINGLE INCH -

AND - I - WILL - BE - HEARD’ - SO -

BIBLE - ECCLESIASTES 3 -

‘A TIME - 2 SPEAK - AND A -

TIME - 2 B - HEARD’

WHY - I - MENTIONED - WILLIAM GARRISON

THE LIBERATOR - BOSTON MASSACHUSETTS

OLDEST - ESTABLISHED - AMONG - 13 STATES

THE UNDERLINE - PARK - 24/7

NO - SMOKING

HISPANICS - BLKS - SMOKE

NO - CAMP

GOVERNMENT CENTER

NOT - CAMPING - SITE

JUST - LIKE - OWNER - OF - SLAVE - TRANSPORT -

SHIP - DEFENDED - BY - POLICE - COURTHOUSE -

DEFENDED - BY - JUDGE - BECAUSE - HUGE TAX -

PAYER - THEIR - PAYCHECKS - GUARANTEED

ALL - MURDERED - AMENDMENT 1

FREEDOM - OF - THE - PRESS

WENT - 2 - PRISON

FINE - WAS - FREED

BIBLE - ‘MONEY - ANSWERS - ALL’

CAMPING - CAMP - NO - TENT - PARKS - USA

7-ELEVEN - NO - BACKPACK - NO - BAGS

WHY - ABOVE - POLICE - JUDGES

COURTHOUSES - WANT - IT - AS A

BUSINESS - INSTEAD - AND - NOT

ADVERTISED - ABOVE - HUGE - TENT

VERY - EXPENSIVE - BUT - EXPOSED

NO - KITCHEN - NO - TOILET

CAMP - KITCHEN

BATHHOUSE

BED - CHAIR - WELL - LIT - SO - ALL-

CAN - SEE - WHAT - THEY’RE - DOING

ON - THE - BED - NO - PRIVACY

MUST - TURN - OFF - LIGHTS AS

THEY - USE - THEIR - BED - THAT

TENT - OVER - $1,000 - EXPENSIVE

THEY - WANT - U 2 - HAVE - CAMP

AS - YOUR - BUSINESS - WHY - SO

U - CAN - CREATE - YOUR - RULES

CREATE - YOUR - LAWS

$225 - PER - NIGHT - AS - U - DESCRIBE

CHECK - IN - CHECK OUT - PHOTO - ID

2 C - AGE 18 AND OLDER - THEIR ZIPCODE

CHECK - THEIR - ADDRESS - WHY - CAMP 2

STATE - GOVERNMENT - LOCAL - GOV’T

FORBID - CAMPING - SO - GUARANTEED

BUSINESS - SUCCESS - AND - $225 - EA

NIGHT - UNITED STATES - NOT - GREAT

NATION - BECAUSE - THEY - ALLOW - THESE

PRICES - ALL - APTS - ARE - UNFURNISHED &

OVER - $1,000 - THEY - HAVE - THE - KEYS - 2 -

YOUR - APTS - SO - THEY’RE - GOING - ALL -

THE - WAY - WITH - U - WHILE - YOU’RE YES -

SLEEPING - PLACED - HIDDEN - CAMERA ON -

YOUR - SHOWERS - AND - KITCHEN - 2 C -

YOUR - RECIPES - LEHIGH ACRES - BLK - FEMALE

BAHAMAS - HAS - CAMERA - DOOR - LIVING ROOM

KITCHEN - BECAUSE - 9:30P - NO - KITCHEN UNTIL

TOMORROW - ILLEGAL - BUT - SEEING - EVERYONE

WHAT - THEY - DO - SHERIFF - SAID - ITS - LEGAL 4

HER - RENTAL - NOT - LEGAL - 4TH - UNREASONABLE

SEARCHES - THEY - TOLD - ME - CAN - EVEN - EVICT

ME - 4 - PINK - HAIR - 8TH - CRUEL - AND - UNUSUAL

PUNISHMENT - USA - NOT - GREAT - BECAUSE -

THEY’RE - NOT - SMART - THEY’RE - MURDERERS

ALL - PRICES - ARE - ALLOWED - BY - THE - USA

NOT - GREAT - GOVERNMENT

WHY - LOTS - OF - MURDERS - ROBBERIES

ABOVE - $225 - PER - NIGHT - WHY - 4 NOT

LEGAL - WE’RE - PAYING - THEIR - EXPENSES

BECAUSE - TAX - DEDUCTIBLE - THUS - HERE

USA - ALWAYS - UNTIL - BUSINESS IS CAUGHT

THEY - LOVE - MURDERS - KIDNEY - BLADDER

AVAILABLE - THEY - LOVE - ROBBERIES - FOR

NOW - THEY - KNOW - PRODUCT - EXISTS SO

UNITED STATES

UNITED - IN - ROBBERY - THROUGH BUSINESS

INDEPENDENT - DEMOCRAT - PARTY

50 STATES

WE - CLOSE - COURTHOUSES - POLICE STATION

SHERIFFS - WE - DISAPPEAR - THEIR - WEAPONS

LOCATIONS - CARS - WE - DECREASE - GAS - YES

STATIONS - MORE - ELECTRIC - VEHICLES

500 YRS - NO - PAYCHECKS - INHERITANCE

500 YRS - NO - INVENTIONS - LIKE - WATCH

MICROWAVES - INTERNET - COMPUTERS - MORE

US TREASURY

IRS

HARVARD LAW

WE’RE - ALL - GETTING - TOGETHER

WHY - NO - CAMPSITE - SO - BUSINESS

CAN - CHARGE - U - $60 - OR - $225 - EA

NIGHT - SO - THEY - CAN - CHECK YOUR

ID - SO - THEY - CAN - CREATE - RULES 2

UNITED STATES - AGE 245

NATION - CALLED - TYRANTS

OPPRESSIVE - MURDERS - &

ROBBERIES - NOT - SMART -

PEOPLE - THEY’RE NOT XO -

NICE - OR - SWEET - DON’T -

GET - 2 - KNOW - THEM YES -

'IN - GOD - WE - TRUST’

DE - DESTROY - WHAT’s - OUT - THERE

OF DEMOCRAT - SO WE WILL DESTROY

‘JESUS - IS - LORD’ - WHO - WE BELIEVE

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z3ncat · 2 years ago

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I’m sure someone else has done this already but I absolutely had to look up the Bible verses corresponding to the John chapters in Nona the Ninth.

All verses taken from the King James Version because it feels more aesthetically appropriate.

John 20:8 Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.

I’m sure there are other ways to interpret this verse about the disciples going to the tomb, but I think it’s the fact that we hear John call his audience Harrow that’s important. Harrow was always looking for Teacher. She always believed, and wanted reason to believe.

In this, we get the first hint that Harrow is both Harrow and Alecto - Alecto, the first of John’s ‘followers’; the first to come to the ‘tomb’. The first to believe. It’s the first hint that the two of them have been entwined for longer than we realize.

John 5:20 For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth: and he will shew him greater works than these, that ye may marvel.

An apt choice for the chapter in which John shows his ‘greater works’ by keeping his favorite corpses from ‘the melt’.

It’s worth noting that unless I’m missing something, we never get a reason for John’s abilities. One might indeed believe he’s touched by the Father; we know for a fact at this point that has has ‘greater works than these’ to show.

John 15:23 He that hateth me hateth my Father also.

A little more subtle, but this is when John starts drawing lines in the sand. When he starts deciding who’s on his side and who’s not. M---, A---, G---, C--- - they’re all his. Those who accepted his first ‘gift’.

John 5:18 Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.

John’s concern at this point is being picked up as a science experiement. Being locked up in a room to be poked and prodded until the secret behind his ability is discovered

As an unrelated note, I think “What is this internet?” “See, I did make a utopia” is hilarious

John 8:1 Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.

So we get our first John/Christ comparison here, with the criticism that “Christ didn’t keep to office hours”

“...and we knew any moment a riot squad was going to burst in.” A very fitting comparison to Jesus and the disciples having the Romans burst in on them while Jesus was praying.

“She betrayed the police for us”. While you can’t draw a 1:1 correlation, betrayal is a theme in the garden of Gethsemane - Judas betrays Jesus, and Peter betrays/denies him as well.

John 19:18 Where they crucified him, and two other with him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say the point of this reference is ‘one on either side; It’s not about John (for once), it’s about the criminals ‘crucified’ alongside him. The alternative methods to escaping Earth.

John 5:1 After this there was a feast of the Jews; and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

A fitting verse for a chapter in which John moves further into a space he considers his own and that everyone else considers belonging to him. He is bringing the Good News. He is changing the world in Good Ways.

John 3:20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.

Those doing evil and hating the light are obviously the trillionaires John’s still naively holding out hope that exposing their lies, their evil, will have a positive outcome.

John 9:22 These words spake his parents, because they feared the Jews: for the Jews had agreed already, that if any man did confess that he was Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue.

A much more subtle passage. But fitting with John’s actions in killing so many people and P--- calling him to task for it. The combination suggests that if John’s going to declare himself God, his behaviors should fit others’ consideration of what God should be like. John’s comments suggest that he think anyone trying to hold him to a standard can go kiss their own ass.

John 1:20 And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ.

Well, from one perspective, this is entirely accurate. John never claims he’s the son of God

He just describes how he becomes God.

And of all the damage, the suffering, the pain, he inflicts as a part of that journey.

#the locked tomb #the locked tomb series #nona the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #ntn spoilers #tlt series #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth

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incarnationsf · 4 years ago

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Nothing Can Separate Us from God’s Love

Bible Reading

By the Rev. Darren Miner

Once again, I find myself drawn to the Epistle, instead of the Gospel. Not that I have anything against any of Jesus’ parables! But in this terrible time of pandemic and forced isolation, Saint Paul’s words of comfort and encouragement seem particularly apt.

He starts out by reminding us that the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness, by which he means our inability to put into words the innermost longings of our heart. And he is right! All too often, we don’t even know what we really want. How often have you thought that you wanted something, or someone, and then realized later that it wasn’t what you really wanted after all? But the Holy Spirit not only knows what our heart wants, he knows what our heart needs. And when we falter in prayer, the Spirit intercedes on our behalf with the Father. Sometimes that prayer of the heart is wordless, consisting of no more than a sigh or a groan. Sometimes it is utterly silent, consisting only of tears streaming down our face. In those moments of utter weakness and vulnerability, the Holy Spirit is with us, offering up prayers to the Father that we cannot express.

I find this quite comforting. For recently, I have experienced times when I found it hard to pray my regular daily prayer. Sometimes, because of sheer inertia. Sometimes, because I was feeling down. Sometimes, because there was so much to pray about that it was daunting to even begin. I suspect that I am not alone in this. Many of us may be feeling overwhelmed by the isolation and loneliness. Some of us may even be beset by depression. And with those terrible feelings, there may come a sense of isolation from God and an inability to pray. Well, no matter what we may feel in those moments of despair, we are not, in fact, cut off from God—not at all!

Saint Paul asks the rhetorical question: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?” The answer to the first question is that no one can separate us from the love of Christ—not even we ourselves! And the answer to the second question is that nothing at all can separate us from the love of Christ, nor from the love of the Father and the Holy Spirit. Saint Paul elaborates on this claim with a sentence that ranks among the greatest expressions of human hope. He writes, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This assurance from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is often read out at Christian funerals. And it is certainly appropriate to hear this when we are bereft. But I think we all need to hear this assurance right now and to take it to heart. Never doubt that God loves you. Never doubt that God is with you. Never doubt that God can hear the prayers that you are unable to utter.

That being said, it still behooves us to pray as best we can for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven—for a world where there is no COVID-19, no poverty, no violence, no racism, no hate, no suffering, no death. In a sense, this prayer for the coming of the Kingdom is the mother of all prayers, for from it is born every other worthy prayer that we might pray. Remember this truth when you pray the Lord’s Prayer later in this service. Remember this truth every time you pray the Lord’s Prayer.

