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dopescotlandwarrior · 4 years ago

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Sinners & Saints-Chapter 3

A special thank you to @statell the best beta ever

Previous chapters at AO3

Chapter Three

Claire strained to get the bodysuit up her arm and over her shoulder. She had been at this for thirty minutes and had one more arm to go. She felt sweat roll down from her temple and grunted the rest of the way into the bodysuit that instantly made her morbidly obese. She pulled her fat clothes on and stuffed her hair into a shag wig that layered hair against her cheeks and forehead. Blue contacts were centered in her eyes and she was ready.

Jamie addressed his team at breakfast, giving last-minute positions and handing out the castle floor plan.

“There is a ten thousand pound bonus to the man that catches Casper in the act. Let me know where he is and stay with him. I only need three minutes with the man then you can arrest him. He has this coming.”

Claire came in through the air shaft and looked through the grate . It appeared to be someone’s office and it was empty. She popped the grate off, preventing it from bouncing on the hardwood floor. Cracking the door, she rushed out when the hall was empty and joined the other handlers unpacking the treasures. The statue was a foot away from where she was working and when she scooted her bulky body around the display, blocking the camera, the statue disappeared for just a moment, and then it was back. It was time to go.

She told her partner, “I gotta take a shit, right back.” When she walked briskly around the corner, she felt the air get sucked out of her lungs and instantly changed direction. James Fraser was walking directly for her, fortunately with his head down. She needed to get out of the castle before someone recognized the statue was a fake. She started running from room to room looking for a way out. She ran through a kitchen and saw a delivery truck behind the castle and the door standing open. She leaned forward to make a run for the door but jumped back into a pantry when Jamie’s voice was coming toward her. Struggling to quiet her breathing she could see his outline through the vent in the door. He was less than a foot away and she could smell his aftershave. Jamie spoke into his walkie and assembled his team in the exhibit hall.

Jamie looked down at one of the handlers.

“The fat girl said she was going to the lu and never came back. I didn’t see her scan out. Just letting you know.”

Jamie and his men spread out and searched the castle for a fat girl looking for a bathroom. This waste of time was irritating. He wasn’t here to manage the handlers or look for a girl with a gastric issue today. His walkie crackled.

“Ah, we have an issue in the exhibit. One of the pieces has been replaced with a fake.”

Once Jamie was out of the kitchen, Claire made a run for the door praying she wouldn’t be seen and pushed her long legs as fast as they would go. She headed for the woods and cover, trying to get her direction so she could find her car.

People in the castle were shouting and running outside to look in every direction and then back in. They discovered the fake statue and if she didn’t get very lucky in the next few minutes Jamie Fraser would finally catch Casper. She said a Hail Mary and chose a direction. Five minutes later she ran right into her rental car.

“Christ almighty, thank God.” The little green bug was pushed to its limit and came bursting out of the woods at the bottom of the hill the castle was built on. It was dangerous and terrifying to race the little car through the woods, but she would not be seen getting back on the road this way. Claire was panting from fear and heat as she flew down the road in her rented bug. She parked behind the hotel and took the service elevator to her room, ripping her bodysuit off as she came through the door. She reached into a hollowed-out pocket in the fat abdomen and pulled out the statue. She might have the hounds of hell coming down on her, but she took a minute to admire the ancient artifact before rolling it into lambswool and placing it in a fake two-liter soda bottle.

Claire checked out of the hotel by phone and headed to a toy store to buy an assortment of toddler toys that she ripped open and dropped into her carry-on. The toys would act like a cushion for the statue after she got it through the x-ray scanner. To do that, she wrapped the statue in carbon paper and affixed it to the bottom of her bag. A sheet of Teflon was laid over it and glued down to the case. When the glue was dry she piled the toys on top.

She raced to the airport and dropped off her rental car then headed for the terminal. She had no idea if the X-ray scanner would pick up the gold statue. If it did, she would be caught and her life would be over. She placed her carry on in the bin and waited at the other side almost fainting with relief when it popped out of the scanner and rolled toward her. Her legs could hardly hold her up as she walked away. Sticking her hand in the bag she pulled at the Teflon until it ripped away. The carbon paper was next and she balled the material up and pushed it into a waste receptacle. Now If her bag was inspected, the statue was just another toy.

Claire requested stand-by, first available flight to Paris, and was told to board flight 312. The woman pointed to the gate that was a brisk walk away and Claire boarded gratefully. When the plane lifted into the air, she allowed herself to exhale and relax. She pulled her phone out and sent a text to Javier. ..’Coming for spaghetti dinner, extra meatballs on mine. Landing 1h10m.’

Javier looked at the text and couldn’t believe it. The code was set between them five years ago and never used. Spaghetti dinner meant, I’m in trouble and coming in hot. Extra meatballs meant go dark, get off the grid.

“Gentlemen, cell phones off, batteries out, this is not a drill. Joseph, the Bear lands in forty minutes, find her.”

Claire pounded two shots of whisky and closed her eyes so she could think. What the hell was Jamie Fraser and his team doing at the castle, today of all days. He would not go there unless someone tipped him off and that thought was terrifying. Forty-five minutes of considering every conclusion to this horrific situation and she was coming undone. Were they waiting at the terminal to arrest her? Had Javier already been arrested? She felt the plane descending and saw the green earth beneath them. Hold on to your sanity, she told herself, you’re almost home.

Claire was very protected by Javier. She would hand off the stolen piece to one of his men, usually within the hour of her possession, and leave the country clean. This was the first time she boarded a plane with the evidence that would convict her, and she was completely unnerved by the experience. Someone was assigned to take the statue in Germany, but she didn’t trust anyone at the moment.

Joseph weaved through traffic at the airport and finally saw Claire walking briskly away from the terminal. He pulled up to the curb and she jumped a foot off the walkway. Not a word was spoken during the ride back and Joseph pulled into the lower garage at the mansion so Claire wouldn’t be seen. Javier was waiting for her and pulled her to his office.

Javier waited while Claire caught her breath. “When was your last sweep in here?”

My darling Bear, spaghetti and meatballs is not a dish quickly eaten. One moment, I will get you a cocktail. One of the men came into the office and swept it for bugs, leaving quickly shaking his head no.

“You may speak freely.”

“What are the odds of James Fraser and his team showing up at a German castle for the Pharaoh exhibit, today? With the statue in my possession, I nearly ran right into him. What reason would he have to be there? Why was his whole team at Sotheby’s two months ago?” Claire put her hand up and exhaled loudly. “He ranted from anger when we were stuck in the rubble. He got control of himself but not before saying his black market snitch told him the Rembrandt would be in play.”

Javier waited for Claire to get it all out. He almost lost it when her eyes filled with tears and her chin quivered as she pushed back on her fear.

“Javier, someone close to you is passing information to Jamie, or the police, and he is hearing it from them. All your men know who I am so I must assume James Fraser knows the true identity of Casper. Jesus Christ, the time he spent with me in Paris, why not arrest me right there? He needs to catch me in the act or risk losing his case to good lawyers is why. You have a rat in your house Javier and he nearly cost me the next twenty years of freedom.”

Javier leaned back in his chair with an expression rarely seen. It was murderous.

“It would seem so. Have a bath and some food and rest a bit. It will not be quick to catch this rat so you must be a teacher for a while until I can catch him. Okay?”

Claire nodded and made her way upstairs leaving the statue on Javier’s desk. She was completely exhausted and confused about Jamie Fraser. Had he known her identity from the start? If so, he was very good at hiding his hand, she never suspected a thing. The smell and serenity of her room were the last straw holding her together, so she sank into the familiar covers and cried.

Claire stayed with Javier for a week before she felt brave enough to board a plane to Chicago. She was out of the thieving business for the foreseeable future, possibly a year Javier said. He tried to convince her to quit but she wasn’t ready. On her trip back to Chicago, she considered the fortune she had amassed in real estate, gold, art, and more stock than she could remember. It was more money than she could spend in a lifetime so why risk everything on the next coveted piece? Her eyelids closed and she slept all the way home.

Frank laughed at the jokes and slammed his shot with the others, smiling at his growing euphoria. He looked around the room and saw shadow people in various sexual positions. It was arousing as hell and he absently grabbed his balls.

A gorgeous girl smiled and pulled on his arm, “common big guy, I think you’re ready.”

He was led into a smaller room with a bed and the woman was taking his belt off and pulling out his dick. Throughout the night the girl would morph from an adult to a very young girl and then back again. He didn’t care as long as she kept it up.

For the rest of the weekend, Frank consumed three roofies dropped in his drink, had sex with women, men, boys and girls, and didn’t remember a thing when he stepped off the billionaire’s plane in Washington. This was his fourth trip to the island, and he looked forward to the next.

Later in the year, snow fell heavy in the Highlands and Jamie leaned against the barn and watched the fields turning white, a sight he never tired of. This year, he arrested five burgeoning art thieves, a counterfeiter, and shut down a major black market railway in Europe, but Casper eluded him still. He could not attribute a single theft to Casper in over a year and decided he had gone underground, but for how long? The men who recruited Jamie were putting pressure on him to make an arrest because someone had to be punished. It wasn’t enough that Casper wasn’t stealing art anymore. Jamie had a network of informants that had been full of information at one time and even they were disappearing or just stopped talking. He shook his head in disgust and went into the house to pack for Paris. He would be there for the week, maybe more, to add another five agents to his team. It was his first time back since the explosion as Sotheby's.

Claire walked quickly through the townhouse throwing items in her suitcase while Frank followed her like a complaining puppy. She couldn’t take it anymore and stopped abruptly feeling Frank bump into her back.

“Frank, I have hardly seen you this year. I agreed to the lecture four months ago and a new DaVinci has turned up in a French basement that I have got to examine. I will be home on Christmas day so why don’t you go see your parents while I’m gone?”

God the man was irritating, she stormed in her head. He wanted to direct her every move, dictate her social schedule, and preapprove her trips and lecture schedule. Now he wants a wedding planned for five hundred people. She wasn’t sure she even liked him anymore. The door closed on Frank Randall’s face because he was making her late. Claire was fuming as she finished packing and stormed out of the bedroom saying goodbye like an afterthought.

Claire got in line to check into her hotel and called Javier to say she landed and would see him for dinner. Jamie was completing his transaction in the line next to Claire and walked the other direction to find his room. An hour later Claire walked across the lobby in a short black skirt, black heeled boots and an oversized sweater. She pulled her Maurizio Braschi cashmere coat around her and hailed a cab. She had not been back to Paris since the ill-fated Germany job, her last job, and she was so excited to see Javier.

Jamie sat through a security workshop and pinched his leg to stay awake. His on-again-off-again girlfriend, Laighaire, was bombing his phone, knowing he would be in meetings all day. Such a pretty girl, he thought, but when the holiday parties were over and there were no more gifts to get, she would be off again, looking for a man who was everything Jamie wasn’t, primarily present and accounted for. He smiled wryly and shook his head to wake up.

Joseph drove Claire back to her hotel after dinner and she gushed about the decorations and lights around the city. The minute he pulled away she was back outside to walk around and look at all the decorations. The temperature was a comfortable thirty-two degrees, so she kept walking.

Jamie stumbled out of the workshop bleary-eyed and needing to find some fresh air. He wrapped a scarf around his neck and headed for the door. His taxi dropped him at the hotel, and he headed out for a brisk walk before dinner.

He saw her sitting on a bench, her ponytail was long and rested on her shoulder. Her lips were pink frost and she smiled at the night. Just lovely, he thought. The woman stood and walked toward him, he kept looking until his feet stopped, and he froze. Impossible. As she got closer, Jamie’s smile was like a beacon and she searched his face.

“Jamie Fraser!”

She jumped into his outstretched arms and kissed his cheek. Jamie smelled her neck and had the same happy grin he had the first time. “God, you smell like heaven. Can you walk with me a bit, we need to catch up.”

They walked through Paris arm in arm for the next two hours, and as before, thoroughly enjoyed the company of the other. Claire was trying to get a signal that he knew she was Casper and decided he was a fantastic liar, or he didn’t know. When they had a nightcap in the hotel bar, she looked in his eyes and asked if he had caught Casper yet. All she saw was sincere sadness and he shook his head no.

“No, lass. Casper went dark a year ago. He retired, or he’s dead, neither work in my favor. I think the team will be disbanded and I,” his eyes looked haunted for a moment, “will be reassigned if I can’t catch him in the next six months.”

Jamie shook his head, “let’s talk about something more pleasant.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

Claire told Jamie about the changes in Frank, his estrangement, and her decision to follow her own path and then she leaned over and kissed Jamie’s cheek.

“Well, it is fortuitous we landed in the same hotel and I hope to spend more time with you while you’re here. Be a good lass and tell me when that will be.”

“Dinner, tomorrow?”

“Perfect, let me walk you home.”

At her door, he said goodnight and moved to kiss her cheek again but instead he held his head close to hers and then looked her in the eye. “Kiss me, Claire, like you did once before,” he whispered. Claire turned her head and kissed his mouth, sucking air at the intensity of the moment. Jamie gorged himself on her lips being careful not to take more than she wanted to give. He felt the key card in his hand and opened her door, kissing her inside, pulling is coat off and then hers. He broke the kiss and looked at the woman who haunted his dreams.

“Goodnight sweet Sassenach.”

Claire was startled at first but realized he felt her hesitation. She really liked Jamie, but he was an art cop and she, an art thief. One thing that was perfectly clear to her, she was done with Frank. The attributes that once attracted her were starting to crack and it was a deal-breaker for her. Besides, he never made her feel the electric current going through her body like Jamie did.

The next night, after a long day of lecture and appraisals, Claire swung the door open with an excited smile. She should be dead on her feet but spending time with Jamie tonight was exhilarating. She kissed him long and deep sending a message there would be no hesitation tonight.

They chatted throughout dinner and the silence was comfortable when they allowed themselves to stop talking and eat. Claire confessed her decision about Frank was partly due to how she felt with Jamie. He inched closer to her.

“Sassenach, is it wise to tell me such things? This lad is head over heels for you and now I know you’re free.” Claire giggled until he kissed her.

“Check please.”

Jamie grabbed her hand and helped her with her coat. “I have already paid Sassenach. Do you want to walk back?”

They stopped to kiss every other minute, so the block-long walk took thirty minutes. He kissed her in the elevator until she broke the kiss, “thirty minutes to call Javier and rinse off.” She walked briskly to her room and Jamie watched like a starving man.

The shower calmed her racing heart and she slipped into a satin nightgown that was very short and felt divine to touch. She knew seduction was the main event tonight and set candles all over the room, a purchase she made between appointments while a happy cab driver waited. Pulling her straightened hair into a ponytail and heard him knock.

Jamie brought champagne and fine chocolates and received the smile of approval from the object of his desire. He waited for her to put them in the frig and then pulled her to him, running his hand up her side and groaning at the feel of the fabric. He didn’t want to race to the bed, instead, he would see how high she wanted to go. He picked her up and sat on the couch with her across his lap. The kissing was slow and sensual as their bodies found their way to a comfortable position. They whispered in the other’s ear, smiled and kissed while their hands explored.

Jamie’s shirt was unbuttoned slowly and she helped him out of it kissing every inch she could reach. Jamie pulled the band from her ponytail loving the soft shiny hair between his fingers.

“You want champagne love?”

Jamie grabbed the bottle and chocolates, pulled Claire to her feet, and poured two glasses. He could not stop touching her and needed to see her naked. It was two years ago she invaded his space so sweetly and he could not wait any longer. While she stood in front of the mirror, he moved his hands up her body under her nightgown and pinched her nipples slightly. He could see the rosy glow on her cheeks as she pressed back into his chest. He lifted the fabric very slowly in case she pushed back until it was over her head and he was stuck staring at her body. His eyes slowly covered every inch and she watched him look her over, confident in her own skin, aware that he needed this visual experience.

The give and take between them made the night exceptional, sweet, erotic, and satisfying. Her body was so responsive to his touch and that thrilled him. When he dropped to her side, panting for his life, she pushed him onto his back, laid her head on his shoulder, and fell asleep, followed by Jamie a short time later.

Claire was hyper aware of Jamie in her bed all night. She woke up several times and went back to sleep with her hand or arm touching his skin. This gesture was sweet and tender to Jamie as he woke each time she moved, anxious to feel her hands move across his skin again.

The beeping of Jamie’s watch brought them both to consciousness as the morning rays were streaming in the windows. He jumped out of bed worried he was late for his interviews and looked around for his clothes. Claire was on her knees on the bed and spread her arms wide, still half asleep, she wanted a morning hug that made him feel weak. He pulled her close and hugged her, kissing the top of her head and asked how she felt, if she was ready for the day, if she would think of him today, and if he could get her anything. He pushed the hair out of her face and realized she was sleeping, somehow still on her knees.

“Sassenach, do you need to get up?”

She nodded her head yes and held her arms up for another hug which was warmly given.

“Dare I ask if you’re free for dinner tonight?”

“If you can wait until seven o’clock, I would love that.”

“See you at seven then.”

Claire checked her email and was shocked to see a coded message. She sent it to Tom remotely and then read what Javier had to say. ‘Rat found, extermination complete, you are safe. Do you want a new project?’ She sent her response to Tom before sending it to Javier. She passed on the project, wanting more time with Jamie to explore her feelings. She jumped to her feet and danced her way to the shower. It was going to be a great day.

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billvsamerica · 6 years ago

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Christmas in Florida

The white powder lashed the windscreen in huge blobs making it impossible to see. We grinded to a halt as the white spray from above covered the car like a foam. Finally, the area started to heat up and the car was practically completely dry. What kind of voodoo was this? Had I fallen asleep while driving again? No, because I wasn't driving and I also wasn't asleep. A snowstorm in Florida, you might be thinking, no way! And you'd be right. I just made you think it was one through vivid descriptive language. We were actually in a car wash readying the car for seeing Shelby's dad, ex-world champion drag racer, Steve Cohen, or as I like to call him (and he secretly likes, but outwardly dislikes), Stevie C or Big Steve. We were sure to be berated if the car’s cleanliness wasn’t up to his standards. And that's what Christmas is all about. Ho, ho, ho everybody!

Their eyes remained on me the whole journey, like I was a sausage in human form

Last year, we spent Christmas apart. This year, to save me from tears, I spent the Christmas with Shelby (Shelby, Shelby...). A very important person was born on Christmas day many years ago. He was Jewish and had very recognizable facial hair. Some call him the savior (of drag racing). And that somebody is Big Steve. He shares his birthday with the big man himself, Ricky Martin and, of course, duh, Lemmy from Motorhead. My own father often complains about his birthday being on January 6th. “Oh, it's too close to Christmas - nobody bothers with it. Oh, I should get a gift for both Christmas and my Birthday. Oh, will you please come and visit me in the home soon, Bill? it gets very lonely in here and I think the nurse is stealing from me.” And to all of those, I simply laugh and say no chance! (He's not really in a home... yet).

It's a strange phenomenon spending Christmas at a destination so close to the equator. Not as weird as spending it within the earth's crust on the actual equator though, which provides me with some solace. We were taking a friend back to her house in Florida, so I volunteered to spend the eight hour journey in the back of the car with a dog with anxiety problems and a weak bladder and a giant dog who thinks he's a chihuahua. Once we arrived, we had thirty minutes to shower off the piss and hair and get ourselves festive for the first family function.

When I think of Christmas in England, I think of roasting chestnuts on an open fire, long walks on the Malvern Hills in the snow, and stopping for a swift pint of ale in a country pub. We walked into the garage of Shelby's uncle's house where he was pointing a handgun at a boat. He was fitting a new sight to the top of the gun.

"Doesn't that make it a bit easy?" I said.

"Not with my shaky hands it doesn't." Shelby's uncle replied.

I queried this in my own head, but thought against arguing. The hosts had kindly accommodated us by preparing a number of vegetarian dishes and the food was delicious.

"You don't eat fish?"

"No, I'm a vegetarian."

"So, no shrimp then?"

They didn't quite understand the commitment I have made to all living things with my abstinence from scranning their dead bodies. Still, as with Christmas gatherings across the globe, somebody had a Chinese puzzle and we all spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out. Dogs and babies created the rest of the entertainment (the party wasn't a front for some sort of underground dog vs babies fight club though, which in some ways, is a disappointment. Note to self: pitch this idea to Vince McMahon or Dana White, failing that pitch to that dodgy guy you met on a train to Aberystwyth once who said he had invented a spoon crossed with a ladle).

As the evening was coming to an end, we handed Mary, Shelby's 94 year old grandma, her gift. It was an Ancestry DNA kit. One of the family members entered the room and walked up to her.

"I just had to see her face when she opened it," he said.

Not sure why - her face was absolutely baffled by it.