#st. paul #Romans #Holy Spirit #intercession #prayer of the heart #separation from God #coming of the Kingdom #sermon #theology #Christianity #jesus #episcopal church #episcopal #episcopalian #The Episcopal Church #anglican #AnglicanChurch #Anglican Communion

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emekrus · 4 years ago

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The Fruit of The Spirit

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.” --Galatians 5:22-23 While it is very scripturally true that every born again child of God has the Holy Spirit indwelling in him, if the believer does not walk in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit becomes of little benefit to him. And this is why the Apostle Paul in most of his epistles admonishes us by the Spirit, to walk in the Spirit. In Galatians 5:25, Paul by the Spirit says; “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit” As we walk in the Spirit, we enjoy the manifestation of the gifts and fruit of the Spirit. I have already discussed about the gifts of the Spirit here. So in this post, we will be looking into the fruit of the Spirit. Because inasmuch as God desires us to covet earnestly the gifts of the Spirit (1Corinthians 12:31), He also desires us to bear the fruit of the Spirit (Colossians 3:12-17). The fruit of the Spirit means divine characters or attitudes that are made available to the believer’s heart or Spirit by the Holy Spirit in them. And as believers yield themselves to the influence of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, these fruit of the Spirit gains free expression through them. So What Are The Fruit of The Spirit? In our opening text, Galatians 5:22-23, Paul by the Spirit lists out the fruit of the Spirit. And in this section, we are going to briefly discuss each of the fruit of the Spirit: - The Fruit of Love: The number one fruit of the Spirit, listed in our opening text, is love. The word of God says, the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us (Romans 5:5). Love is the fruit of the Spirit in our hearts that enable us love God and our fellow humans, even when it is not convenient. The love of God helps us love God and our fellow men selflessly and sacrificially. It enables us show love to even our enemies as the Lord Jesus instructs us. - The Fruit of Joy: The fruit of Joy helps us, believers, to remain joyful in the Lord, no matter whatever circumstances we face in life. The Joy of the Holy Spirit is a supernatural manifestation in the heart. It is a supernatural manifestation in the heart that is undeterred by the happenings around the believers, whether good or bad. - The Fruit of Peace: In John 14:27, the Lord Jesus says; “Peace I leave with you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” This peace of the Lord is brought to our hearts by the Holy Spirit of God in us. The peace of God puts the believer’s heart at rest. Regardless of whatever situation he finds himself. Then the peace of God also removes fear from our hearts, no matter what we face in life. - The Fruit of Longsuffering: The fruit of longsuffering helps the believer with the fortitude to go through some tribulations of life, as permitted by God. Longsuffering helps the believer to forbear his fellow brethren’s offences. So in summary, longsuffering means patience with God and with our fellowmen. - The Fruit of Gentleness: Gentleness as stated in our opening text, is from the Greek word “chrestotes”, meaning-- usefulness. That is, moral excellence; in character and demeanor. So the fruit of gentleness confers moral excellence on the believer. Part of the moral excellence, is the attitude of not being apt to hurt his neighbor. The fruit of gentleness removes rascality from a believer. - The Fruit of Goodness: The fruit of goodness makes believers to be beneficent. That is, it makes the believer to be always apt to do or seek the good of others. The fruit of goodness enables believer to do good to even those that despitefully treat him. - The Fruit of Faith: Faith is from the Greek word ’pistis’. Which means persuasion or assurance. So the fruit of faith helps us maintain our assurance or confidence in God, at all times for all things. Because the bible says, the just shall live by faith. And it is the fruit of faith that helps us maintain a lifestyle of faith. - The Fruit of Meekness: Meekness means humility. So as we walk in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit impacts our hearts with humility. Such that no matter whatever height God lifts us to in life, we don’t get puffed up and proud. Among other things, meekness makes us teachable. - The Fruit of Temperance: Temperance means self-control. So the fruit of temperance helps us to control ourselves, especially our emotions. All our human emotions and desires, if not controlled, can lead us into troubles and sins. So the Holy Spirit in us, believers, helps us to discipline ourselves. By the Holy Spirit, we are able to control our food appetite, sexual appetite and every other natural appetite which can lead to sin. So listed above, are the nine major fruit of the Holy Spirit in us. And according to the word of God, these fruit of the Spirit, find expression in our lives as we continually give ourselves to walking in the Spirit. If you do have any question or comment on the fruit of the Spirit, please drop them at the comment section below and I’ll respond back to you as soon as possible. Then if you are blessed by this post, you can use the social media widgets below to share it with your friends. And as you do, God will richly bless you. You may also like: How to Receive the Infilling of the Holy Spirit The Gifts of the Holy Spirit The Holy Spirit And His Features The Anointing of the Holy Spirit Read the full article

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loneberry · 7 years ago

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“One-Story House” by Rebecca Solnit

[An extraordinary essay from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost on dreams, extinction, memory, the American landscape, the architecture of the psyche, familial figures, turtles, and place. The bottom of the pool...]

I was carrying the tortoise in both hands, holding it out in front of me like an altar boy’s Bible or a divining rod as I walked around the periphery of the room. Each plate of its ruddy shell was distinct. It leaked as I carried it. More water came forth than a tortoise that size could possibly store. The creature was a fountain, a cleft rock in my hands, and when I awoke I realized that the room in which I paced was my childhood bedroom.

I had been wandering through that house every now and again ever since I’d left it at age fourteen. A quarter century had passed, and I still wasn’t out of it, in my dreams. It was a classic suburban house of its era, single-story, L-shaped. The houses children draw look like faces with upstairs windows for eyes and a door for a mouth. They have a solidity and a centrality that makes them home as the head is home. This house, with its public rooms that opened one into another as though they were only distended passageways and its bedrooms appendix-like cul-de-sacs, had no center, but my psyche was stuck in it. The previous owners’ plantings all around it were strange, exotic, bottlebrush and artificial strawberry tree, a spruce the same powder blue as the corduroy pants boys wore then, succulents and other plants that were nameless, unrecognizable, inedible, with shiny leaves or spiky ones. One plant up a narrow side plot in perpetual shade bloomed annually with a single colossal lily that looked as though it were made of crumpled black leather from some thin-skinned creature. In front of each of the two children’s bedrooms facing the street was a misshapen juniper, and at night the headlights of passing cars made the shadows of their branches whirl around the walls like pterodactyls. Awnings, eaves, and patio roof prevented sunlight from reaching in directly to this place made of formica and tile and linoleum and dark green wall-to-wall carpeting with a nap like aerial photographs of forests. Everything about it seemed to be made of chilly alien materials, and the swimming pool was strangest of all.

The pool was unheated, too cold for skinny kids to jump in most of the year, but it always needed sweeping and skimming to get the dirt and debris out, and the tools for doing that were fantastically long, like cutlery for a Behemoth with its head up in the clouds. It was the usual pale turquoise with a pink cement rim that abraded bare feet and the sharp smell of chlorine emanating from its waters. There’s something fearful and mysterious about every body of water, murky water that promises unseen things in unseen depths, clear water that shows you the bottom far below as if you could fall into it, though the water would buoy you up in that strange space neither air nor ground. The term “a body of water” is apt, for here was a mysterious body thirty feet long, eight feet tall at the far end, a transparent captive into whose depths you could throw yourself. Even the lightest breeze patterned the water on the surface, and the sun turned those patterns into strange skeins of light that fled across the bottom, endless nets cast across a fishless sea. Afterward I dreamed over and over of the pool as well as the house. It was as though I couldn’t find my way out of the house, as though I was still lost in it, but the pool was less part of the labyrinth than its holy well.

Terrible things happened in that house, though not particularly unusual or interesting ones; suffice to say there’s a reason why therapists receive large hourly sums for listening to that kind of story. Or maybe there’s one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness. It’s based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there’s not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away. A story can be a gift like Ariadne’s thread, or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth’s ravening Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.

Some years ago, I dreamed that my mother had fixed up the house, or had done so in dream terms, heavy-handed ones: the swimming pool was surrounded by broken glass, the bathroom had two sunken tubs shaped like coffins, and my own small bedroom had been brightly repainted with a line of dancing skeletons on one wall. I dreamed of my father every now and again too, and long after his death, not long after the hermit taught me to shoot, there was a period in which I told him to stand back because I was armed. After this series of victories, he became harmless. Clearly, I was getting somewhere over the years. I took over the master bedroom and decided to move, I drove the family out of my own room, and then came the dream of the tortoise.

In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open onto the impossible. But the morning after I carried the leaking tortoise, I knew I was no longer stuck in the house. The weight of a dream is not in proportion to its size. Some dreams are made of fog, some of lace, some of lead. Some dreams seem to be made out of less the usual debris of the psyche than bolts of lightning sent from outside.

I wondered where the tortoise came from. I remembered riding a Galapagos tortoise in a zoo when I was two, remembered a box turtle my middle brother had as a pet, and the small red slider turtles painted up for Easter back when animal cruelty standards were lower, read about how the Zuni think of turtles as the spirits of the dead returned, noticed that every image of turtles and tortoises had a sort of pull on me. Months passed before I remembered an encounter with a desert tortoise almost a decade earlier, when I was camping in the Mojave with a few other women. I saw the full-grown tortoise in the center of a secondary road near Death Valley and stopped my truck. We got out to look at it, and I recited what I knew: that it is bad to touch these creatures, because they are stressed by the transformation of their environment, vulnerable to illness and to infection, particularly to a respiratory disorder, and touching could contaminate them. In crisis, they sometimes void all their stored water, water slowly extracted from leaves and gulped up from puddles after hard rain, water that can make up to forty percent of their body weight, and losing their water is a crisis itself.

But they are also prone to being run over by cars and off-road vehicles throughout their territory, the Mojave and western Colorado deserts. We watched the tortoise, which had stopped when we did, watched a few approaching cars in the distance, and then I took out a clean dish towel and, with the dish towel between my hands and its shell, lifted the creature. It had retracted its head and limbs, and so I carried a heavy dust-colored dome with each plate etched in concentric lines, a mosaic of mandalas. Holding it before me, I strode about fifty feet into the scrubby desert and set it down facing in the direction it had been going. Put down, it walked again with an odd tipping motion, its shell lurching a little with each step. One of the most famous Buddhist tales is about a pair of monks sworn to keep apart from women. One day they come to the edge of a turbulent river. A woman there implores them to help her cross—old fables are short on athletic women—and one of them carries her through the waters. After the two monks have been walking for some time on the farther shore, the other monk reproaches him for breaking his vows. His companion replies, “Why are you still carrying her? I put her down on the far side of the river.” Several years after that little encounter in the desert, I was still carrying the tortoise, but it had become a compass, a visa, an amulet. The desert tortoise is in danger of extinction—it officially received “threatened” status from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1990—because of human encroachments. The causes of its diminishing numbers are many. Nonnative plants have disrupted its diet, and grazing animals, dogs, vehicles, development, military bases have all had their impact, as has the widespread capturing of the creatures for pets. An increase in garbage dumps in the desert has vastly increased the raven population, and ravens prey on young tortoises during the five years or so before their shells harden sufficiently to protect them. (The hermit once found a young tortoise with severe pecking wounds in its shell; he brought it home and called in a zoo veterinarian he knew to try to save it with kitchen-sink surgery—I was away then, and he delivered telephone reports on “Miss Tortoise” for a few days, then told me that “Miss Tortoise didn’t make it.”) The desert tortoise can go for more than a year without food or water, hibernates several months a year in its colder northern reach, stays in its cool burrow during the hottest part of summer, seldom roams more than a mile from its burrow, walks slowly, lives slowly, to a great age, upward of a century. They have existed for sixty million years or so. The plan to save them is designed to give them a fifty percent chance of existing in five hundred years. The government is unwilling to dedicate more resources or curtail more activities than make the odds even.

In 1919, a young ethnographer fell in love with a blacksmith from the Chemehuevi tribe whose large territory is the heart of tortoise habitat. The blacksmith, George Laird, was already forty-eight, and as a boy he had learned much lore that was being forgotten and lost and diluted. The winter he was sixteen—about 1888—he nursed a man in the agonizing last stages of syphilis, and the dying man taught the boy a purer form of their language and “filled the long, sleepless nights with tales of the Immortals, the pre-human Animals Who Were People, told with great style and elegance.” During the twenty-one years the Chemehuevi man and the ethnographer, Carobeth Laird, were inseparable, she learned the language, the songs, and the stories he knew, and long after he died, when she herself was old, she turned her notes and memories into a book of ethnography. Of the tortoise, she recorded, “This reptile was desirable for food, but it also had a peculiar aura of sacredness. It was and is to this day symbolic of the spirit of the People. ‘A Chemehuevi’s heart is tough, like the turtle’s.’ This ‘tough-heartedness’ is equated with the will and the ability to endure and to survive.” But the tortoise is not surviving us well.

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?

Once I found a locket with a crescent moon and star spelled out in rhinestones on one face, unreadably intricate initials on another, and two ancient photographs inside, and someone must have missed it terribly but no one claimed it, and I have it still. Another time, traveling down a river in one of the last great wildernesses, a roadless place the size of Portugal, I lost a sock early in the trip and a pair of sunglasses later, and I think of them littering that wilderness so clear of such clutter, there still or found by someone who might have wondered as I did about the woman with the locket. On that trip I leaned over the side of the raft and stared straight down for hours at the floor of that river whose name almost no one knows that flows into another little-known river, stared at thousands of stones, hundreds of thousands of millions of stones sliding by, gray, pink, black, gold, under the clearest water in the whole world, floating for miles and days on water I drank straight out of the river. Material objects witness everything and say nothing. Animals say more. And they are disappearing.