The phenomenon that is Mary, the 94-year-old world traveler with a penchant for corgis

For two weeks over Christmas, most people become functioning alcoholics - rising from their slumber to eat leftovers that soak up the alcohol from the night before, which is what I did the next day. That evening, we were heading to Ralph's in Dade City. I've been to some dive bars where I've felt the atmosphere change as I walk in - an instant feeling of not belonging or a high probability of getting my head kicked in. Mainly in Scotland. But few of these, if any, have left me feeling like I may be abducted and used as some sort of sex slave for a closeted hick with family money. That was, of course, until I got to Ralph's.

This is the vibe I got from Ralph's, but as soon as I walked through the doors, my mood changed. I was told by Shelby that Ralph's was a bit "Out of business up the front, party in the back," and she was right. There was a band on that night playing some rock and roll classics, a huge fire with various people gathered around, and a giant 21 year old man with bruised knuckles who I befriended named Eric. Eric didn't seem to know anybody. He claimed that he had a party at his house earlier but everybody left, so he had walked to Ralph's to keep drinking before he met his supermodel girlfriend. I like a good character, and Eric was certainly that. Although he kept nudging me in the stomach with his big hand and putting his arm around me, which I didn't like. I volunteered to walk to the shop with him so he could buy a packet of cigarettes, and when it came to pay I half expected him to ask me for some money. Instead, he pulled out a wad of ten 100 dollar bills and counted them. I thought this was probably not a wise thing to do at the Dollar General next to Ralph's in Dade City, Florida, but didn't want to say anything, again, because of the big hands. I was worried that I would have to keep him company all night, but a few minutes later his supermodel girlfriend actually did turn up and I was left confused. After that, I went inside to play pool. Didn't pot a single ball and then potted the black by mistake, which is how I knew it was time for me to make a dash for the exit through the line dancers and sex offenders at Ralph's, where everybody knows your name (because you're probably the owner's cousin).

Christmas day was fast approaching and on Christmas eve we hosted Shelby's friends and their baby. As they walked in, they told us that the baby was sick. Bit annoying, but unlike adults, it's hard to explain to a baby to keep at least three meters away from me at all times or I will invoke the use of force, but I did keep my distance. The last thing I wanted was a baby cold ruining my festive fun. Like the wisemen in the story of Christ, I led them to the door when they decided it was time to head home. Mary and Joseph (not their actual names) used their truck as a makeshift donkey, their headlights as the north star, and their house as the barn to lay the baby down in. Although technically Jesus wouldn't have been born until the next day, but whatever, I'm trying to get into the festive spirit.

In the morning, we all rose to gather around the tree and exchange gifts. I had already received my main gift, a guitar, from Shelby the month before, but I was stoked to open a leafblower (my first middle aged gift ever) from my in-laws and a number of other treats, including a jar of Branston Pickle. I handed Shelby her main gift. She shook it excitedly and opened it up. I had bought her a robot vaccuum cleaner. Now, granted, she hadn't asked for one, and was a bit surprised less in a "Wow, cool!" way and more in a "What the hell's this?" tone, but I knew she would like it simply for the fact that it could keep the dog company when he was home alone. She lated admitted that she thought I had bought her a pair of Dr Marten boots, which I didn't.

This photo is blurry and Bagel is staring at something and it creeps me out

That afternoon, we were heading for our second family engagement of the holiday period, with the family I did choose, sort of. While milling about eating little puff pastry things and trying not to look at anybody the wrong way, I bumped into Shelby's step second cousin (possibly that is their relation), a tentative link, but one all the same. He told me that he used to live near where we now live and was actually one of the first employees of the World's Largest Dog-friendly Travel Website, BringFido, where I now work. What are the bloody chances of that? Apparently, he left the company disgrace without telling them he wouldn't be returning. Nice bloke, though.

Outside, I bumped into one of Shelby's cousins, who was wearing his favourite shirt for the occasion. He'd gone all out with this one - It read "Guns, God, Trump, Family" in big letters. I took the word “Trump” to mean the British word, to fart out of one's bum bum, making the shirt much more entertaining. I sat down with the men, most of whom had their t-shirts tucked into their trousers, and immediately fit in - not at all coming across as a lanky, camp, British, randomer... The man next to me sat back in his chair and breathed out heavily.

"I was on a forum online,"

Where was this going, I thought as I considered dialling Dateline.

"About guns,” I breathed a sigh of relief.

“And I got into it with these people. I said to them, Do you even like guns unless you own over a hundred?"

I like donuts, but that doesn't mean I - actually, I take that back.

"I mean, I only have 82, and I'd say I was an enthusiast, but the real enthusiasts - they have over 100."

"What guns do you have?” somebody asked.

"Got a grenade launcher."

"What's the practical use of that?" I said, for some reason.

"Scaring birds off your crops"

While literally blowing up everything you've grown in the process and leaving shrapnel in your cabbage, I thought.

"I've got a machine gun, that sort of thing. They're mainly good for the zombie apocalypse."

If I ever become a zombie, remind me not to go to his house.

My new year's resolution is to update my blog more and release a podcast recounting my adventures in China, mainly because I just got a mic stand and I need to use it. Happy New Year to one and all! (Except those who've wronged me. You know who you are. I hope irritating things happen to you all year round, like flat tires and having to spend a fortune to replace your guttering).

An unrelated photo of me and Bagel taken after Christmas

#christmasinflorida #christmas #lol #comedy #funny #blog #bagel #dog #vacation #britabroad

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thewahookid · 3 years ago

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September 30, 2021 Reflection - Be aware, little children, that life is short..

September 30, 2021

St. Jerome

Dear Family of Mary!

“Dear children! Pray, witness and rejoice with me because the Most High continues to send me to lead you on the way of holiness. Be aware, little children, that life is short, and eternity is waiting for you to give glory to God with your being, with all the saints. Little children, do not worry about earthly things, but long for Heaven. Heaven will be your goal and joy will begin to reign in your heart. I am with you and bless all of you with my motherly blessing. Thank you for having responded to my call.” (September 25, 2021)

In her September 25, 2021 Message Our Lady spoke to us about eternity. She reminded us: "Be aware, little children, that life is short, and eternity is waiting for you to give glory to God with your being, with all the saints." When we ponder eternity, we begin to understand how very short our years on earth are. Eternity cannot be comprehended. But we can at least tell ourselves that eternity is time that never has an end. Hours end. Days end. Years end. Eons end. But eternity will never end. Never.

And if we believe in eternity, if we believe in Heaven and Hell, then it becomes very important that we spend that eternity in the right place. Only life with God in Heaven can be imagined.

The question then becomes, "How do I live so as to find myself in Heaven for eternity?" Our Lady has told us already: "Pray, witness and rejoice with me because the Most High continues to send me to lead you on the way of holiness." God has sent Our Lady to lead us into holiness, which is the only way to arrive in Heaven for eternity. Holiness is our way, Heaven our goal.

I want to share with you one of the most comforting Scripture passages I know, that deals with our future in eternity. It is long, but so worth the read!! It is from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans:

Romans 8

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law, indeed it cannot; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Any one who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.

But if Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you. So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh -- for if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, "Abba! Father!" it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.

What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies; who is to condemn? Is it Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, "For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, 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. (Romans 8)

Dearest Mother, lead us on the way of holiness so that one day we will find ourselves in the love of God in Christ Jesus for eternity!

In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!

Cathy Nolan

Mary TV 2021

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seekfirstme · 4 years ago

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Meditation: Do you know the joy, peace, and freedom which God offers to those who trust in him and obey his word? God sent his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to bring us God's kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17). Jesus came to rescue us from our sinful pride and slavery to sin. He came to rescue us from Satan's snares and the clutches of hell, and to free us from the world's temptation to empty glory and lust for greed and power. Only Jesus can truly set us free and reconcile us with God - every other way falls short of God's plan to save and deliver us from death, corruption, and sin.

Why did the religious authorities reject Jesus's offer of freedom, forgiveness, and new life in the kingdom of God? Despite Jesus' numerous signs and miracles, the Jewish authorities could not accept his claim to speak and act in the name of his heavenly Father. They were blinded by their misguided ideas of how the Messiah would restore Israel and rule the earth. And Jesus revealed to them how Satan had led them into temptation - both to reject him as the Messiah and to thwart his claim by killing him.

Jesus met their opposition and hostility with courage and determination to do his Father's will. He willingly embraced the cross in order to destroy the works of Satan and to save both Jews and Gentiles through his atoning sacrifice for the sin of the world. Jesus shows us the way to the kingdom of God - through faith and obedience to God's word and will for our lives. To be a follower and disciple of the Lord Jesus requires faith and obedience - they are two sides of the same coin. The word disciple literally means one who learns from the Master and who listens to the voice of the Teacher. And the word for obedience literally means to listen under and be subordinate to the one who has rightful authority to teach and command what is just and true.

The free gift of faith

How can we grow in faith and discipleship - by faithfully following the Lord and obeying his word. Faith is a free supernatural gift of God. It is more than just a belief in the truths of God. It is first and foremost a personal relationship of trust and obedience to the Lord and his word. The Lord is worthy of our complete trust and wholehearted devotion because he is utterly reliable, just and true, and he is faithful to his word. That is why we can entrust our lives to him and submit to him without reservation.

God does not leave us in the dark or remain distant and silent. He reveals himself to all who earnestly seek him and hunger for his truth. God, in fact, first seeks us out and draws us to himself. We could not find him if he did not first seek to reveal himself to us. That is why we need to respond to God's gracious gift of invitation with an open and receptive heart that wants to listen, learn, and receive what God wishes to give us. Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) said, "I believe, in order to understand - and I understand, the better to believe" (Sermon 43:7,9).

The test of faith

In the Old Testament Book of Daniel we see a remarkable example of faith being put to the test in the midst of trial and adversity. When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the three young companions of Daniel, were commanded by the king of Persia to bow down and submit to the pagan idols of his nation, they unhesitatingly said, "We will not serve your gods or worship the golden image which you have set up" (Daniel 3:18). They knew God's command, "Do not worship false idols"(Exodus 20:3-6; Deuteronomy 12:29-31). They decided it was far better to obey God and entrust their lives to him rather than give in to the threats of others. God gave them courage to take a bold stand for their faith. They willingly accepted the King's punishment as they were bound and thrown into a burning fiery furnace.

Daniel tells us how God was very present to these three young men as they proclaimed their faith in him. God showed his presence to the three men and walked with them in the fiery furnace. As a remarkable sign of God's power to the pagan rulers of Persia, God kept the three men from harm and delivered them from death (Daniel 3:25,28). Do you trust in God to give you his help and strength when your faith is put to the test?

True and false sources of identity

The scribes and Pharisees, who were the religious authorities of the Jews, questioned Jesus' authority to speak and act in God's name. They questioned Jesus' claim to forgive sins and to set people free from slavery to sin. They understood that only God had power to forgive sins and to release people from their burden of guilt and shame. They refused to accept that Jesus' authority was given to him by his Father in heaven. Jesus tells them that they think evil of him and desire to kill him because they are under the influence and power of the "father of lies" who is opposed to the one true Father and Creator who made us in his image and likeness (Genesis 1:26-27).

Jesus explains that he is speaking of two different senses of "fatherhood". The first is a physical identity through natural fatherhood. And the second and more significant identity is a self-chosen one that is the result of being led and formed in a moral way of thinking and living one's life that has been shaped through the example, words, and influence of someone we are consciously or unconsciously following and imitating.

We do not grow or learn in a vacuum. We are shaped for better or for worse by those we choose to imitate and follow. Sin leads us away from God's truth and the help he gives us to follow him. Slavery to sin is ultimately rooted in the father of lies (John 8:44), whom Scripture calls the devil (Luke 4:1) and Satan (Luke 10:18), the ruler of this present world who is opposed to God (John 12:31; 2 Corinthians 4:4).

True freedom comes from God

The freedom which Jesus offers his followers is freedom from the power of sin, Satan, and the worldly influence of those who oppose God and his ways. We are powerless to set ourselves free from bondage to Satan, sin, and death (Romans 3:23; 5:6). That is why the Lord Jesus took our sins upon himself and nailed them to the cross (1 Peter 2:24; Isaiah 53:5-6; Colossians 2:14). His death on the cross has won victory and pardon for us, and peace with God. Through Jesus' sacrifice we are not only forgiven and reconciled with God - we become the adopted sons and daughters of God (Romans 8:14-16). We can call God our Father because the Lord Jesus has reconciled us and redeemed us from slavery to sin and Satan.

A redeemed slave is not entirely free until all of his chains and weights have been broken and destroyed. The Lord Jesus alone has the power to release us from every chain and burden that would keep us in bondage to sinful habits and hurtful desires. Are there any chains - any sinful patterns, harmful attitudes, and addictive behavior - that you need to be released from? Allow the Lord Jesus to unbind you and bring you healing, pardon, and freedom to walk in his way of love and truth. The Lord Jesus sets us free from slavery to our own selfishness and sinful desires in order to set us free for a joy-filled life of love and service for his kingdom. Paul the Apostle reminds us that Christ has won freedom for each one of us - not to serve ourselves or do as we please - but rather to please the Lord and to serve our neighbors in love for their sake (Galatians 5:1,13). Do you accept and believe Christ's word of truth, love, and freedom for your life?

"Lord Jesus, write your words of love and truth upon my heart and make me a diligent student and a worthy disciple of your word."

NO ROOM

“My word has no room among you.” —John 8:37, RNAB

How chilling it would be on the Day of Judgment to hear Jesus, the eternal Word of God, speak the words: “My Word has no room among you.” Jesus came into this world as a Baby in the womb of Mary, His mother. At Bethlehem, on the day of His birth, there was no room for Him at the inns and homes of Bethlehem (Lk 2:7). There was no room for the Word of God.

Do you have a Bible in your home? If so, does it merely sit unopened on a shelf? Or do you have room in your life for the Word of God? We need to make room for the Word of God by getting rid of clutter in our lives which is “taking up room” and crowding God’s Word out of our lives. Meditate on God’s Word day and night (Ps 1:2). Devour God’s Word and let it become the joy and the happiness of your heart (Jer 15:16).

Whatever changes are required, make room for God’s Word in your heart and in your life. Presentation Ministries publishes this booklet, One Bread, One Body, to help you abide in God’s Word (Jn 8:31-32) through the daily Mass readings. In these final days of Lent, devote yourselves anew to Jesus and His Word. “Open wide your hearts!” (2 Cor 6:13)

Prayer: Father, I open wide my heart and ask You to plant Your Word deep within. May I be good soil that hears and heeds Your Word to bear much fruit for You.

Promise: “If you live according to My teaching, you are truly My disciples; then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” —Jn 8:31-32

Praise: Roger and his wife have labored for years to bring food and faith to the starving people of a third-world nation.

Reference: (This teaching was submitted by a member of our editorial team.) (Open wide your heart to Scripture. Order, view or download our leaflet Through the Bible in One Year on our website.)

Rescript: "In accord with the Code of Canon Law, I hereby grant the Nihil Obstat for One Bread, One Body covering the period from February 1, 2021 through March 31, 2021. Most Reverend Joseph R. Binzer, Auxiliary Bishop, Vicar General, Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio March 31, 2020"

The Nihil Obstat ("Permission to Publish") is a declaration that a book or pamphlet is considered to be free of doctrinal or moral error. It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat agree with the contents, opinions, or statements

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dfroza · 4 years ago

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To have written it down

to document and conserve the History of the message of grace in the new covenant is of dear significance.

this is a point seen as we begin the book of Acts for Today’s reading of the Scriptures with the first chapter of the ancient book:

To a lover of God, Theophilus: In my first book, I recounted the events of Jesus’ life—His actions, His teachings—from the beginning of His life until He was taken up into heaven. After His great suffering and vindication, He showed His apostles that He was alive—appearing to them repeatedly over a period of 40 days, giving them many convincing proofs of His resurrection. As before, He spoke constantly of the kingdom of God. During these appearances, He had instructed His chosen messengers through the Holy Spirit, prohibiting them from leaving Jerusalem, but rather requiring them to wait there until they received what He called “the promise of the Father.”

Jesus: This is what you heard Me teach—that just as John ritually cleansed people with water through baptism, so you will be washed with the Holy Spirit very soon.

When they had gathered just outside Jerusalem at the Mount of Olives, they asked Jesus,

Disciples: Is now the time, Lord—the time when You will reestablish Your kingdom in our land of Israel?

Jesus: The Father, on His own authority, has determined the ages and epochs of history, but you have not been given this knowledge. Here’s the knowledge you need: you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you. And you will be My witnesses, first here in Jerusalem, then beyond to Judea and Samaria, and finally to the farthest places on earth.

As He finished this commission, He began to rise from the ground before their eyes until the clouds obscured Him from their vision. As they strained to get one last glimpse of Him going into heaven, the Lord’s emissaries realized two men in white robes were standing among them.

Two Men: You Galileans, why are you standing here staring up into the sky? This Jesus who is leaving you and ascending to heaven will return in the same way you see Him departing.

Then the disciples returned to Jerusalem—their short journey from the Mount of Olives was an acceptable Sabbath Day’s walk.

Back in the city, they went to the room where they were staying—a second-floor room. This whole group devoted themselves to constant prayer with one accord: Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James (son of Alphaeus), Simon (the Zealot), Judas (son of James), a number of women including Mary (Jesus’ mother), and some of Jesus’ brothers.

As the disciples prayed, Peter stood among the group of about 120 people and made this proposal:

Peter: My friends, everything in the Hebrew Scriptures had to be fulfilled, including what the Holy Spirit foretold through David about Judas. As you know, Judas was one of us and participated in our ministry until he guided the authorities to arrest Jesus. (He was paid handsomely for his betrayal, and he bought a field with the blood money. But he died on that land—falling so that his abdomen burst and his internal organs gushed out. News of this death spread to everyone in Jerusalem, so Judas’s property is known as Hakeldama, which means “field of blood.”) In this way, one of David’s psalms was fulfilled: “May their camps be bleak, with not one left in any tent.” But the psalms also include these words: “Let his position of oversight be given to another.” So we need to determine his replacement from among the men who have been with us during all of the Lord Jesus’ travels among us—from His baptism by John until His ascension. We need someone to join us as a witness of Jesus’ resurrection.

The group put forward two men: Joseph (who was also known as Barsabbas or Justus) and Matthias.

Disciples: Lord, You know everyone’s heart. Make it clear to us which of these two is Your choice to take on this ministry as Your apostle, replacing Judas who went his own way to his own destination.

Then they drew lots, and the lot fell to Matthias, so he was added to the eleven apostles to reconstitute the twelve.

The Book of Acts, Chapter 1 (The Voice)

Today’s paired chapter of the Testaments is chapter 19 in the book of Judges where a terrible act was done by some men in a city where people were just passing through, expecting hospitality:

[The Levite]

It was an era when there was no king in Israel. A Levite, living as a stranger in the backwoods hill country of Ephraim, got himself a concubine, a woman from Bethlehem in Judah. But she quarreled with him and left, returning to her father’s house in Bethlehem in Judah. She was there four months. Then her husband decided to go after her and try to win her back. He had a servant and a pair of donkeys with him. When he arrived at her father’s house, the girl’s father saw him, welcomed him, and made him feel at home. His father-in-law, the girl’s father, pressed him to stay. He stayed with him three days; they feasted and drank and slept.

On the fourth day, they got up at the crack of dawn and got ready to go. But the girl’s father said to his son-in-law, “Strengthen yourself with a hearty breakfast and then you can go.” So they sat down and ate breakfast together.

The girl’s father said to the man, “Come now, be my guest. Stay the night—make it a holiday.” The man got up to go, but his father-in-law kept after him, so he ended up spending another night.

On the fifth day, he was again up early, ready to go. The girl’s father said, “You need some breakfast.” They went back and forth, and the day slipped on as they ate and drank together. But the man and his concubine were finally ready to go. Then his father-in-law, the girl’s father, said, “Look, the day’s almost gone—why not stay the night? There’s very little daylight left; stay another night and enjoy yourself. Tomorrow you can get an early start and set off for your own place.”

But this time the man wasn’t willing to spend another night. He got things ready, left, and went as far as Jebus (Jerusalem) with his pair of saddled donkeys, his concubine, and his servant. At Jebus, though, the day was nearly gone. The servant said to his master, “It’s late; let’s go into this Jebusite city and spend the night.”

But his master said, “We’re not going into any city of foreigners. We’ll go on to Gibeah.” He directed his servant, “Keep going. Let’s go on ahead. We’ll spend the night either at Gibeah or Ramah.”

So they kept going. As they pressed on, the sun finally left them in the vicinity of Gibeah, which belongs to Benjamin. They left the road there to spend the night at Gibeah.