That things should be lost to our knowledge is one thing, in which we don’t know where we are or they are; that things should be lost from the earth is another. There is a strange crossroads these days, between the actual and the known. Biologists estimate that about 1.7 million species are known, but that there are between 10 and 100 million on earth. Our discovery and categorization of species increases at a manic rate, but so does the disappearance of both known and unknown species. More is known; there is less to know; we lose both what we know and what we don’t. It is certain that species are vanishing without ever having been known to science. To think about this is to imagine the space inside our heads expanding but the places outside shrinking, as though we were literally devouring them.

In dreams I have been an eagle and a green finch, have met a three-headed coyote, wolves, foxes, lynxes, dogs, lions, songbirds, fish, snakes, cattle, seals, many horses and cats, some who talk, a woman giving birth by cesarean to a full-grown stag that ran away, still wet with the juices of birth, down a dark, tree-shrouded road, a gazelle fawn that a woman breast-fed, a brown bear who married a woman. “They are all beasts of burden in a sense,” Thoreau once remarked of animals, “made to carry some portion of our thoughts.” Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech. A man once told me that much of my writing was about loss, that that was how I imagined the world, and I thought about that comment for a long time. In that sense of loss two streams mingled. One was the historian’s yearning to hang onto everything, write everything down, to try to keep everything from slipping away, and the historian’s joy in retrieving out of archives and interviews what was almost forgotten, almost out of reach forever. But the other stream is the common experience that too many things are vanishing without replacement in our time. At any given moment the sun is setting someplace on earth, and another day is slipping away largely undocumented as people slide into dreams that will seldom be remembered when they awaken. Only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable, makes it natural. There are more sunrises coming, but even dreams could be emptied out.

The golden age, the dreamtime, is the present, and too much in it is leaking out now. The Times Square clock that counted down to the millennium, its seconds, minutes, hours, days racing away on a digital display, could have been kept for endangered species, at least thirty lost a day, more than ten thousand a year, half of all of them to be gone in a century unless something changes radically, or everything does. Imagine the present as already a Noah’s ark, and greed and development and poison as a trio of pirates marching the animals and plants over the edge, to the bottom of the sea that is the past. No more flocks of passenger pigeons darkening the midwestern sky for hours and days in the past century, all known Sampson’s pearly mussels gone from midwestern rivers by the 1930s, no more Santa Barbara song sparrows since 1959, no more Tecopa pupfish since 1972, an estimated 142 Sonoran pronghorn left in the U.S. as of the late twentieth century but less than half that by 2002, seventy-two species of snail missing in Hawaii, the blue pike of the Great Lakes gone extinct right about when men first walked on the moon, the speckled cormorant gone from Alaska about the time of the gold rush.

During that California gold rush, Yankees in quantity first came through the heart of the desert tortoises’ territory. The Death Valley Forty-Niners were in haste to make it to the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada, and because they had arrived in the Great Basin too late to go over the Sierra’s snowy passes, they hired a Mormon guide to take them down the Spanish Trail to southern California. They called themselves the Sand Walking Company, a corruption of the San Joaquin Company, because none of them recognized the saint whose Spanish name had been given to a river and valley in the southern mother lode. A twenty-year-old New Yorker named O.K. Smith showed up on the trail with pleasant stories of a more direct route to central California, and most of the wagons switched over to the alleged shortcut. The guide continued on the Spanish Trail with the few who didn’t. The strays were abetted by a map that government explorer John C. Fremont—“the pathfinder”—had drawn up, showing a long range running east-west that happened not to exist (a bad map had much to do with the Donner Party’s 1846 stranding too). “These mountains are not explored, being only seen from elevated points on the northern exploring line,” said the map, above an area marked in larger letters: “Unexplored.” The Sand Walkers thought they could travel along the foothills of the fictitious mountain range. Many turned back when the terrain became impassible for wagons, and the rest broke up into smaller parties. These parties got stranded in Death Valley, the lowest land in the Western Hemisphere, a dry lake bed like an empty mouth between two sharp rows of mountain ranges.

“We had been in the region long enough to know that the higher mountains contained the most water, and that the valleys had bad water or none at all, so that while the lower altitude to the south gave some promise of easier crossing it gave us no promise of water or grass, without which we must certainly perish,” wrote William Manly, half a century later. “In a certain sense we were lost. The clear nights and days furnished us with the means of telling the points of the compass as the sun rose and set, but not a sign of life in nature’s wide domain had been seen for a month or more. A vest pocketful of powder and shot would last a good hunter until he starved to death, for there was not a living thing to shoot, great or small.” Manly was a skilled hunter and outdoorsman, and there’s no ready explanation for why the landscape through which he traveled in the winter of 1849-50 seemed to be so without wildlife. For these pioneers, the Mojave was an empty quarter, without water, without animals, without names, without maps, without all the things that give a place life and meaning. They were afraid of Indians, though the only two survivors of one party of eleven men made it because they were rescued by Paiutes. The skeletons of the other nine were found a decade later, inside a low circle of stones. Other parties were shown the location of precious waterholes, springs, and streams by Indians they encountered. Columbus had arrived in the Caribbean he mistook for the Indies almost four hundred years before, but there had been few direct disturbances of the indigenous inhabitants of the more remote western regions, and they were not yet resisting what was not yet a crisis.

One starving pioneer attempted to buy a biscuit off a neighbor for ten dollars and was refused. Another buried $2,500 to lighten his load, having been unable to find anyone who wanted to carry the gold coins for a half share of them. He was never able to find the burial spot either. Still others found ore that suggested rich mines, had they only the food and water to survive there. The Lost Gunsight Mine, named after a silver-rich piece of ore that one of the Death Valley Forty-Niners had made into a gunsight, became famous, as did the Lost Goller Mine. The latter mine consisted of a few nuggets picked up by John Goller’s companion. Upon seeing them, Goller snapped, “I want water; gold will do me no good.” The mines themselves were legends later visitors would look for in vain, built out of bits of ore brought out by these desperadoes. It was a strange sojourn, this journey through a landscape where all their hopes of finding mineral wealth were set aside, where wealth meant nothing and water everything, where they were faced with critical decisions about sharing and surviving, where they all faced death and some met it. It was a detour into the essential and the introspective, as the desert often is, and they were lost in it.

The nomadic Chemehuevi navigated wide expanses of this arid terrain with songs. The songs gave the names of places in geographical order, and the place names were descriptive, evocative, so that a person who’d never been to a place might recognize it from the song. Carobeth Laird commented, “Nowadays when a song is sung it takes great leaps from one locality to another, because there is no one who remembers the route in its entirety.” She explained further, “How does that song go?” meant “What is the route it travels?” Men inherited songs from their father or grandfather, and the song gave them hunting rights to the terrain it described. Despite Manly’s experience, there seemed to be plenty to hunt for those who knew where to look, and when. The Salt Song describes the route of a flock made up of every sort of land bird in the region, and it “travels all night, arriving at Las Vegas about midnight, at Parker towards morning, and back home to the place of origin by sunrise. If the night on which it is sung is very short, the Salt Song—as the other hereditary songs—may be shortened so that it will not outlast the night.” In that song the birds began to leave the flock toward morning, each dropping out into its own place in this orderly world of words and places. A song was the length of the night and a map of the world, and the arid terrain around Las Vegas was the Storied Land of the great myths. The Mojave people just to the south had a turtle song that also lasted the length of a night or several nights.

The silence in which Manly and a companion walked out of Death Valley to seek help for two families stranded there forms a strange contrast. They carried only small canteens and soon ran out of water. So they “traveled along for hours, never speaking, for we found it much better for our thirst to keep our mouths closed as much as possible, and prevent the evaporation.” They were unable to eat the dried ox meat they carried because their mouths were too parched, and when they finally found a small sheet of ice like “window glass,” they quenched their thirst only to find that they were ravenous. It took Manly and his companion twenty-three days to find help and return with provisions and a route out. By that time their traveling companions had despaired of the young men’s ability and altruism, so they were surprised as well as rejoiced at their return. The whole party finally reached the settlements four months after they’d taken their shortcut. Afterward they returned to the mapped world and to their familiar way of living. “Every point of that terrible journey is indelibly fixed upon my memory, and though seventy-three years of age on April 6, 1893, I can locate every camp, and if strong enough, could follow that weary trail from Death Valley to Los Angeles with unerring accuracy,” wrote Manly in his memoir Death Valley in ’49, and it was his party who named the place where they were stuck Death Valley.

I know the Storied Land or the country a little north of it. It’s the first desert I came to know and the place that taught me to write. In my late twenties, I started going to the Nevada Test Site, where a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated over the years, started going there with thousands of others to oppose the nuclear testing, a wild mix of Western Shoshones and pagans and Mormons and Franciscans and Buddhists and anarchists and Quakers. The place demanded to be described not with the straight line of a single story but with stories like the roads that converge upon a capital, for many histories had arrived there in the decades since the Death Valley Forty-Niners, and some of the old ones had not been forgotten. The people I met there invited me into a wider sense of home in the West, and a tortoise I picked up not so far from there would carry me out of my old home, a tortoise that might have been Turtle Island itself, the old name for the whole continent, as though the whole continent could be home, and perhaps it’s this sense of place that sprung me from the house I left a quarter century before.

Six or seven blocks northwest of where I live now is the hill where the last Brown Satyr butterfly was collected in the 1870s, as that intensely local species was going extinct. Some of the individuals of the gold rush were likeable, but their cumulative effect was terrible; they worked feverishly to acquire what could be hoarded—notably the tons of gold dug out of the mountains—and for it they paid with what couldn’t be hoarded and didn’t belong to them, the clear streams and rivers filled up with miners’ mercury and dirt, the salmon runs already starting to fail in their time, the forests chopped down for smelters, the California grizzly extinct everywhere but the state flag by 1922, the languages and stories of the tribes devastated by violence and by disease in this place that was blank and unborn to the miners. It was this acquisitiveness and its increasingly sophisticated new technologies that came to extract more and more wealth from the wild and remote places of the world to empty them out, filling up banks with more money than could ever be spent, more than there are things to buy. Now the scarcity is real, and growing.

It’s not as simple as a morality tale because what came into being is partly beautiful, and it has come to have its own complexities. There’s a Catholic university on the hill where the butterfly left off being, and I have heard great poets read there and environmentalists speak. About twice as far from my white birdcage of an apartment in the opposite direction is the San Francisco Zen Center one of the key locations for the arrival of Buddhism in the West. The handsome brick building in a poor neighborhood was erected long ago as a residence for Jewish women, and a few Stars of David are still worked into the iron balconies. One morning four months after my midsummer dream of the tortoise, I woke up knowing it was time to go there. I arrived in time for the Saturday morning talk and sat behind a huge African-American man. Whenever he shifted his weight the altar appeared and it was the more interesting in glimpses. That day, someone mentioned that the stone Buddha on it was from an Afghanistan that had ceased to exist long ago. I had just given the two wool blankets I had inherited from that house in my dreams to the Quakers for winter relief in Afghanistan. The statue with its serene full face seemed to be looking back from the place where the blankets were going. Its soft brown stone spoke of an aridity and solidity that made the place real, made me see stony mountains shaped by erosion into folds like the curves of the statue’s robes.

A gaunt man with cropped gray hair sat down cross-legged, arranged his dark robes, and without preamble began to tell a story, softly, slowly, with long pauses: “Good morning. For many years there was someone who used to come here and sell us boxes of candy. Actually they were tins of candy, and they were caramel-coated in chocolate, and they looked like little chocolate turtles. So we called him the Turtle Man, and the Turtle Man would come and sell us this very sweet caramel-covered chocolate. And the Turtle Man couldn’t see. He was blind, so we bought two boxes instead of one. And then we’d put them in the desk in the office and then, even though we all thought they were way too sweet, we would eat them—quickly. The Turtle Man did this for many years. Like many blind people, he had a white cane, and he’d tap his way up the stairs and then he’d tap the door, and then he’d come in. We’d do our transaction, and then he’d leave.

“And one day I was out on the street right out here and I heard this voice go help . . . help . . . help . . . and it was the Turtle Man, and he was standing over there on the corner. He needed to cross the street and his way of crossing the street was to stand on the curb and say help and just say help until someone came along and helped him across the street. I didn’t watch him, but I assume that at each street crossing this was how the Turtle Man negotiated the crossing: he just stood there and said help, help.