The Levite went and sat down in the town square, but no one invited them in to spend the night. Then, late in the evening, an old man came in from his day’s work in the fields. He was from the hill country of Ephraim and lived temporarily in Gibeah where all the local citizens were Benjaminites. When the old man looked up and saw the traveler in the town square, he said, “Where are you going? And where are you from?”

The Levite said, “We’re just passing through. We’re coming from Bethlehem on our way to a remote spot in the hills of Ephraim. I come from there. I’ve just made a trip to Bethlehem in Judah and I’m on my way back home, but no one has invited us in for the night. We wouldn’t be any trouble: We have food and straw for the donkeys, and bread and wine for the woman, the young man, and me—we don’t need anything.”

The old man said, “It’s going to be all right; I’ll take care of you. You aren’t going to spend the night in the town square.” He took them home and fed the donkeys. They washed up and sat down to a good meal.

They were relaxed and enjoying themselves when the men of the city, a gang of local hell-raisers all, surrounded the house and started pounding on the door. They yelled for the owner of the house, the old man, “Bring out the man who came to your house. We want to have sex with him.”

He went out and told them, “No, brothers! Don’t be obscene—this man is my guest. Don’t commit this outrage. Look, my virgin daughter and his concubine are here. I’ll bring them out for you. Abuse them if you must, but don’t do anything so senselessly vile to this man.”

But the men wouldn’t listen to him. Finally, the Levite pushed his concubine out the door to them. They raped her repeatedly all night long. Just before dawn they let her go. The woman came back and fell at the door of the house where her master was sleeping. When the sun rose, there she was.

It was morning. Her master got up and opened the door to continue his journey. There she was, his concubine, crumpled in a heap at the door, her hands on the threshold.

“Get up,” he said. “Let’s get going.” There was no answer.

He lifted her onto his donkey and set out for home. When he got home he took a knife and dismembered his concubine—cut her into twelve pieces. He sent her, piece by piece, throughout the country of Israel. And he ordered the men he sent out, “Say to every man in Israel: ‘Has such a thing as this ever happened from the time the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt until now? Think about it! Talk it over. Do something!’”

The Book of Judges, Chapter 19 (The Message)

my personal reading of the Scriptures for Sunday, September 13 of 2020 with a paired chapter from each Testament along with Today’s Psalms and Proverbs

Today’s message by the ICR that illuminates the new covenant being written into our hearts:

September 13, 2020

The Writing of God

“And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.” (Exodus 32:16)

In this verse is the first occurrence in the Bible of the word “writing” and, appropriately enough, it is speaking of “the writing of God” rather than the writings of men. The reference, of course, is to the two tables of the law, the Ten Commandments, “written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18) and rewritten on a second set of stone tables to replace the first, once they were shattered (Exodus 34:1).

All Scripture is divinely inspired, but the Ten Commandments were divinely inscribed! This testimony of their unique importance is a sobering condemnation of any who ignore them or distort their meaning (including the one referring to the six-day creation in Exodus 20:11).

But there is another writing of God—this one recorded in the New Testament, one of even greater personal significance to the Christian: “Ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ...written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3). No longer an external standard divinely engraved in stone by the finger of God, but an internal conviction inscribed in the heart by the Spirit of God! “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them” (Hebrews 10:16).

This remarkable writing of God’s law in our hearts and minds has been accomplished because Christ came not “to destroy, but to fulfill” the law (Matthew 5:17) and “hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). Now, with the law in our hearts, we have become epistles of God, “known and read of all men” (2 Corinthians 3:2), and it is vital that the writing is read true and clear through our lives. HMM

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gabriel-gabdiel · 4 years ago

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【Draft】Fantasy of Evolution Chapter 1: The Quiet Kid in Class

Here’s the draft of my original piece of fiction. It’s here for backup purposes.

Enjoy.

Darkness without light is an abyss. Light without darkness is blinding. You cannot have a coin with one side.

(Unknown)

***

Fantasy of Evolution

An Urban Fantasy Story by Abdiel

Here's my first-ever original work I conceptualized from scratch. Hope you all like it. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: This work may reference copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is believed that this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. All copyrighted material referred to in this work belongs to their respective owners. All rights reserved.

***

Chapter 1: The Quiet Kid in Class

***

Somewhere inside Our Lady of Fatima School in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila...

Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Azrael. Or was it Uriel?

'Those were the Four Archangels, right?' the young 14-year-old boy by the name of Florante Galang thought, talking to himself in his mind as the rain poured all around him.

What a dreadful month this had been.

Anyway, Michael or Mikhail was the most famous archangel whose name meant "Who Is Like God". He was the greatest of God's angels and the most godlike of the four. With his flaming sword, he was the seraph who ultimately cast the angelic traitor Lucifer out of Heaven and into Hell.

Meanwhile, Raphael, Rafael, or Israfil was the archangel whose name meant "God Heals" or "God, Please Heal". The healing angel who bound the Archdemon Azazel under a desert called Dudael. The Angel of Life and Healing.

Then there was Gabriel or Jibrail. His name meant, "God Is My Strength". The strongest warrior angel of the four. The seraph that was closest to the humans who regularly appeared among prophets and holy persons. He was the Angel of Strength and Righteous Power.

Azrael or Samael, meanwhile, was the archangel whose name meant "Angel of God" but actually had the reputation of being more of the "Angel of Death". He was rumored to be the angel who killed all the firstborn sons of the Egyptians during the time of Moses as part of the Seven Plagues of Egypt.

In Jewish mysticism, he was even considered the embodiment of evil. The most demonic of the archangels who never fell from grace.

Some contend that the fourth angel of the Four Archangels was Uriel instead of Azrael, whose name meant "God Is My Light". The archangel responsible for "changing" the Orb of the Sun as the day wound down from morning to night. The Solar Angel.

Those were the strange thoughts swirling inside Florante Galang's brain for whatever reason as he stared breathless at the strange apparition of a goddess(?) with an hourglass figure, porcelain skin, and growing white wings waltzing across the long hallway of the entrance to Fatima School.

Who was this? What was this? Why was this...?

Actually, he felt like he'd been walking in that same hallway towards the exit forever until that point, with no light at the end of the tunnel. Only a black nothingness that stretched on forever, interrupted by this strange being of light before him.

The only light he could see was from this strange being before him that triggered his flight-or-flight response for merely existing.

She also sported huge dove wings on her back that spread behind her like a long white feathery banner. As though she were a valkyrie or something. Or an angel.

Were her angel wings what made him think of the Four Archangels?

He should've been thinking about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph instead, to be honest.

'Susmaryosep!'

He sometimes wondered if he was seeing the same things through his eyes that the rest of the world was seeing. After all, everyone could see color but couldn't describe them, so there was no way of knowing if the red he sees was the red other people see.

Maybe there was something wrong with his brain. His mother did say she was tempted to have him take an autism test. However, the cause didn't matter. It wouldn't change the effect.

He stood there, transfixed by her gorgon stare and her tall, svelte body. She strode, her form appearing inch by inch with every gliding step.

The feminine silhouette emerged from the shadows, revealing the horror underneath the silken black cloak of darkness.

She said nothing, but he could feel the malice in her every movement.

Her skin gleamed like pearls in the moonlight. A sensation grew inside him inexorably, rising from his stomach to his throat as he felt his soul claw its way out of his body in anticipation and dread.

Was she a "White Lady" or a vengeful spirit from beyond the grave? Was he being haunted on this rainy day (or night)?

His gaze focused right into the shining, mesmerizing eyes of the goddess staring right back at him.

Beguiling. Alluring. Dangerous. It pushed all his buttons, confusing him.

So what the hell was he looking at?

Was it delirium that made him see a strange woman that reminded him of angels instead of the embodiment of death before him?

A Biblical angel. Both awesome and awful.

She... not that gender mattered to angels... said, "Do not fear, child. It will be over soon."

She approached him with every bone and muscle from her swaying body twitching visibly under her skin.

His delirious mind going blank, he asked the apparition her name.

"Who are you?!" he asked, when he should've instead said, "What are you?"

The pitter-patter of the rain grew louder and louder. The wind blew hard, tousling his thin bowl-cut hair.

"This is the end of the line for you. I won't let you hurt anyone else, Flor. Prepare to die."

Oh no. Is she for real? What did he do to deserve this? How did she know his name? Her voice began to sound familiar though.

Was this the end of the line for him? More importantly, did it matter?

The juxtaposition of beauty and beast almost drove him mad. Like a surreal dream that melted into a formless nightmare. Or perhaps vice-versa.

The haze in his mind then cleared. He recognized who that person was. She was someone familiar. Even in her transformed state he could recognize her face.

She then flew towards him with dove wings and the speed of a man jumping from a skyscraper and falling to his death towards the cold, hard pavement.

Faster than he could even fathom or wonder why she was named after the Angel of Healing instead of the Angel of Death.

His life then flashed before his eyes.

***

Florante Galang's story was a typical one (apparently).

The awkward teenage boy who couldn't make friends. The absent-minded weirdo. The outcast who lived in a world of his own. The nerd who loved anime a bit too much.

'You've heard it once and you might as well have heard it a thousand times before.'

How'd he know he was such a stereotype? From the movies and TV shows he'd watch or the books he'd read. He was the "blank slate" awkward kid in such stories. The default.

Perhaps even the background character. Otherwise, a subject of mockery or wish fulfillment.

They were stories made to appeal to someone like him, after all. Or mock someone like him.

He was not someone people wished to be but what they usually ended up as from the start. An ordinary fellow that sat in contrast against the special ones. The greats.

Most everyone in Fatima High School had their own cliques and social circles, but most who studied there had formed them since grade school.

Because he was a socially inept loser and he transferred there as a freshman, he never had a chance to form bonds with most anyone.

He was, in short, the new kid in school, who then became the quiet kid in school.

'Ugh.'

Even his mother, whom he had a complicated relationship with due to their countless shouting matches and arguments that had her shaming him for being a disrespectful smart aleck (in not so many words), was the one person he was closest to than anyone else on earth.

Yes, even the closest person to him was never on the same page as him.

His mother. The woman who kept admonishing him for misbehaving and putting fear in his heart every time she grabbed a shoe or one of his father's belts (his gentle father himself never laid a hand on him) was also the person he interacted with the most.

Him and his family originally hailed from Makati but moved to Pasig around the EDSA (Epifanio de los Santos Avenue) Revolution. He could barely remember his time in Makati because he stayed there when he was 3 to 4 years old, and he only started really forming memories at around 4 years old.

He could barely remember anything about his previous residence in Makati except maybe that one time he allegedly fell down the stairs as a toddler.

He'd become acrophobic ever since that happened even though he could barely remember the event.

Every time he walked on an overpass or at the higher floors of the mall, he had to move himself far away from the railings and he never looked down, feeling a tingle from head to toe until he got back down to earth safely.

However, the phobia he had over heights was nothing compared to the dread he felt when going to school.

His family, the Galangs, arrived in Pasig around the time Manggahan Floodway... an artificially constructed waterway in Metro Manila... was first built.

He had spent most of his childhood in Pasig, watching his mother and father invest in half of a bungalow that they then slowly built into a whole house over the years by saving up for it.

His memories were hazy, but he did remember when he was about 6 or 7 years old that every Friday, from 7:00 to 7:30 PM, ABS-CBN Channel 2 would air the show, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles".

TMNT originally aired in the U.S. from 1987 onwards while ABS-CBN went back on air in 1986, right after Ferdinand Marcos was deposed. ABS-CBN got the program later on at a time when local channels imported programs about 2-3 years late.

Nonetheless, he distinctly remembered watching it at that timeslot when he was a kid.

Even before that, he vaguely remembered watching programs of his youth that helped shaped him and his imagination, from Voltes V to Bioman and Maskman as well as Voltron and Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs.

He remembered playing with clothespins and putting them together to form his own Voltron toy.

Programs that made him dream of a time he could become a hero himself, his imagination looking like a vague hodgepodge of pop culture references and shows he watched from childhood to his teenage years.

His father was a curious man. The Galangs had ashtrays all over the house but they were never used. He used to be a heavy smoker but he quit around the time Florante was born.

Florante never met the cigarette-smoking version of his dad, who judging from old pictures, was a thin hippie with long 1970s hair and pants to boot.

His Dad also regularly waited for him with their family car, a Mitsubishi Lancer, to take him home during the first few weeks of school. His school service wasn't ready yet and he didn't know how to commute to school as of yet.

To the good people of Pasig, his father was Engineer Galang. To Florante, he was the home tinkerer. He fixed everything in his home from leaky kitchen pipes to Florante's broken toys.

Even if was something as simple as super-gluing the broken arm of his toy Bioman toy... Blue 3, to be more specific... his father would do it.

It felt relaxing and comfortable to drive around with his father back and forth to school, but Florante took it too much for granted in retrospect. The man had office work to attend to as well.

Then again, Florante was a bit of a sheltered spoiled brat who didn't know how to commute to and from his home. He depended on his father or a school service to take him back to his residence.

Regardless, the jeepney service soon came through and his father was free to go straight to work instead of being bothered by driving his son from home to school and back again.

The thing Florante missed the most when being driven by his father was the small, inconsequential talks they had about life, school, and the future.

Small talk about what he wanted to do when he graduated high school, what his career would be, where his passion lay, and if his love of drawing and art could lead anywhere.

They also talked about what sort of games could or couldn't be played on his work laptop (Duke Nukem from Apogee, apparently). Or how Florante should stop sleeping with his work laptop in his room, replaying the Simpsons After Dark Screensaver program.

Or whatever happened to that floppy disk (the really big and floppy ones) he had containing a videogame involving a cat that might've been custom-made by one of his coworkers.

Florante also discussed with his father his dreams of becoming an animator who worked at Disney and the like.

He was even closer to one of his older sisters, the one closest to his age. The middle one. His other sister, the eldest of the three siblings, was the one with the strong, abrasive personality. The aloof eldest sister to her two younger siblings.

The middle sister was the one whom Florante talked to the most.

She was usually as meek and kind as a sheep yet sometimes as stubborn as a ram. She was the one he told his made-up stories about angels and demons. The plot he wanted to turn into his own comic book or manga or anime TV show.

He, like many other teenaged boys his age, wished he could draw or write his own stories. After reading snippets and summaries of Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost, his mind went running wild regarding the prospect of a series about angels.

God's so-called messengers.

This was why he knew so much about the Four Archangels. He researched about them for the sake of writing his own (fan) fiction using "original" characters.

Sure, his middle sister might be patronizing him by listening to his puerile action stories of super-powered beings duking it out that she'd soon forget a day or two later, but he appreciated her effort in listening to him regardless.

Also, as lame as it sounded, making that story in his head into reality as a comic book or TV show (and making money off of it) was his biggest dream for the longest time. Again, it was a typical childhood fantasy from someone who regularly obsessed about cartoons and comics or anime and manga.

Meanwhile, he didn't have anyone to talk to at school at all. He had no friends at school. He was a friendless loser.

He could talk about almost everything to his father and sister. However, he couldn't talk about "that".

He wished he could talk to them about the bullying and shunning he suffered from school but he was too embarrassed to do so. He was already 14 years old. He should be able to handle things on his own by now.

How could he possibly reveal that he got bullied so bad that he had to act as his own snitch to the teacher just to get them to stop?

Had a teacher not seen the bullying firsthand and told his bullies to cut it out, he wouldn't even have the list as his means of mitigating the flow of abuse from what seemed like everyone.

Even then, he had a hard time making friends with any of his classmates regardless. His social life was dead. He could only make friends with his fellow "Dead Kids" and nothing more.

***

Fatima Grade School and High School of Mandaluyong was also right beside a church, since it was a Catholic school that was founded by Franciscan capuchins.

The church sat atop a hill with a steep, sloping road wherein cars can drive through. The parking area was at the foot of this hillside road. Right below the church was the back of the canteen—the kitchen area—and outside of it was a bricked walkway full of tall trees and what little dirt they were allowed to grow on.

The unexpected benefit of enrolling in Fatima School was the nearby shopping malls. They were within walking distance. Florante was no mallrat but he regularly made a beeline to these malls every dismissal time. He went there to kill time while waiting for his school service to take him home.

The actual entrance of the school was a narrow hallway with concrete pillars and seats enclosed within a chain link fence. The security guard's job was to check your I.D. before letting you inside. Right beside the walkway a separate glass door entrance to the Faculty Room and the Principal's Office for Fatima Grade School.

You needed to travel further within the campus, past the quadrangle, open-air basketball courts, tennis court, soccer field, and tree-lined park in order to reach the L-shaped high school building.

It rained that day, so he had to walk on the covered walkways to spare himself from the muddiness of the soccer field and the wetness of various puddles on the concrete ground.

It was a proper, well-funded private school. With the ached looks of his parents at the start of the year where they had to pay the tuition fee, Fatima should give them their money's worth.

Inside the high school building, beyond the muddy floor mat and within the vicinity of the hardworking custodians mopping up the soppy shoe prints of the milling students, everything was nice, warm, and dry.

Or it would've been nice, warm, and dry had the air not been so muggy. This sort of humidity was to be expected from the Philippine tropics.

What wetness he left behind on the floor mats he could feel from under his collar.

He had felt his breath gradually creep towards hyperventilation as he approached the door to his section. He then held his breath while following two of his classmates through the door.

At any rate, here he was. Back to hell he went.

There was mustiness from the hallway that reached all the way to the classrooms.

This gloomy air all around him reminded him of his first day in Fatima High. He remembered it like it was yesterday.

***

During his first day of school at Fatima High...

His enrollment into Fatima High School was a bureaucratic blur.

He had gone through the motions of waiting in line in a small, brightly lit office in order to get his papers containing his schedule before being directed to his classroom.

At the time, he pulled his hood over his face (he wore a hoodie since it was cold) as he walked through the dour campus full of milling, bright-eyed teenagers and kids, thankfully blending in with the rest of the crowd before being "outed" as a transfer student.

He was an introvert though, so he couldn't muster the courage to talk to any one of them as they all formed their little cliques and social circles.

Meanwhile, he ended up in the company of total strangers because he was the new kid in school.

Regardless, he used the map given to him at the faculty room along with instructions on how to get there.

He checked the room number on the paper slip that the office gave him, and then checked the names on the list pinned on the board hanging on the door. Sure enough, he found his name there.

This was the right classroom.

He took a deep breath (perhaps more of a prolonged sigh) before opening the door to his classroom.

The people in front of him were chatting it up, their school bags beside them. They had no lockers to speak of even though they were supposedly a private school.

He glanced at the multiple gatherings of unfamiliar faces, identifying only two of boys as students he'd seen during enrollment.

With a gulp, he held his own bag in his arms and clutched it close to his chest like a pillow. Or a security blanket. This was a move taught to him in order to avoid getting his bag snatched in places like Divisoria in Quiapo.

His eyes traveled further across the room, avoiding the gazes of the students around him and only looking directly at them if they were staring elsewhere. Otherwise, he ended up staring at the floor or his shoes instead while his head was bowed.

Since the first day of school was a time when the seating plan hadn't been planned out yet by their designated advisor, he silently searched for a seat at the back while other students who were a mix of graduates of Fatima Grade School and newbies like him started to mill inside their classroom like herded sheep.

It was there that he met her. A girl with silky long black hair and a shy smile.

The bell rang with such franticness that like in a game of "Trip to Jerusalem", he ended up sitting down on a seat right beside her.

***

Their homeroom teacher, some forgettable 40-year-old guy serving as their class advisor, did a roll call on everyone present.

He waited and raised his hand when his name was called. He then made a mental footnote to wait for the name of the girl beside him to get called.

Philippine private high schools, unlike those from the U.S., had classes held in the same classroom for the same section instead of multiple classrooms with assigned subjects and teachers.

It was the teachers that moved from section to section and room to room instead of the students. The latter setup where students went to Math or Science class was more of a college thing in the Philippine Islands.

In between classes and within the same room they'd been staying in the whole day, Florante attempted to chat up the pretty girl he ended up sitting beside with, first by introducing himself and then calling her by her name as revealed by their homeroom teacher.

Her name was Laura Reyes, by the way.

"So Mandaluyong is a lot different than Antipolo, huh?" he asked her after she mentioned where she was from. My, their school sure was a long way from her home!

"Very different," she said, not quite looking at him.

"The roads there go high up on an incline, right? Since you're near the mountains or something," he added, referring to the highlands where Antipolo was located. "Must be a long, tough commute."

"I guess," she replied vaguely. "Well, not really. It takes about 30 minutes if the traffic is clear. It's not that far away."

"Oh. Okay," he said before both went silent once more.

Uh-oh. He was running of topics to discuss with her. Dammit.

She wasn't quite giving him the cold shoulder, but she wasn't the one keeping the conversation going either.

Also, he couldn't believe Laura of all people didn't know about the tale of "Florante and Laura" by Francisco Baltasar or made the connection between their names when he joked about it earlier.