“So I thought, Isn’t that really amazing? What an amazing life. You walk along and you reach a barrier and you stop and you just call out help. You don’t know who you’re talking to, you don’t know who’s around if anyone, and you wait, and then somebody turns up and they help you across that barrier, and then you walk on knowing that pretty soon you’re going to meet another barrier and you’re going to have to stop again and cry out help, help, help, not knowing if anyone’s there, not knowing who it will be that will turn up to help you across the next barrier.

“And yet somehow the Turtle Man could roam around the city selling boxes of turtle candy, coming to places like Zen Center and persuading them to buy a couple of cans.

“And he was, you know, a bit of a hustler. He knew we didn’t really want them, but he knew we were good for two cans. The Turtle Man wasn’t a fool. It was always a kind of a thrill to see him. It was almost like it was a miracle. It was like the Turtle Man defied gravity, he defied common sense, he defied conventionality. It was like the Turtle Man was a superhero, so it was always a little bit exciting and a little bit joyous when he turned up at the door.

“How else could we break through the spell that we weave if we didn’t have a little piece of Turtle Man in us? But this is a very dangerous proposition because most of us don’t have the excellent training of Turtle Man. Turtle Man had no option. It was either stay in bed or get up and meet the impassable barrier and cry for help. Those were the options.

“Maybe if I really paid attention to my life I’d notice that I don’t know what’s going to happen this afternoon and I can’t be fully confident that I’m competent to deal with it. Maybe we’re willing to let in that thought. It has some reasonableness to it, I can’t exactly know, but chances are, possibilities are, it’s not going to be much different than what I’ve usually experienced and I’ll do just fine, so we close up that unsettling possibility with a reasonable response. The practice of awareness takes us below the reasonableness that we’d like to think we live with and then we start to see something quite fascinating, which is the drama of our inner dialogue, of the stories that go through our minds and the feelings that go through our heart, and we start to see in this territory it isn’t so neat and orderly and, dare I say it, safe or reasonable. So in the practice of awareness, which has gone on for centuries after centuries and millennium after millennium, human beings have asked themselves, Hmmmm, how do I engage this process in a way that I don’t become too frightened by what it might unfold or too complacent by avoiding it? This is the delicate work of awareness.

“You hear a sound, and you think, that’s a big truck going around the corner. It all happens in half a second. We see someone and make up a story about who they are, and sometimes we get ourselves into a lot of trouble with the stories we make up as we weave our world. And the practice of awareness doesn’t say don’t weave your world. That’s what we’re hardwired to do, it’s not a volitional thing to think ‘truck’ after hearing that sound. The practice of awareness says don’t grasp it too tightly, don’t be too convinced. And in that simpler way of being, it’s okay to become like the Turtle Man, it’s okay to sometimes experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier. It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped. Sometimes we’re calling out for help. Sometimes we’re offering help, and then this hostile world becomes a very different place. It is a world where there is help being received and help being given, and in such a world this compelling determined world according to me loses some of its urgency and desperation. It’s not so necessary in a generous world, in a world where help is available, to be so adamant about the world according to me.”

Several months later, I was camping on the eastern side of the Sierra, in a forest of Jeffrey pines that stood far apart on that pale sand, speaking of vast root systems tapping out what moisture there was in that dry place. The pinecones fell in perfect circles under the trees, and the place seemed almost geometrically pure: the flat plain of volcanic sand, the tall straight trees, the dark circles of cones. In the warmth of day, the bark of these trees gives off a fragrance like vanilla and butter-scotch, a sweetness that added to the tranquility of the place that seemed when we were in it as though it was all there was in the world, as though the trees went on forever, as though time, history, obligation were no longer on the map. We slept in our cars on a night so cold that the water in our dishpan was frozen solid by morning. We’d camped there the year before, and that time I’d gotten my car stuck in the sand, several miles from the paved road. It had been a lovely moment to realize that I could count on my traveling companions, and they had gotten me out with good cheer and little fuss. This freezing night I dreamed I’d driven into the backyard of that childhood home and gotten the car stuck again, but the yard and house belonged to someone else, a middle-aged Asian woman who had added a second story to it. It was her house now. I wasn’t going in, and friends were coming to dislodge the car.

And then as I was preparing to write this chapter, I dreamed of the place again, from the outside again. We were burying my father’s and grandmother’s hearts by rocky graves like ornamental excrescences around the edges of the swimming pool. This time the pool had dark dirt on its bottom, and its sides were no longer straight but wavering, encrusted with big stones. It was becoming a pond. The dark hearts had been in my refrigerator, in a Ziploc bag, like butcher’s meat. A dream doesn’t have to explain how long they’d been there. Which one was bigger, my dreaming self wondered, and did the size indicate generosity, body size, or unhealthy enlargement? Both died of heart trouble. And through a knothole in the tall back fence—and there was a real knothole I had forgotten, which in real life did look out onto the hilly pasture of a little quarter horse ranch—I saw horse-drawn carriages speeding by, then horses galloping faster and glossier than ever, exuberant with power, with life.

A few months later, I went to spend a few weeks writing in the county I grew up in, not the suburban corridor whose northernmost edge that house sat upon, but its wild west, mostly parkland and dairy farms. Geese were flying south, apples were ripe on the trees, and one day a naturalist named Rich took me around to look at birds. While we were watching a pair of white-tailed kites in the tree they roost in, he mentioned that they had been thought to be extinct, and they were now doing so well that they were expanding their ecological niche and range. Almost everywhere but the black bands on their wings, the birds were as dazzlingly white as doves, though their contours were the condensed ferocity of hawks. Some people call them angel hawks. We went calling on dozens of shorebirds and waterbirds, a king-fisher, green herons half-hidden in the reeds, one gulping a blue dragonfly still whirring as it went down that long narrow throat, songbirds, and then a turtle peering above the still water of an old millpond. Reflection turned its tilted head in profile into a notched oddity with two yellow-gold eyes looking back at us. We traveled to several places not far from the road, and through this guide’s eyes and tales I saw a completely different place than this the one I had been coming back to almost all my life. My place had been made out of plants and landforms and light and some human histories. His was crowded with creatures going about their lives, each living according to a pattern, the patterns interwoven into a tapestry of formidable complexity.

Some ideas are new, but most are only recognition of what has been there all along, the mystery in the middle of the room, the secret in the mirror. Sometimes one unexpected thought becomes the bridge that lets you traverse the country of the familiar in an unprecedented way. You know the the usual story about the world, the one about ongoing encroachment that continues to escalate and thereby continues to wipe out species. Rich told a different story about how here for a hundred years or so after the gold rush the newcomers blasted away at everything that moved, an era that let up half a century ago. And so, he said, in North America at least, a lot of species have come back. In this county with so many miles of open space, he told me, even coyotes became locally extinct. I realized that the hills I roamed as a child were empty and silent compared to what they are now. It was odd to think of what had been my paradise and refuge as an impoverished landscape, though I had long known its very grass wasn’t native.

Across the continent many of the common animals are coming back, the deer, moose, bears, coyotes, and cougars, a story that hasn’t been made much of. Many of the birds endangered by DDT four or five decades ago have likewise returned, peregrines, eagles, osprey, and more. But in this county, more happened. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, tule elk were hunted into extinction altogether on this coast, and throughout their California habitat only a few survived. These survivors were discovered in 1874 in a tule marsh in the San Joaquin, the valley the Death Valley Forty-Niners had pronounced as Sand Walking. Their discoverers were in the process of draining the marsh for agriculture. A serious endeavor to save the species began in the twentieth century, and ten animals were reintroduced to this coast the year I left home and the county. Since then they had multiplied into the hundreds, and they are, in the present order of things, safe as a species.

I knew about the elk, but as Rich talked I began to see a picture I had not before, of all the animals who had hovered in the doorway of disappearance and then returned to this place. Elephant seals had vanished for a hundred and fifty years from this stretch of coast and by 1890 vanished from all their breeding grounds but one place in Baja, their numbers dwindled down to about a thousand. Four years after the elk returned, the first breeding pair was sighted here. Now, twenty years later, a couple thousand of them heave themselves up onto this county’s remotest beach in winter to quarrel and bask and give birth, and there are altogether about a hundred and fifty thousand of them in the world. Brown pelicans and crested egrets had come back from the brink, as had other waterbirds, and almost half the birds of North America are in this place at least some of the time, up to two hundred species at a time. The place also has a number of unique subspecies, evolved in isolation over tens of thousands of years, and more than a score of endangered and threatened species altogether, including coho salmon spawning in its streams. I had seen them too, golden female and ruby male thrashing their way up shallow water in the early dusk of drizzly midwinter.

After that day, I found a book at the house I was staying at, about how the land on which these creatures flourished was protected from development, and found my father’s name in the index. We moved back to California when he was hired to write the master plan for the county, and he spent the next five years working on a document that protects from development most of its western portion that wasn’t already under state, federal, or land-trust protection. The drive for protection came from citizens first, and it was their support that made it possible for the professionals to push their plan through, but it was the planners who wrote the rules of this protection and took much of the heat. The book spoke of “a revolutionary Marin Countywide Plan, which used ‘designing with nature’ as its method for preserving Marin’s extraordinary landscapes and preventing its cities from sprawling together.” I own a copy of the environmental plan whose title was drawn from a poem by Lew Welch quoted on the flyleaf, “This is the last place. / There is no where else to go,” and so it was called Can the Last Place Last? So far it has, though Welch didn’t. He walked into the Sierra Nevada wilds in 1971, and no trace of him was ever found.

The plan “went through fifty-seven public hearings and was adopted in 1973. . . . The plan was the inspiration of talented county planners Paul Zucker and Al Solnit. Zucker later lost his job after he lost a supervisorial race, and Solnit was the victim of vicious attacks by developers and hostile editorials. But the Plan was embraced by the public and has prevailed through minor revisions for over twenty-five years.” One summer evening when I was about nine, my father came home late and found a forgotten glass of chocolate milk gone sour on the kitchen counter. Waste enraged him, and since I was the principal drinker of chocolate milk, he rushed into my room, flicked the light on, and dashed it in my face as I slept, so that I woke up dripping with a giant roaring over me. (That the milk was a brother’s is only a detail; it was a very random universe in there.) Reading that account, I realized that what he had come home from was one of those rancorous meetings at which the fate of this place was being decided.

The house was a small place inside a larger one, or a small story inside a larger one; picture the stories nesting like Russian dolls, so that terrible things were happening in that house, but they were tied to the redemption happening on the larger scale of the county, which was in part reaction to the violent erasures going on across the country and the world. I had left the house for good a quarter of a century before and just gotten out of it in my dreams over the past year, but the county was something I chose to return to again and again, and on this return I’d seen the nesting of those stories, as well as some of the animals that had come back. I revisited the elk a few days before the day of the angel hawks. Most of them live out on the remotest peninsula of this remote place, a spit of land like a north-pointing finger, segregated from the rest of the world by a ten-foot-tall ring of cyclone fencing across its knuckle, a peninsula at whose tip I had realized that the end of the world could be a place as well as a time. They’d been lounging among the grasses and the domelike lupine shrubs, herds of cow elk with a few bulls among them and herds of young bulls who scrambled to their feet at the sound of my approach so that their antlers looked like a forest rising up. The end of the world was wind-scoured but peaceful, black cormorants and red starfish on wave-washed dark rocks below a sandy bluff, and beyond them all the sea spreading far and then farther.

#Rebecca Solnit #dreams #essay #literature #unconscious #extinction #nature

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comebeforegod · 6 years ago

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Knowing Jesus Christ: The Lord Jesus’ Disposition Is Not Just Merciful and Loving

By Lanlan

The Bible says, “Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high has visited us, To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:78–79). Every Christian who accepts the Lord’s salvation enjoys the plentiful grace which He bestows on us and we experience the peace and joy He brings to us. Many people therefore believe that the Lord Jesus’ disposition is eternally loving and merciful.

This is what I believed too, after having believed in the Lord for many years. But then I read the passage in the Bible where the Lord Jesus rebukes the Pharisees: “Why I say to you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven to men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven to men. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come” (Matthew 12: 31–32). From these words in which the Lord Jesus condemns and curses the Pharisees, I saw that His attitude toward them was one of abhorrence and loathing, and I understood from this that God’s disposition also has a side which brooks no offense. Coming to this realization, I felt very surprised, and I thought to myself: Could it be that the Lord Jesus’ disposition is not only merciful and loving, but is also majestic and wrathful? Because I didn’t thoroughly understand this matter, I began to seek the answer.