Or maybe it was for the best that she didn't, since making such references to a stranger you just met was kind of cringe-inducing.

Someone else cleared their throat. 'Her' throat.

"Hey, Laura!" said the bespectacled girl in front of them as she did a sideway glance at the two. "Who's your new friend?"

"Oh. Uh, this is... what's your name again? Flor?"

He sighed then said, "Florante."

He winced whenever people shortened his name like that. "Flor" was a girl's name, for goodness's sake!

"Oh, sorry. Florante it is." Laura smiled at Florante vaguely then turned towards the other girl. The cute one with the glasses.

Laura and the bespectacled girl had an easier time with their small talk, presumably because they attended the same grade school and weren't transfer students like he was.

He also couldn't help but feel like the other girl was giving him a wary side eye. He hoped it was his imagination. The last thing he wanted was to look creepy to the girls on the first day of school.

"...Nah, I'm staying with some relatives in Metro Manila," Laura replied to the nerdy girl asking her the same question Florante did earlier regarding the commute from Antipolo to Mandaluyong.

"Oh really? Cool. I'm from Makati," the nerdy girl replied.

Now wait a second. Why did Laura answer her question but when he asked the same thing, she didn't tell him about staying with relatives in Metro Manila? Ugh, this girl.

Beautiful as Laura was, she was also quite rude!

She didn't need to pretend to be nice to him. If she didn't want to talk to him, she could've just given him the cold shoulder like many of the girls from his old school!

"Hey, Flor!"

"It's Florante," he automatically corrected before noticing it was the girly nerd who beckoned him by name. "Uh, yeah. What is it?"

"Where are you from? What class were you back in Grade 7? Or are you an accelerant from Grade 6?"

"Accelerant?" he repeated. He was familiar with the term.

The girl later explained that when at Grade 6 or 12 years old, a student with good enough grades could skip Grade 7 and go straight to first year high school as an accelerant.

He clarified, "No, no. I'm a transfer student. This is my first day at Fatima."

"Right. Welcome to Fatima High, then!" the girl with the glasses said. "The name's Jenny, by the way. Jenny Tolentino. I'm an accelerant from sixth grade."

He nodded absently. "Florante Galang," he reintroduced himself to this mousy girl with short hair, noticing her baby doll face behind coke-rimmed glasses for the first time.

She looked of East Asian descent, but Florante couldn't for the life of him tell if she was part Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. Chinese was a safe bet.

***

The rest of the morning of his first day in school passed in the same fashion as before: With him engaging in awkward small talk with either Jenny or Laura that was interspersed with introductions, note-taking, and discussion of lesson plans galore.

The homeroom teacher had Florante, several other transfer students, and "accelerants" from Fatima Grade School introduce themselves in front of the class full of Grade 7 graduates who already had their own cliques and friends by now.

His social anxiety got him to stammer an introduction to the class, blush tomato-red, and trip over himself on his own two leather shoes as he made his way back to the seat.

He cringed and didn't meet Laura's eyes. He looked so uncool.

They then had their next class with a strict middle-aged woman for a mathematics teacher covering one of the most boring subjects of all time.

Their advisor and home economics teacher was a young woman straight out of college by the looks of it, dealing with her first teaching job and showcasing a strong aura of "substitute" teacher even though she wasn't one.

Her name was Cathy, if he recalled correctly. Or Miss (Cathy) Estrella. She was kind of cute, if a bit goofy and had a tendency to pronounce her Ls as Ws like Barbara Walters or Elmer Fudd.

After three classes had passed, he began recognizing several of the faces in their first-year section.

More and more people ended up talking to Laura even though she herself was an accelerant from the sixth grade amongst mostly seventh graders. She was particularly popular among the boys in the group: No surprises there.

Her beauty hadn't only caught Florante's eyes, apparently. The rest of the class's male population wanted to talk to her. Even the females wished to chat her up as well. She had that aura of friendliness around her.

There were several brave enough to ask her about how much she liked Fatima High so far and why she decided to go there instead of a school closer to Antipolo. Maybe even an all-girls school.

Most of her answers were mostly terse and diplomatic, like with him.

She did reveal to Jenny that she already went to an all-girls school in elementary, which was part of the reason why her parents had her transfer to a co-ed one: To help her become more prepared for a co-ed college life.

This then led him to curiously tell Jenny, "Hey, I thought Laura and you were accelerants with how buddy-buddy you two were acting. But didn't you say you were an accelerant?"

Jenny shrugged. "I am. But I met Laura earlier when our families came over to school and paid the tuition fee on the same day. She's a nice gal." She then whispered to him, "She's cute, isn't she?"

He turned away, his hand holding up his lightly blushing face while his elbow rested on his desk. "She's all right," he mumbled.

He heard Laura giggle at Jenny and say, "Hey, I'm right here! Don't talk behind my back!"

Jenny herself laughed. "No, we weren't! We were talking right in front of you! We don't backtalk! Right, Flor?"

Florante forced a smile at the Chinese-looking girl and nodded.

The Galang boy then got a better look at the nerdy Jenny. Aside from those huge tinted glasses that looked almost like goggles and seemed to belong in the 1970s, she had short, neck-length curly hair.

She wasn't bad looking herself.

She talked to both him and Laura in between subjects and lessons, but mostly to Laura, who at least talked to her in return and wasn't as evasive with her answers as she was to him or the other boys in class.

Jenny acted more like the nice girl she described Laura as, at least.

As for him, he could only smile and nod as she prattled on in between classes and teachers, telling Laura about the Fatima campus. He didn't try to keep up and figured he'd learn more about Fatima on his own.

During lunchtime, Florante ended up sitting at the far end of a full lunch table with Jenny and Laura along with several of their other new "friends", their classmates.

Florante forgot their names as soon as they spoke them, his mind focused more on Laura.

He debated to himself whether she was waving him off the same way she waved off the boys who were probably hitting on her back at their classroom.

One of their classmates, he did remember.

The one who brought up the "Florante and Laura" connection they had that made Florante's eyes light up, only for his shoulders to then slump when he turned and saw Laura tell the guy off, "Gross! Stop fooling around, Gerry! I just met him! C'mon, you're embarrassing Flor!" with a giggle.

'Gross'? Aw, come on, Laura!' Florante thought to himself, his heart sinking while he did a nervous chuckle at the cruel joke. Did he actually gross out Laura after all?

Laura and "Gerry", the jester who brought the "Florante and Laura" connection up, then laughed at the thought, all the while reassuring Galang that they were just kidding.

"No hard feelings, bro," said the tall guy named Geronimo "Gerry" (pronounced "Jerry") Jacinto who made the joke in the first place. Florante did his best to laugh things off, hiding his quivering lower lip with his hand.

Galang took a good look at the smart aleck who brought the subject up.

This person was the size of a tall rock with the mind of a sock. Comfortable to wear but once taken off, easily lost. He was also the kind of man who looked like he'd spent the last decade worrying about his penis size.

No, no, Florante was being needlessly mean to the jokester. He was big, tall, and had a huge head. Not exactly a good-looking guy but a witty and confident one. Also, among the boys there, he seemed to have the most rapport with Laura, if not the most memorable one of the bunch.

Gerry was more of a "Florante" to Laura than Florante was. Although they just met, they were already getting along famously.

On the bright side, he was glad he never made that Florante and Laura joke to break the ice with Laura.

As the chatterbox Jenny talked the ears off of the crowd of boys and girls surrounding Laura, the withdrawn Florante saw them arrive at the cafeteria.

"What are those weirdoes doing anyway?" someone at their table asked.

***

Sitting at the corner of the cafeteria, as far away as possible from where Florante Galang and Laura Reyes's group sat, were these pale-faced, dark, and brooding Fatima High students.

The term "Goth" was more of an American trend than a Philippines one, but that was the best way to describe these people.

'What was their problem?' Florante thought to himself. He wasn't the only one staring holes at those people though.

They weren't gawking at Laura, unlike most other students of the first year class of St. Francis of Assisi and even other classes.

Instead, everyone ended up gawking at them for a change, including Galang and Reyes.

By the way, in Fatima School, all of the sections were named after saints. Florante belonged to First Year St. Francis. As for those other people, he overheard Jenny stage whisper to Laura, "They're from St. Valentine, right?"

One of Gerry's friends confirmed, "Yeah, some of them belong to St. Valentine," referring to First Year St. Valentine of Rome.

There were five of them, four boys and one girl. They weren't talking to each other. They weren't eating either, with each of them holding trays of untouched food.

Apropos of nothing, Galang noticed they were an eclectic and diverse group from multiple high school years.

The shortest male of these Fatima students had spiky hair standing up like a black bush or a shadowy fire. He was also the most boyish one of the group.

Another one, the girl, had hair in a bun with side bangs as long as her back ponytail. She was about the same height as the bush-haired boy and had an almost elfish or pixie-like quality to her smallish face, body, and gait.

Still another, the one with the tanned skin and brusque physique, had shades colored light enough for him to claim they were glasses. Not only did he wear shades indoors—he also sported a jacket indoors too.

The happiest, smiley-faced one of them with the long, thick hair just also happened to be the palest one of the group, even though both the girl and the "midget" boy had alabaster skin themselves. He also looked like a serious weightlifter for someone supposedly so young.

Finally, there was the really tall, lanky young man. Taller than Gerry. Skinny as a rail yet as tall as a basketball player. Maybe 6'9". Maybe even seven feet. He might as well be eight feet high from the looks of him and his lengthy arms and feet.

Look at the height of that human being. If he was a human being.

However, there were in the Philippines with a height average of 5'1" so he was probably just 6'5" or something.

He definitely didn't appear like a high school student for sure. More like their guardian or butler. "He looks old for a freshman," remarked Florante.

Gerry himself corrected, "Tanga (Stupid)! Only the midget and girl are from St. Valentine. The rest are from different years. Celestino is a fourth year student."

Florante frowned but did not dare glare at the bigger Jacinto.

Instead, he repeated the name, "Celestino..." as his words trailed off while he stared the tallest student of the weird bunch.

Now that he got a better look at him, he identified that this Celestino person had half-Caucasian or "mestizo" features.

He might not even be half but full Caucasian by how white he was and how sharp his nose got.

He might even be of Spanish descent, which was a sought-after attribute among Filipinos, whether they wanted narrow noses that were "matangos" as opposed to flat noses or "pango".