Thank the Lord that, after a while, my seeking finally bore some fruit. I saw several passages of words from a book: “First of all we know that God’s disposition is majesty, is wrath. He is not a sheep to be slaughtered by anyone; even more, He is not a puppet to be controlled by people however they want. He is also not empty air to be bossed around by people. If you really believe that God exists, you should have a heart that fears God, and you should know that God’s essence is not to be angered.” “What is God’s attitude toward people who aggravate His disposition, and offend His administrative decrees? Extreme loathing! God is extremely enraged by people who are unrepentant about aggravating His disposition! ‘Enraged’ is just a feeling, a mood; it can’t represent a clear attitude. But this feeling, this mood, will bring about an outcome for this person: It will fill God with extreme loathing!” “God’s love for man is not the pampering or spoiling kind; His mercy and tolerance toward mankind is not indulgent or unmindful. On the contrary, God’s love for mankind is to cherish, to pity, and to respect life; His mercy and tolerance convey His expectations of man; His mercy and tolerance are what humanity needs to survive. God is alive, and God actually exists; His attitude toward mankind is principled, not a dogmatic rule at all, and it can change. His will for humanity is gradually changing and transforming with time, with circumstance, and with the attitude of each and every person.”

From these passages, I came to understand that God is the Lord of creation and that, although He is filled with mercy and love for mankind, He is also dignified, and even less does His disposition tolerate any offense. When people unscrupulously blaspheme against God and go even further to contest with Him and oppose Him, then God’s punishment comes upon them; to those who abide by God’s words, who obey His work and who have God-fearing hearts, however, God is loving and merciful. From this we can see that God’s attitude toward man is not unchangeable, but rather it changes along with man’s attitude to God—this is God’s righteous disposition.

Thinking back to when the Lord Jesus came to earth to perform His work, He expressed many truths and performed many signs and wonders. The Pharisees, priests and scribes knew perfectly well that the Lord Jesus’ words and work carried authority and power, but in order to safeguard their own positions and livelihoods, they recklessly fabricated rumors and they judged and vilified the Lord, so much so that they even blasphemed against the Lord Jesus, saying that He cast out demons by relying on the Devil, and they tried to stop the common people from following Him. Their attitude of being hostile to the truth and sick of the truth offended God’s disposition, and that is why the Lord Jesus hated them and cursed them to experience misfortune, saying that they were of the ilk of the serpent and the sons of hell. Then there was Judas, the disciple of the Lord Jesus, who always stole money from the Lord Jesus and spent it, who did not cherish His words and who had no love for the truth at all. He also sold the Lord Jesus out for 30 pieces of silver, thus becoming a shameful traitor who severely offended God’s disposition and who, in the end, was cursed by God and died of a burst stomach. There is also the story of Ananias and his wife who secretly kept a portion of the money made from selling their land. By doing this, they not only cheated other people, but they also blatantly lied to the Holy Spirit. They thereby offended God’s disposition and God smote them down. These facts about God’s work prove that God’s disposition is not only merciful and loving, but that it is also majestic and wrathful, and this is the embodiment of God’s righteous disposition. Although God loves mankind whom He made with His own hands, to those who rebel against Him and who blatantly oppose Him, He reveals another side to His righteous disposition—that of profound anger. Thus, I came to understand that the Lord Jesus’ mercy and love is not bestowed endlessly upon us. When we do not follow God’s way and we defy God and act hostile to Him, He then unleashes His majesty and wrath upon us, and the sin offering that the Lord Jesus made on our behalf then becomes null and void. Just as the Bible says, “For if we sin willfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for sins” (Hebrews 10:26).

To those who love the truth, who accept the truth, who truly repent and are able to abide by God’s words, however, as long as they don’t blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, then God shall always be merciful and loving toward them. Take Peter and John, the followers of the Lord Jesus, for example, as well as such people as the tax collector Matthew, who repented and confessed to the Lord. When they heard the Lord Jesus’ call, they gave up everything and followed Him. They listened diligently to His sermons, thirsted for His words, and the Lord Jesus treated them with mercy and love. The Lord also often lived alongside them, giving them His blessings and guidance. At that time, because Peter didn’t understand the work the Lord Jesus had to perform, he tried to obstruct God’s work out of the goodness of his heart before the Lord was crucified, thus becoming one of Satan’s lackeys. When he said: “Be it far from You, Lord: this shall not be to You” (Matthew 16:22), the Lord sternly rebuked him, saying, “Get you behind Me, Satan” (Matthew 16:23). From these words, we can see that the Lord Jesus abhorred Peter’s action. Yet the Lord scrutinizes the hearts of men and He forgives the immaturity of men’s statures, and so He did not punish Peter, but instead gave him a chance to repent. When Peter realized what he had done, he often felt remorse for his action and, in the end, the Lord did not remember Peter’s transgression, but instead gave him the job of shepherding the church.

I then became certain that the Lord Jesus’ disposition is not merely loving and merciful, but that it is also righteous, majestic and wrathful. If we forever delimit the Lord Jesus to being only a loving and merciful God because we have enjoyed the Lord’s love and mercy, and if we believe that God will never be angry with us no matter what sin we may commit, but that He will instead be merciful and lenient toward us, then we will be apt to displease God with our actions and offend His disposition due to our lack of a God-fearing heart. I then read another passage of God’s words: “God is a living God, and just as people perform differently in different situations, God’s attitude toward these performances differs because He is not a puppet, nor is He empty air. Getting to know God’s attitude is a worthy pursuit for mankind. People should learn how, by knowing God’s attitude, they can know God’s disposition and understand His heart bit by bit. When you come to understand God’s heart bit by bit, you won’t feel that fearing God and shunning evil is a difficult thing to accomplish. What’s more, when you understand God, you’re not likely to make conclusions about Him. When you stop making conclusions about God, you’re not likely to offend Him, and unwittingly God will lead you to have a knowledge of Him, and thereby you will fear God in your heart. You will stop defining God using the doctrines, the letters, and the theories you’ve mastered. Rather, by always seeking out God’s intentions in all things, you will unconsciously become a person who is after God’s heart.” This passage enabled me to understand that, only by knowing God’s disposition will we be able to approach every matter we encounter with caution and care. Especially at this crucial time of the last days during which we welcome the Lord’s return, we cannot determine such things as how the Lord will come in the last days, what work He will perform, based on our own ideas and imaginings, much less should we delimit the Lord in any way. We must harbor a God-fearing heart and seek more in all things so as to avoid delimiting and defying God, offending God’s disposition and committing the same mistake as the Pharisees by relying on our misconceptions and imaginings. It is evident that understanding God’s disposition is incredibly important to each and every believer in God.

#Lord Jesus #God’s words #The Bible #God’s love

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love-god-forever · 6 years ago

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Knowing Jesus Christ: The Lord Jesus’ Disposition Is Not Just Merciful and Loving

By Lanlan

Whenever we talk of the Lord Jesus, we all think of His abundant love for us; He personally came into the world to redeem mankind and was an innocent Man who was crucified upon the cross, and this act completely manifests His love for all mankind. The Bible says, “Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high has visited us, To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:78–79). Every Christian who accepts the Lord’s salvation enjoys the plentiful grace which He bestows on us and we experience the peace and joy He brings to us. Many people therefore believe that the Lord Jesus’ disposition is eternally loving and merciful.

#Lord Jesus #the Son of man #The Bible #God’s words #God’s work

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firstumcschenectady · 7 years ago

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“Perplexing” based on Acts 2:1-18 and John 20:19-23

Drew, today's confirmand, planned this worship service. He had a lot of leeway. I was surprised at how little of it he used, and how intentional he was in the decisions he did make. Drew likes worship the way we usually do it, but there were some tweaks. Please pay attention to the labeling of the music at the beginning and end of worship ;)

Some of the leeway Drew had was in picking the scriptures for today. He asked what was traditionally read on this day and we read together the Pentecost texts from the Revised Common Lectionary, year A. After questions about the texts themselves, he decided that we should read the two different versions of the Pentecost story from Acts and John. When we discussed the sermon he suggested that I compare and contrast the stories, and then pull out the meaning that is in both of them for all of us.

I like this young man's idea of a sermon ;)

The Christian liturgical calendar follows the Luke-Acts narrative about Pentecost, placing it 50 days after Easter. The Greek ordinal number for 50? Pentecosto. Pentecost was a part of the Jewish Celebration of Booths (sometimes called Tabernacle), celebrated 50 days after the Passover, and was a harvest festival. Luke's placement of the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost is saturated with meaning. The harvest festival becomes a harvest of new Jesus followers. The harvest festival was celebration of the bounty as a sign of of God's care for the people, and Luke reimagines it as a celebration of God's care for the people through the sending of the Holy Spirit.

It is on this basis that Christianity celebrates the Season of Easter for 50 days, starting on Easter Sunday and culminating in Pentecost. We do it because Luke and Acts tell us that the gift of the Spirit came 50 days later.

John, however, disagrees. Neither Matthew nor Mark present any version of this story, so the debate is simply between Luke-Acts and John. (Ah, I should explain my language. Luke and Acts are written by the same person and meant to be parts 1 &2 of the same book, however the order of the New Testament messes this up.) John's gospel places the gift of the Holy Spirit on Easter evening. We may sometimes gloss over this story, because it gets used as an opening to the story about Thomas, who wasn't there when the Spirit was given. The story is less often heard standing alone, and it didn't get prime attention in the creation of the Christian calendar, which prefers Luke's version.

The stories are VERY different. Luke-Acts takes place in the morning, a fact we are reminded of because Jesus' followers are again being accused of being drunk. John's version takes place at night. Luke-Acts's version happens in public, others see the impact of the Spirit, and they hear the preaching, and many are converted. John's version involves a large group of disciples as well, but without an audience. There is more FUSS in Luke-Act's version, more description of the event, more of a miraculous feel. John's version is relatively quiet. It mostly focuses on Jesus speaking.

In Luke-Acts, the crowd responds to the disciples speak. It says they were amazed, bewildered, and perplexed. The movement of the Spirit and its impact seemed startling, and not in particularly comfortable ways. The Spirit is known to blow as she will, and that often makes people uncomfortable.

(An aside: the last time I read about the Spirit, the Bible translation I read from referred to the Spirit with feminine pronouns. Afterward I was asked about it, and had the chance to share the fact that the Spirit's pronouns in Hebrew are feminine, and some translators follow the Hebrew, despite the fact that in Greek the Spirit is gender neutral and in Latin the Spirit is masculine. Since the Creator most often gets male pronouns in the Bible, I also tend to want to follow the Hebrew pronouns for the sake of balance within our conceptions of God.)

In both texts the Spirit comes to the Body as a WHOLE. The Spirit is NOT received by one person, but instead by many. In Luke-Acts, given that the occurrence is during a Jewish pilgrimage festival, faithful Jews had filled the city to be witnesses, but the people in the house together all receive the gift together.

The writer in the New Interpreter's Bible, has a fantastic comment on the fact that the faithful Jews from around the diaspora took note that the Galilean men were speaking to them in their languages. They could still tell that the men were Galilean, including by their speech. Robert Wall says, “The language of the Spirit is not communicated with perfect or heavenly diction, free from the marks of human identity; it is the language of particular human groups, spoken in their idiom. God works in collaboration with real people – people who are filled with the Spirit to work on God's behalf in their own world.”1 I rather love that idea. The Spirit moved, and certainly in unexpected ways, but still worked within the people as they were, including with their existent accents!

Now, likely because of the tradition doing so, I associate the story in Acts as the normative Pentecost story, which means that I'm intrigued by the version in John. As previously mentioned, it also involves the Spirit coming to a group of Jesus followers, it was likely NOT just the 12 because John doesn't tend to think in terms of just the 12 and he didn't designate them as such. A group of followers were simply gathered, and they had an experience of the Risen Christ, which IMMEDIATELY involved receiving the gift of the Spirit.

Jesus speaks in five sentences, and two of them are saying “Peace be with you.” This is a particularly apt greeting for the frightened followers who had fearfully locked themselves into an upstairs room - after hearing the women's Easter story! The double naming of peace both sounds like a traditional greeting imbued with God AND serves as a reminder that fear need not define their lives. Those faithful disciples were going to face significant persecution in coming days and years, but Jesus, God, AND the Spirit were calling them to do so in a different way, with the Peace of God within them.

In this version the gift of the Spirit is the gift given so that the followers of Jesus can continue his work, they become HIM and are empowered to do as he had done. He was sent, so they are sent. He breaths on them as God has breathed on the first humans in Genesis. A new life is beginning, one that is defined by peace.

Now, I have never much liked the LAST line of this passage, John 20:23, which has Jesus saying, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." My objections aren't particularly deep. I j shy away from sin language, as I've too often seen it lead to guilt and shame rather than to a free and abundant life of peace and joy with God.

However, Gail O'Day's commentary on John (also in the New Interpreter's Bible) fixed a lot of problems for me, and made me rather glad that line was included. She says that, “In John, sin is a theological failing, not a moral or behavioral transgression (in contrast to Matt. 18:18). To have sin is to be blind to the revelation of God in Jesus.”2 Furthermore, given this understanding, “The forgiveness of sins must be understood as a Spirit-empowered mission of continuing Jesus' work in the world.”3 And, finally, this work is the work of the community, and never one person alone.

So, let me see if I can remake those words so they fit with O'Day's insights. But maybe first, you should know that Gail O'Day is Dean and Professor of New Testament and Preaching at Wake Forest School of Divinity, and was previously professor of homeletics at Candler school of Theology at Emory. She's an amazing scholar, and especially well respected as a scholar of the Gospel of John. Following her insights, it would be as if Jesus said, “If you work together to help people see God at work in the world, they will be free from their fears and able to live in peace with you. If you leave people in the fear they already know, there they will stay, without the blessings that you now live with.”

In O'Day's reflections on this text, she continually turns back to John 14-17, which is called the Farewell Discourse. Within it are the defining words, in John 15:12, “ ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” O'Day reflects on the continuity between the passages, “By loving one another as Jesus loves, the faith community reveals God to the world”4 Thus, the seemingly problematic line that the institutional church has often used to claim authority over people's lives and access to forgiveness is really about inviting the followers of Christ to share God's love, and in doing so to show other people the possibility of living life in peace, love, joy, and freedom from fear.

Perhaps it isn't so perplexing after all. Perhaps the story of Pentecost is the story we already know: God calls us to love one another and be examples of the gracious and abundant love of God in the world. And that can change everything, because it is the completion of the Easter narrative – no matter when it happened ;). Thanks be to God for the opportunity we have to extend love into the world. Amen

1Robert W. Wall, New Interpreter's Bible Volume X: Acts Leander E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002) 58.

2Gail O'Day, New Interpreter's Bible Volume IX: John, Leander E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,1995) 847.

3O'Day, 847

4New Interpreter's Bible, John, 848.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/ https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

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curtklingermanposts · 3 years ago

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Have You Forsaken His Word

What is Your View of His Word?

When it gets down to the nitty-gritty, how do you view the Bible? Do you actually believe what is written? Some embrace it cover to cover, while others pick and choose parts of it, according to their personal taste or worldview. How many say they believe it, but when it comes to living it, it doesn’t appear to be so? No judgment here. In a similar vein, others live it to the degree in which they feel comfortable.

Living by the Word of God is not necessarily easy, at least initially. Depending on the culture in which some grew up, convenience may play a big part in what degree a person follows Scripture as led by Holy Spirit. Clearly, when the flesh gets involved, all bets are off. Is partial obedience truly obedience? Hmmm.

Where is your heart in relation to God? Do you love and believe Him? How you respond to His Word may be an indicator. That being said, have you considered the consequences of ignoring or even forsaken it?

Consequences of Forsaking His Word

God is love, and His love motivates the way in which He interacts with humanity, and that includes you. Love will always do what’s best for the recipient, even when the recipients doesn’t like it, much less appreciate it. Because of His love, He also revealed Himself to us, which included using the Bible. Believe it or not, the principles found in it are for our benefit. Nonetheless, His love gives us the choice to accept or reject them.

Moving forward, let’s be clear about one thing, what’s written here is not about earning salvation, nor is it intended to coerce any to believe or follow it. That decision belongs to the individual.

Love speaks the truth, and the truth is there are consequences for ignoring or rejecting His Word. Of course, there are rewards for embracing and obeying it. What are some consequences. One is we miss the blessings of God.

2 Kings 21:8 Neither will I make the feet of Israel move any more out of the land which I gave their fathers; only if they will observe to do according to all that I have commanded them, and according to all the law that my servant Moses commanded them.

In this verse, which is one example of many, we find a condition attached to a promise God made to Israel: only if they will observe to do according to all that I have commanded them. While this is an Old Testament example, it is written for our learning, and of course, we find New Testament promises predicated on obedience.

When people reject the Word of God, they actually oppose themselves, even if they believe they’re opposing God, Himself.

2 Timothy 2:20-26 But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour, and some to dishonour. If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work. Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do gender strifes. And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth; And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will.

For believers, perhaps one of the simplest ways to frame this principle is found in 1 Corinthians: For all the promises of God in Him are yea, and in Him Amen, unto the glory of God by us (1 Corinthians 2:20).

Embracing Jesus Christ is the Key to receiving the promises of God. Obviously, the opposite is true. There is so much more that could be said about the consequences of rejecting His Word, but perhaps it boils down to this: rejecting His Word may be the result of rejecting Him. On the other hand, those who embrace Him, embrace His Word.

www.perfectfaith.org

#PerfectFaith

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penniesforthestorm · 4 years ago

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“But us sheep? We won’t never get struck out.”: ‘Justified’ Season 1, Episodes 10-12

The fuse has been lit, and the sparks are starting to fly, as we come to the final stretch of Justified’s premier season. For the finale, “Bulletville”, I’ll be doing a more conventional ‘review’, wrapping up some thoughts on the season as a whole. If you’re just joining us, my notes for the pilot, episodes 2-5, and 6-9 can be found by clicking the links. Read on for more...

Episode Ten: “The Hammer”

-We’re introduced to Boyd’s new church, as he lays out his philosophy to an aspiring acolyte, Bobby Joe: replacing addiction or other types of recidivism with a sense of purpose, which, y’know, isn’t the worst idea.

-Raylan arrives, and can’t resist poking the bear, in a mocking address to Boyd’s ‘congregation’. “...May this food provide them with the nourishment they need, but if it does not, may they find comfort in knowing that the US Marshals Service is offering $50,000 to any individual providing information that will put Boyd back in jail. We can make the check out to cash, or to Jesus.”

-Case of the week: eccentric federal judge Mike “The Hammer” Reardon (Stephen Root) requests Raylan for his personal security detail. Reardon’s penchant for strippers, whiskey, and ‘draconian’ sentencing add up to serious trouble.

-Boyd’s mission: wiping out meth in Harlan County (again, not the worst idea), which happens to be Papa Bo’s primary source of revenue. Cousin Johnny drops by for a revealing conversation--Johnny’s willing to turn on Bo if Boyd has a more successful scheme in mind. Boyd tells him, “Truth always sounds like lies to a sinner.”

-Raylan tracks down ‘Preacher Fandy’, whose church was bombed in the pilot, to see if he’ll testify against Boyd. He’s dropped the Rasta act, and notes that it’s been three months since the bombing.

-Raylan and Reardon have a long chat about regrets-- Reardon describes an early case he feels he was too lenient in, and brings up the subject of Raylan’s Miami adventure, asking, if Bucks had been unarmed, “Would it have changed what you did?”

-Boyd blows up a backwoods meth lab, and, to his dismay, is informed that there was someone inside.

-The Reardon adventure reaches a crisis: Virgil Corum, released after an eight-year stint for possession, corners the judge at his favorite bar. Reardon clumsily fires on him, but Raylan stops him. The judge, indignant, protests, “I thought you guys shoot people all the time! That’s why I picked you!”

-Raylan visits “Fandy”/Otis again, and realizes he’s misread the situation: Otis didn’t identify Boyd because he genuinely didn’t see him. He offers to testify if Raylan will show him a picture of Boyd, but Raylan, wised up in light of his other escapades, tells him, “I’m not that guy.”

Episode Eleven: “Veterans”

-Raylan and the marshals raid Boyd’s camp, and Raylan catches Dewey Crowe, struggling to escape his own tent. The casualty in Boyd’s meth-lab bombing was a CI for the State Police.

-Raylan and Art question Boyd, and Art is infuriated by Boyd’s use of the Bible to justify his own ends, sending him on his way with some hard words about “the hand of righteousness.”

-Nicky, one of the cookers from the lab, comes to Bo and Johnny Crowder asking for protection. Raylan visits Sheriff Mosley in prison, and finds out that Arlo took over Bo’s collections after Bo’s arrest, but couldn’t maintain control.

-Bo visits Boyd, and attempts to bring him to heel with an “offering” of the protection money he’s collected. Boyd doesn’t exactly turn him down, but neither is he willing to follow orders outright.

-Raylan and Art, attempting to track down Arlo, have a chat with Aunt Helen. She sends them off to the VFW, but, as neither Raylan nor Art are veterans, they can’t enter. Finally, Art calls Deputy Tim, and the three of them try to convince Arlo to give them info on Bo, but Arlo and Raylan’s mutual animosity gets in the way. Outside, a call comes from the police that the two survivors of the lab explosion are no longer, uh, surviving...

-Next day, Arlo meets with Bo. Arlo pleads his case-- the “young punks” didn’t respect him. Bo counters that he placed his trust in Arlo precisely because of his age (as an example, he mentions that Johnny would’ve had ambitions ‘above his station’), and cautions Arlo to come up with the money he lost.

-1st appearance of ‘Lemuel’ and his store of various mechanical wonders, visited by Boyd.

-Raylan encounters Dewey Crowe hitchhiking, and Dewey explains that he was kicked out of Boyd’s ‘flock’ for some... unfortunate personal proclivities, much to Raylan’s derision. Raylan, in a flash of inspiration, ‘deputizes’ Dewey into the Marshal Service, and Dewey instantly explains why Boyd targeted that particular lab- on behalf of his new convert Bobby.

-The church camp is raided again, and Raylan and Boyd have another tete-a-tete. Boyd drops the perturbing detail that Arlo worked closely with Bowman Crowder, and Ava may have known about it.

-Raylan finds Ava, who doesn’t want to hear his plea for her safety. After a confrontation with one of Bo’s goons, a creep named Hessler, Raylan packs Ava into his car and calls Winona, who somewhat bemusedly agrees to host her for the night.

-Arlo and Helen chase off an intruder, blasting away side-by-side. Meanwhile, a contrite Dewey begs to return to Boyd’s flock. Boyd raises his pistol, but decides on mercy instead, telling Dewey to scram. Bobby shows up at the Marshals’ Office, taking the fall for the lab explosion.

Episode Twelve: “Fathers and Sons”

-Arlo shows up, claiming willingness to sing for the marshals, but it’s an open question whether it’ll be the tune they want to hear.

-Bo Crowder meets with Gio, the cartel honcho, in Miami, arranging for a shipment of ephedrine to be delivered by Gio’s assistants, Ernesto and Pilar. In passing, Gio mentions Raylan, hinting that he still wants revenge for Tommy Bucks.

-A pair of strained conversations: Ava at Winona’s, and Arlo at Raylan and Art’s office. Ava is suspicious of Winona’s friendliness toward Raylan; Winona attempts to toss it off. “It’s kinda hard to stay mad at Raylan,” she says. Ava responds, “I wouldn’t know; I’m just getting started.” Arlo refuses to wear a wire to meet with Bo, and he and Raylan goad each other almost to blows.

-Bo, Johnny, Hessler, and a chemist meet with a realtor to rent out space for processing Gio’s ephedrine. During a discussion of the details, Bo sends Johnny away.

-That evening, Ava returns home to find Hessler and his buddies drinking beer in her living room, seemingly on Bo’s orders, and she flees. Winona drops by Raylan’s motel room, and things quickly get intimate. As Winona leaves, we see Ava parked outside. The next morning, Ava visits Aunt Helen, and asks if she can get her hands on a gun.

-Bo and Boyd attend an actual church, and Boyd ‘witnesses’ to the congregation, in a wild, amped-up screed. He proclaims his allegiance to his “one true father”, i.e., The Man Upstairs, grinning pointedly at his earthly patriarch. Outside, Bo gives him a stern serving of ‘Crowder gospel’, boiling down to ‘this joke isn’t funny anymore’.

-Trouble at the VFW: a young soldier about to be redeployed to Afghanistan is threatening to blow the place with a live grenade. Arlo, cool as a cucumber, sits with him and hears his story: He received the epithet “Lucky” after the rest of his unit was killed in Iraq while he was sidelined by an asthma attack. Arlo responds with another parable from the Book of Givens (Old Testament): in Vietnam, his unit was ambushed, and he managed to hide while the rest were dragged off. The story is false, but the lesson is true-- Lucky’s crisis is “why me?”, and Arlo’s answer is “why not you?” Outside, Arlo tells Raylan he’ll wear the wire.

-Ava storms into Johnny’s bar, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, to give Bo a piece of her mind. Johnny attempts to intervene, but she waves him off. Bo tells her he doesn’t want to kill her, but warns her to get out of Kentucky. She tells Bo she’s already shot one Crowder.

-Arlo meets with Bo, wired, but with a trick up his sleeve: he flashes Bo a message that their conversation is being monitored, and hands him an envelope stuffed with newspaper clippings, instead of the $20,000 the marshals gave him as a peace offering. Bo sets up another meeting and mentions that if Arlo ‘sees Raylan’, tell him to get Ava under control. Raylan goes riding off, but Ava has dug herself in.

-Bo’s ephedrine shipment is making its way into town, but gets held up by Boyd, who has a brand-new rocket launcher and seems only too delighted to use it.

So, the table’s all set for the finale. (It seems uniquely apt that my thoughts on said finale will be posted on Good Friday.) See you around....

#tv #recap #long post #justified #did you miss my heart on purpose

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olaluwe · 5 years ago

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Opportunity has been compared to a missing pearl which everybody is assumed to be looking for.

It has also been likened to a treasure hidden on which all and sundry are looking to lay hold of their hands.

I remember in the early days of GSM in Nigeria, you’d see people climbing all sort of raised platforms or randomly walking around their households or rooms as the case may be purportedly in their search for a strong-enough signal which is forever unstable in all its ways. Of course, it is now a thing of the past substantially.

But is opportunity fluctuating like network’s signal or hidden as treasure so much that we all must labor to identify it and bring it to a profitable use of ourselves and others?

Or is it that we are the one looking elsewhere while it continues to pass us by?

In the event of any of the two, how then can we locate opportunity or make opportunity locates us for our maximal usage?

Before we attempt to answer these questions, let's first of all take a cursory look at these two prominent myths surrounding the subject of opportunity.

1. Opportunity lost is believed can never be regained.

This is a myth because opportunity missed can be recovered depending on the nature and preponderance of the wasted opportunity.

For instance, you cannot tell me as a man that because you missed out on marrying that delectable, well-behaved lady, it automatically translates to a tightly closed door to a similar if not a better opportunity for you? The answer is no.

This is because God has made available a steady supply of alternative women to choose from either by their varying statuses as eligible spinsters or single-again mothers as results of either the death of their spouses or having divorced from their previous marriages.

The same applies to the women folks. Because you were rejected by a man surely isn't the end of the world and shouldn't trouble you so much that the only solution that occurs to you is suicide.

Yes, you might have lost out on the opportunity to marry that person whom in your human estimations you considered special, (in any case, everybody is special perspective is what matters) I can assure you, however, that the door is not irreversibly shut to you to meeting better people if only you will not only be diligent in your quest the next time around but be ready to take your chances.

2. Or alternatively, many people even belief opportunity comes but once.

This is another fallacy, a myth. I can tell you for free that opportunity comes to all not just once but the second, third, and even the fourth time provided your belief or faith has not gone on a long holiday.

Again, I'm strongly convinced that many people sometimes missed out on a great opportunity, not due to any faults of theirs. Life just happens to them which they cannot help.

It could be due to the dark forces are at work in their life. It could also be due to being careless.

Therefore, are we to conclusively say that a force far more superior to the ones messing up their life cannot and should not step in and restores order? The answer again is no.

Let’s go back to the questions I asked earlier on.

Opportunity is neither fluctuating nor hidden. It’s just what it is - a free-roaming spirit of possibility waiting to be activated- which avails itself much to those who look earnestly forward to it.

Like money, it is mostly an unscheduled visitor. Its favor can also be curried. If it pays you a visit, make the most of its stays. In other words, it is advisable you make it visits as ensconced as possible so it’s tempted to make it stay a permanent one.

Therefore, the second scenario is most likely that we’re possibly the ones not paying enough attention to details. Devil, remember, they use to say is in the details.

So literally speaking, opportunity passes most of us by because we sometimes get distracted by the diversionary side attractions to life which competes with our attention.

And we must as a duty learn to shout-out-loud at our own drowning or floundering attention to focus more on weightier matters of life.

Distinguishing between opportunity contenders and pretenders

For example, just as there are contenders and pretenders in the race for the coveted diadem in all the football leagues around the world by reason for better or poor preparation in terms of recruitments of new players who can bring something different to the team and keeping the core of the team which have been together for some time play an important role.

By so doing, it is either the respective team consolidates on the successes of the preceding seasons or they allow them to fritter away. In sports generally, the availability of the required financial wherewithal plays a vital role in teams’ successes.

Similarly, opportunity contenders may well have a better preparation ahead of time in term of training, experience, connections, awareness, and exposures which the pretenders, unluckily, may not have or might have papered over in the course of time may be believing in error that things just happen by chance. Hasn’t success been aptly described as opportunity meets preparations?

Even in the culturing process of crops, growth doesn’t just happen naturally all the time. Conscious and deliberate efforts are required of the farmers to ensure the crops in their fields grow well in their natural environment or a simulated one in order to achieve better yields and improved profitability. Sometimes, it takes the sampling of improved crop varieties.

How then can we locate opportunity and as well maximize it?

There is a popular Yoruba saying: the ears of the king at home and abroad, that’s what the people are.

The king obviously cannot be everywhere at the same time. So, it is - the ordinary citizens and the people to whom he has delegated powers - that form his first line of getting firsthand dependable information about what’s going on that would aid his effective and efficient rule of the realm. The same applies to each and every one of us.

The essence of that is that the people are the opportunity and the opportunity is the people.

Let me briefly illustrate the point I’m making here with a bible story of the widow at Zarephath of Zidon whose husband died living her with debt. 1 King 17 vs. 8-16.

The debt was so much that the receiver’s managers are determined to take her only son which is most likely the collateral for the loan away from her. And what did she do?

Prophet Elijah paid her a visit on the instruction of God and had to prepare a meal of cake to entertain him in obedience to his word ‘out of flour in a bin, and a little oil in a jar’ that was left in the house.

When he was done, he asks her to gather all the empty jars in her households as well as even going to borrow from the neighbors. And the prophet pronounced a blessing on her. 1 King 17 vs.14

And that was the most instructive part of the event because it is filled with an important life lesson which is very profitable for instruction in the task of locating and maximizing life’s opportunity.

Because here comes an opportunity of a lifetime, one that’s pregnant with transforming possibilities for her family with regards to the repaying of the debt owed and having enough left to cater to other existential matters.

But it was all dependent on the number of empty jars she could gather. Now imagine for a moment that she was an unfriendly type who is always making trouble with the people closest to her such as co-tenants and neighbors? Imagine if she’s not on talking terms with them?

That opportunity would have been screwed because there could’ve been no one to turn to for empty jars that would go on to determine the size of her blessings.

It would’ve been payback time for them by turning down her request for their empty jars though they may not have any use of them at that point in time.

The moral of this story is that you prepare for life’s opportunity with the right attitudes and cordial relations with people around you.

To locate and maximize opportunity, consider the following:

Preparation.

You can locate and maximize opportunity through preparation by way of the acquisition of relevant education/orientations/skill in one or more areas of specializations or by the way of developing your God given talents and gifts for such, the bible says, shall not only make ways for you, but make you stand before Kings.

Indeed, it’s apt to recall that the motto of one of the greatest youth movements in the world, the Boy Scout is ‘Be Prepared’.

Information.

You can locate opportunity and maximize the same through staying informed. This is more pertinent because we now live in the high-speed information age which enables a very rapid transformation like never seen or known in the history of humanity.

So, positioning yourself for the right and timely information will go a long way in helping you to locate and maximizing opportunity in life.

Alertness.

Alertness is the reflexive capacity to ably response to positive energies around you, while avoiding or ignoring the negative ones.

And we speak of mental, social, economic, political, and spiritual alertness.

It generally involves knowing the signs of the time and minding them for your own good. Your opportunity for breakthrough, promotion, deliverance, healing, and restoration comes from all of the above.

Build a people-centric network.

Like I said earlier, people are the opportunity and opportunity is the people. The Chinese call it Quingxi.

The people are more often than not your eyes, nose, and ears concerning your search for lifelong progress and advancement.

Surely, they would bring you reports of new development to which you can avail yourselves if you’re in their network. Summarily, have a good relationship with people for they are your sure resource for the blessing which God has destined for you. Always remember, nobody succeeds as an island.

Being level-headed.

Level-headedness is the ability to stay calm even when the situation doesn’t warrant it or is going haywire. When you’re level-headed it makes you see and think clearly. As such you don’t get things all muddled up for yourself.

Being faithful.

Faith, the bible says, is the substance of things hoped for, evidence of things not seeing. By it, the elders obtain good testimony.

The bible also says that ‘faith doesn’t make things easy, it makes them possible’. When you’re faithfully committed to what your hands have found to do and doing it well, you automatically identify and maximize opportunity around it.

Being goal-oriented.

Goal-oriented persons will easily locate opportunity and maximize opportunity than people who are not.

They’re so motivated and driven to succeed that they are continually on the look-out for ways to upgrade on their competences which ultimately leads to the awareness of and maximization of opportunity in their chosen field or career.

Being focused.

When you’re focused on something or on a journey it’s unlikely that you will not get to your desired destination.

It’s most unlikely that you would be driven and tossed around like the waves by the wind. And though storms of adversity may arise and wind of uncertainty may surge, they shall found you fearless because you know they are merely temporary distractions.

Looking beyond temporary gratification.

Obsession with temporary gratification can make you miss out on an enduring opportunity and more so maximizing it.

Some jobs and callings come with little or no financial gains, especially in the beginning, and this has led many to overlook them thereby skimming over the brighter side to them in the long term.

It’s advisable to try delaying your gratification even if the enterprise is self-originating. It makes it more fulfilling when it finally comes through. Food is sweetest, filling, and satisfying when hunger is more pronounced.

Despise not the day of little beginning.

All big things have a little and almost insignificant start. The mother hen of today was once a fragile pullet. There’s a seminal point to every significant thing you see out there.

We must be prepared to swim like a trout in the small stream then grow to a shark or other cetacean mammal capable of swimming in the ocean whose waves and tides are most violent and threatening to the feeble of aquatic creatures which carelessly venture beneath the treacherous sea.

As I leave you with this quote by Jack Ma, China’s richest man who, when asked to compare his brand, Alibaba with the big American rival, Amazon humbly reckoned that:

“Amazon is like a shark in the ocean, while Alibaba is still like a crocodile in the Yangtze”.

The import of that, however, should not be lost on those who genuinely are seeking for an opportunity to launch out in business or career.

Because contextually the statement is neither that of admittance of failure and defeat nor of surrendering before the fight even commences.

Rather, it’s a fair pronouncement borne out of humble assessment of the current reality of the two rival brands.

Yet, it’s so full of positives for those who can dare to dream, for those who are willing to start small where they presently are, being ready to scale up or diversify when possible.

Opportunity may be few and far between but real chances for growth will always come. However, don’t despise the day of little beginning and so bungled your chance to succeed in real-time in no distant future. Follow your path, locate the inherent opportunity, and maximize it. Impossibility is nothing!

#IFTTT #Blogger

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ilovefunreading-blog · 5 years ago

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Warning: Women Can Be Used As Weapons

And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

Genesis 3:13

Women have done great things for God and the Lord will use them even more in the future. The Holy Spirit has been poured out on both the sons and the daughters. This notwithstanding, the Bible gives us a long list of women who have been used as weapons of destruction.

The subject of this chapter is to understand how women have been used as weapons to destroy God’s work. It is important for a minister of the gospel to recognize that women are likely to be used as weapons to destroy his life and ministry. Women who can destroy you range from strange women whom you hardly know to women whom you know very well, such as your wife!

Let me share with you several examples from the Bible. Below is a list of ways in which women have been used to afflict great men.

1. THE DESTRUCTION OF ADAM: A woman brought down the very first man. A wife, the only woman in the world, was used as a bridge to gain access to the only man in the world. By causing her to fall, satan gained access to Adam. Adam tried to help his wife but landed in the same difficulty as she did. Eve was used as a bridge. Satan gained access to Adam, the head of the created world through his wife Eve. Satan destroyed man by using his wife.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

Genesis 3:6

2. THE DESTRUCTION OF JOSEPH: Through a woman, one of the heroes in the Bible was given a prison sentence. A lying woman was used to damage Joseph’s life. Through Potiphar’s wife, Joseph went to prison and spent a long time in captivity.

And it came to pass, when his master heard the words of his wife, which she spake unto him, saying, After this manner did thy servant to me; that his wrath was kindled.

And Joseph’s master took him, and put him into the prison, a place where the king’s prisoners were bound: and he was there in the prison.

Genesis 39:19-20

3. THE DESTRUCTION OF KING DAVID: There was a snare for the man after God’s heart and that snare was a woman. A bride, was used as a weapon against king David. The plan was to use David’s love for Michal to gain access to him.

And Saul said, I will give him her, THAT SHE MAY BE A SNARE TO HIM, AND that the hand of the Philistines may be against him. Wherefore Saul said to David, Thou shalt this day be my son in law in the one of the twain.

1 Samuel 18:21

4. THE DESTRUCTION OF SAMSON: The captivity and death of God’s strongest man was accomplished by a woman. A girlfriend was used as a weapon in the life and ministry of Samson. Delilah was used as a weapon to gain access to Samson, the leader of the Israelite nation. Through Delilah, Samson was destroyed, blinded and silenced.

And it came to pass afterward, that he loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah. And the lords of the Philistines came up unto her, and said unto her, ENTICE HIM, and see wherein his great strength lieth, and by what means we may prevail against him, THAT WE MAY BIND HIM to afflict him: and we will give thee every one of us eleven hundred pieces of silver. And Delilah said to Samson, Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy great strength lieth, and wherewith thou mightest be bound to afflict thee.

Judges 16:4-6

5. THE DESTRUCTION OF SOLOMON BY WOMEN: The destruction of the wisest man on earth was achieved only by women . Wives and concubines were used as weapons in the life of Solomon. The subtle influence of Solomon’s wives was the power that neutralized the great wisdom of Solomon. All the wisdom that God gave to Solomon was destroyed by these wives.

But king Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites;

Of the nations concerning which the LORD said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go in to them, neither shall they come in unto you: for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods: Solomon clave unto these in love.

And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart.

For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.

1 Kings 11:1-4

6. THE DESTRUCTION OF STRONG MEN BY WOMEN: The slaying of strong men is blamed on the strange woman. Strange and unknown women are described as hunters in the book of Proverbs. These hunters are to destroy a man and turn him into a piece of bread. Under the influence of the strange woman, a great man is turned into an ox in the slaughter house. The wounded and the strong are destroyed by strange women.

For she hath cast down many wounded: yea, many strong men have been slain by her. Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.

Proverbs 7:26-27

7. THE DESTRUCTION OF ARMIES BY WOMEN: Entire armies have been corrupted by women . Daughters were used as weapons in the wars described by the prophet Daniel. They were sent as weapons to neutralise and to fight the enemy. Many people do not go to war because of their love for women. Mark Anthony who fought to be the leader of Rome was mocked because of his love for Cleopatra.

He shall also set his face to enter with the strength of his whole kingdom, and upright ones with him; thus shall he do: and HE SHALL GIVE HIM THE DAUGHTER OF WOMEN, CORRUPTING HER: but she shall not stand on his side, neither be for him.

Daniel 11:17

8. THE DESTRUCTION OF PROPHETS BY WOMEN: A fornicating woman is described as having destroyed the ministries of many prophets and saints. In her was found the blood of many prophets. She has destroyed many men of God.

Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.

And IN HER WAS FOUND THE BLOOD OF PROPHETS, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.

Revelation 18:20, 24

9. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE REDEEMED BY WOMEN: The defilement of the redeemed is by women. Women are used to defile the saints. The presence and effect of these women, somehow, defiled the church.

These are they, which were not DEFILED WITH WOMEN; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were redeemed from among men, being the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb.

Revelation 14:4

10. THE DESTRUCTION OF KINGS BY WOMEN: Women have destroyed many kings. Amazingly many wrong decisions taken by authority figures are influenced by women.

Give not thy strength unto women, nor thy ways to that which DESTROYETH KINGS.

Proverbs 31:3

11. THE DESTRUCTION OF MEN OF GOD BY WOMEN: According to the Bible, there is trouble waiting for those who get married. Marriage to a woman will introduce trouble into your life and ministry. This is probably why Jesus did not marry. He allowed women to minister to Him, but He did not marry any of them.

But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned. Nevertheless such SHALL HAVE TROUBLE IN THE FLESH: but I spare you.

1 Corinthians 7:28

12. THE DISQUALIFICATION OF BISHOPS: Bishops are tested for their ability to stay with one woman. Marriage to one woman brings about the first test that a bishop has to overcome in order to rule the church. Failure to overcome the challenges posed in your life through marriage will disqualify you from being a leader in the house of the Lord.

A bishop then must be blameless, THE HUSBAND OF ONE WIFE, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach;

1 Timothy 3:2

by Dag Heward-Mills

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fear-god-shun-evil · 5 years ago

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How Will the Second Coming of Jesus Happen?

By Gao Jie

We Christians all know that when the Lord Jesus descends for the second time, He will receive us so that we can be with Him. This is the promise that the Lord has made to us, and also is the greatest longing for all Christians. So welcoming the Lord’s second coming is the most important matter of us believers’ lives. But to welcome the Lord, we must first know in what way His second coming will happen. If we are not clear about this, then we will be apt to miss the Lord’s return and lose the opportunity to enter into the kingdom of heaven for all of eternity. Let’s fellowship about this topic today.

In what method will the Lord appear when He descends for the second time in the last days? I believe most people think that when the Lord Jesus returns He will descend upon a cloud and will be seen by everyone, because the Bible predicts, “You men of Galilee, why stand you gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as you have seen Him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). “And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matthew 24:30). Therefore, we keep watching the skies for years and waiting foolishly for that joyful day when the Lord suddenly returns on a white cloud to take us. However, so many years have passed, but we never see the Lord Jesus descending on a cloud. Actually, if we examine the Bible’s prophecies regarding the return of the Lord closely, we can readily discover that there is not just the “descend with the clouds” prophecy, but also prophecies like that the Lord will descend secretly. For instance, Revelation 3:3, “If therefore you shall not watch, I will come on you as a thief, and you shall not know what hour I will come on you.” Revelation 16:15, “Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watches, and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.” And Mark 13:32, “But of that day and that hour knows no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” These prophecies mention that the Lord will come as a thief. “As a thief” means coming secretly, quietly and no one will know. Furthermore, in many parts of the Bible it is predicted that the return of the Lord will be the “coming of the Son of man,” as it says in Luke 17:24–25: “For as the lightning, that lightens out of the one part under heaven, shines to the other part under heaven; so shall also the Son of man be in His day. But first must He suffer many things, and be rejected of this generation.” The “Son of man” mentioned here refers to someone born of a human and who is possessed of normal humanity, like the Lord Jesus in the flesh who lived a normal life, ate and lived alongside man, really and truly gave sermons, and so on. Anyone that is a spiritual body cannot be called the Son of man. Such as Jehovah God, the resurrected Lord Jesus, and angels—they are all spiritual bodies and thus cannot be called the “Son of man.” Besides, we know that when the Lord Jesus became flesh in the form of the Son of man and did His work in the land of Judea, He was rejected and condemned by the Jewish people, and was nailed to the cross, experiencing a lot of suffering. And this verse mentions “be rejected of this generation”, which proves that when the Lord returns in the last days, He will be rejected by this generation. If He openly descended with the clouds, everyone would tremble with fear and dare not to resist Him. That way, He definitely wouldn’t endure a lot of suffering, much less be rejected by this generation. So, the Lord will return by descending in secret as the incarnated Son of man, to perform His works and appear amongst mankind.

From this we can see that in the last days the Lord will return in two ways: one way is to incarnate as the Son of man and come in secret, unbeknown to anyone; the other is to come on a cloud and appear openly to people.

We all know the words of the Lord are faithful, and His every word will be fulfilled. Then how will the two different prophecies about the manner of the Lord Jesus’ return be fulfilled? We can understand the answer through the Lord Jesus’ words. He said, “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth: for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatever He shall hear, that shall He speak: and He will show you things to come” (John 16:12–13). “And if any man hear My words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. He that rejects Me, and receives not My words, has one that judges him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day” (John 12:47–48). “For the Father judges no man, but has committed all judgment to the Son” (John 5:22). “For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God” (1 Peter 4:17). “And, behold, I come quickly; and My reward is with Me, to give every man according as his work shall be” (Revelation 22:12). From these verses we can see that, during the stage where the Lord comes in secret to do His work and save mankind in the last days, He will express His word to judge, purify, and perfect mankind. This is when the wheat and tares, sheep and goats, and good and evil servants will be separated. At this point, we will certainly not see the Lord appearing in public atop clouds. Only after the work of God’s incarnation and secret descent among man is complete, a group of overcomers have been made complete, and then God returns to Zion with glory, at which time the calamities will visit upon earth and God will punish the wicked while rewarding the good, appearing openly before all the nations of earth. At this time, the prophecy of the Lord’s public descent on earth will be fulfilled: “Behold, He comes with clouds; and every eye shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him” (Revelation 1:7).

By this point, someone may ask: “When people see the Lord appearing to all of humanity in public atop clouds, in theory they should be very excited and overjoyed, and yet here it says ‘all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him.’ Why is this?” This is because when God finally appears in public, God’s work to save mankind in secret will already be complete and God will have started His work of rewarding the good and punishing the evil. All those that rejected God’s secret work and resisted and condemned Christ of the last days will beat their breasts in despair, wail and grind their teeth, and regret for the rest of their life, knowing that the One they resisted and condemned is the returned Lord Jesus whom they’d been longing for. So that’s how the scene of “all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him” will appear.

Let’s read a passage of words in a book, so that we can understand more clearly. It says, “When you see Jesus descend from the heaven upon a white cloud with your own eyes, this will be the public appearance of the Sun of righteousness. Perhaps that will be a time of great excitement for you, yet you should know that the time when you witness Jesus descend from the heaven is also the time when you go down to hell to be punished. It will herald the end of God’s management plan, and will be when God rewards the good and punishes the wicked. For the judgment of God will have ended before man sees signs, when there is only the expression of truth. Those who accept the truth and do not seek signs, and thus have been purified, shall have returned before the throne of God and entered the Creator’s embrace. Only those who persist in the belief that ‘The Jesus who does not ride upon a white cloud is a false Christ’ shall be subjected to everlasting punishment, for they only believe in the Jesus who exhibits signs, but do not acknowledge the Jesus who proclaims severe judgment and releases the true way of life. And so it can only be that Jesus deals with them when He openly returns upon a white cloud” (“When You Behold the Spiritual Body of Jesus Will Be When God Has Made Anew Heaven and Earth”). From this passage we recognize that, those who stubbornly cling to the belief that the Lord Jesus will come upon a white cloud but refuse to investigate His secret work will leave themselves a lifetime of regret, because they are too stubborn, too conceited, and too arrogant! It’s just like the Pharisees who longed for the arrival of the Messiah, but stubbornly held on to their own notions and imaginings in delimiting the Lord Jesus. They believed that the Lord Jesus could not possibly be God because He was not called Messiah, and that the Lord Jesus was not the Messiah because He was not born in a palace. Their arrogance and ignorance, self-importance and conceit impelled them to nail the Lord Jesus to the cross, which led to them losing the salvation of God and the entire Jewish people suffering the unprecedented pain of national subjugation. The Bible says, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out! For who has known the mind of the Lord? or who has been His counselor?” (Romans 11:33–34). We are just insignificant little creatures, so how could we fathom God’s wondrousness and wisdom? And how could we arbitrarily delimit how God should work in the last days?

I read a passage in a book of truth, which is very helpful for us seeking God’s appearance and welcoming His second coming. The book says, “Since we are searching for the footprints of God, it behooves us to search for God’s will, for the words of God, for His utterances—because wherever there are new words spoken by God, the voice of God is there, and wherever there are the footsteps of God, God’s deeds are there. Wherever there is the expression of God, there God appears, and wherever God appears, there the truth, the way, and the life exist” (“The Appearance of God Has Ushered in a New Age”). The Lord Jesus also said, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me” (Revelation 3:20). “And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom comes; go you out to meet him” (Matthew 25:6). These words tell us that God’s sheep listen to God’s voice, and that wise virgins will take heed to listen to the Lord’s voice. In the last days, when we hear that someone is preaching that the Lord has returned and that He is expressing the truth, this is the returned Lord knocking on our door. At this time, we should waste no time in letting go of our conceptions and imaginings, going out to meet the Lord, and searching for the words of the Holy Spirit to the churches, for only then will we have the chance to welcome the Lord’s second coming, follow His footsteps, and be raptured to before His throne to attend the wedding feast of the Lamb.

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#Bible Study Topics #Second Coming of Jesus #Way of Jesus Christ Return

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