It rooted from the colonial days of the Philippines when it was a colony of Spain for 300 years then of the United States of America for almost 50 years. The foreigners intermarried with the natives, and their half-white, half-Spanish, or half-American offspring tended to be treated better than the rest by society.

It came to the point that looking like a mestizo by surgery and skin whitening procedures resulted in better treatment by everyone else at large, which in turn led to such appearances being part of the standards of Philippine beauty.

It was "Colonial Mentality" in action, if you would.

Then again, if Celestino hadn't been born with that (Spanish?) family name of his, Florante would've sworn he picked that name himself because it sounded cool.

Speak of the devil, as Galang said the name, Celestino suddenly met eyes with him.

Celestino initially had shut eyes that opened into narrow slits and seemed to glow underneath his bangs that formed a curtain of hair over his face.

Florante balked at the tall, scary dude with gangly limbs and a weird stringy hairstyle that parted to the side and formed a bobcut with hair moving outwards from his head like antennae, giving his head a diamond shape.

Celestino looked at Jenny for a second before his sharp eyes flickered back to Florante.

Florante looked away first, a flush of crimson embarrassment making him drop his eyes with a shudder.This also had him almost bump into Gerry, who then jibed, "Oooh, does someone have a little crush on him?" with a pat in his back like the asshole that he was.

Jenny herself giggled with an unsure smile, looking at Florante as she asked, "You okay, Flor?"

Galang nodded to Tolentino with a nod. When the ruckus was over and people stopped staring at the strange "circus" troupe, Florante stole glances at all the five strange high school students.

Aside from the shortest kid of their group and the pale-faced girl, the rest of them looked like they could be college students instead of high school ones, or even outright teachers around the same age as Ms. Estrella. Or even older.

Even the shorter people of their group looked a bit too old to be freshmen or high schoolers. Like they were 30-year-old actors playing the role of teenagers in a Hollywood high school movie or something.

Just as they were different they were also the same in a strange way.

They were walking contradictions of themselves in terms of their inhumanly beautiful appearance that verged on the uncanny.

Uncanny because they looked like the airbrushed or manipulated photographs on a fashion magazine. Or walking paintings from the Renaissance. Perhaps even sculptures shaped from marble, silver, or bronze.

Aside from the tanned "moreno" or "kayumanggi" one that served as the black sheep in their white-fleeced herd, they shared chalk-pale alabaster skin that bordered on being albino, dark eyes with shadows underneath them, and gangly limbs that matched them more with each other than their high school uniforms.

They looked like they hadn't slept a wink for weeks or months. In fairness, all five shared perfect, straight, and angular features carved straight from marble.

Who did they remind Florante of?

"They look like The Addams Family," whispered Gerry to his friends, which had them erupt in laughter.

To Galang's chagrin, he agreed with Gerry. Took the words right out of his mouth, even.

He himself might've said, "Children of the Corn", but he doubted that present company would even be familiar with such a reference.

However, their appearances weren't the reason why Florante couldn't look away from them.

He felt something familiar about them. Déjà vu, perhaps?

They group of five then looked away from them. From all those stares.

They looked away from one another and from the other students. Like there was a bird or a plane in the distance that caught their attention had there not been a wall or a ceiling obstructing their view of the sky.

The girl rose from her seat, her tray of untouched food and unopened soda remaining still as she walked away with a stride and sashay of a model before she glided up the steps of the exit, her silhouette across the light permeating from the outside creating ghostly afterimages behind her.

Florante's eyes darted back to the four remaining males, who sat like statues or students posing for a group picture. Unmoving. Like the famous painting of The Last Supper at another angle.

After a couple of more minutes, all four of them left the table altogether in unison. They strode with the grace of dancers or athletes, including the muscular one.

The one named Celestino never looked at Florante's way again. Like he was a bug who was below his notice.

He'd later learn their names. The short guy and girl of the same age were fraternal twins: Kalantiaw and Dalisay Hidalgo.

The bronze-skinned one with the shades was known as Alonzo Estanislao. The extra pale, extra jacked one with the creepy smile and caveman hair was named Jacob "Benjo" Benjamin.

Finally, the tallest, lankiest, and oldest one of them was called Francisco "Kiko" Celestino.

What strange, old-timey names. The nicknames sounded about as goofy, cutesy, and silly as a typical Filipino nickname, but the actual names themselves sounded old. Almost ancient.

From the Year "Nineteen Kopong-Kopong", almost. Or a time before the Philippines went from a Spanish colony to an American colony.

***

Florante Galang remembered how his eyes flickered back and forth from his worn leather shoes to the table where those five weirdoes sat during his first day of school at Fatima High.

He wanted to learn more about those—for lack of a better term—Gothic or Goth kids who wore jackets and trench coats in the tropics unironically.

They didn't have a name for their "gang", but the rest of the school did.

They were called the Dead Kids mostly to make fun of them and their cringy, pretentious lifestyle. Like the way they sat around and didn't really eat during lunchtime.

He wanted to ask more questions about the Dead Kids and their gangly cult leader Celestino, but both Laura and Jenny were themselves newcomers to the school and Gerry intimidated him.

He'd eventually get additional information about them through word of mouth and small talk from the rest of his classmates as the rest of the school year unfolded.

Like info on whether or not they'd always lived in Metro Manila, Mandaluyong City, Cainta City, Quezon City, or Pasig City all this time. Maybe they moved from Makati to Pasig like his family did.

They'd apparently been around since last year. They were transfer students.

Last year, Celestino was immediately moved to his third year in high school, Estanislao and Benjamin entered first and second year respectively, and the fraternal Hidalgo twins joined them only this year as freshmen in high school.

Because the Galangs themselves recently moved to Pasig, Florante was unaware of how recently Celestino himself moved in town.

Rumors had it that they were all foreign exchange students, hence their half-foreign looks. The only one who remotely looked native Filipino was Estanislao.

The rest looked like the typical half-Chinese, half-American, half-Latino, or half-European models Florante would see on television. Come to think of it, the tan Estanislao could be half-Mexican or half-Moroccan for all he knew.

After all, the Philippines was itself a melting pot of cultures, with it being a colony of both Spain and America for years. Even centuries, in the case of Spain.

Regardless, he felt a curious surge of relief and pity for these beautiful people. As pretty as they appeared, they were considered as the outsiders of Fatima High. They were perhaps even ostracized or bullied by the rest of the student body.

Something that Florante could relate to.

The way the people around them reacted to their strange mannerisms reminded Florante of how people back in grade school treated him for being such an asthmatic crybaby.

He was relieved he wasn't the only newcomer in Fatima. And he wasn't the most interesting spectacle among all the newcomers to arrive in the high school either, so everyone's bullying was more "spread out" and such.

Thank goodness.

As the first quarter of the school year neared to a close, Galang started moving predictably further and further away from the Reyes and Jacinto group for various reasons.

He started eating more and more by himself instead of their group.

He could barely talk to any of those quick-witted smart alecks, except maybe Jenny, who probably talked to him out of pity or to help him save face. Or maybe because she was just that talkative.

During one of those numerous lonely lunch breaks, as he gazed as the supposed Dead Kids, he froze as one of them... Kalantiaw this time around... looked up and met his gaze.

At the time, Florante was actually staring at the cute wallflower Dalisay, who did remind him of Wednesday Addams from the Addams Family, only for him to get caught snooping by a set of sharp, angry eyes of a certain midget brother. The Pugsley to Dalisay's Wednesday.

Those eyes shooed him away from staring any further at the cute Goth chick sister.

Dalisay's twin brother didn't appreciate all his staring. If looks could kill, the short boy with bushy hair had flying daggers for eyes.

'Ow, the edge.' What would that midget do to him anyway? Chop him to bits? Burn him to ash? All with a stare? Jeez.

As sarcastic as Florante's thoughts were, he still stood down from the stare down like the little bitch that he was.

Come to think of it, what sort of name was "Kalantiaw" anyway? It was almost as pretentious of a name as Celestino, but at least Celestino was a family name that was passed down for generations.

Kalantiaw's parents didn't have the common sense to pick a better name for their son that wouldn't lead to teasing and bullying.

Ah, but Florante quickly realized that wasn't one to speak about being called names, teasing, or bullying. It wasn't as if he could pick on the shorter kid in real life or anything: Only in his mind.

As his wandering eyes returned to the group, he noticed that Estanislao was also staring at him. his glance holding some sort of unmet expectation.

'Oh no, not this again,' he thought, afraid of a confrontation with the Dead Kids.

He quickly ate the rest of his lunch when he should've eaten the rest of the bitter words swirling inside his head, deciding to wander around the bleachers or the tree park near the children's library where he sometimes hung out (alone) as well.

However, the lithe and agile Estanislao caught up with him.

"AH!" Florante yelped.

"Hey, you know it's rude to stare, right?" Alonzo said to Florante.

Galang gulped, stuttering, "S-Sorry, I won't do it again!" cringing as he said the words.

The taller second year student with sunglasses smiled at the shy kid. "I heard of what happened to you and your classmates. Must have been rough, huh?"

Florante's lower lip trembled, his gaze not meeting Estanislao's, only for him to meet the piercing stare of Kiko Celestino.

The "leader" of the Dead Kids had the strangest expression on his face. A furious, almost hostile one. What did Florante do to deserve such a look?

He noticed that Celestino's eyes were as pitch black as midnight in the deeper parts of the province. In places where urban development had not yet started and electrical posts, much less lamps, were at least 30 minutes away.

Bewildered, Florante looked away again in time to almost stumble face-first into the canteen floor. He caught himself with the assistance of Alonzo grabbing him by his arm.

"Whoops. Careful there, kiddo," the shades-sporting lad said. Strangely enough, Florante could hear the "grin" in his voice. "You don't want to add ammo to all your classmates' teasing of you, do you?"

Unbidden, a flashback of him playing alone in the playground while the basketball varsity team snickered at him miming Rambo putting on his red bandanna flashed in his head, making him shudder and cringe.

A basketball varsity team that included the promising tall freshman, Gerry Jacinto.

He shouldn't have done it anyway. He looked stupid, playing by himself, pretending to be Rambo in the intro of his cartoon series (he never saw the actual R-rated movies).

"SorryIwon'tdoitagain," he mumbled in one breath, apologizing once more just short of doing a Japanese bow and backing away.

"No need to apologize for that," Estanislao reassured, letting go of Galang before lowering his polarized sunglasses and giving him a cheesy wink. "But remember, Flor Contemplacion, I've got dibs on Hidalgo's sister."

"I wasn't...!" Florante said, wondering how he knew his name (kind of) when this was the first time they had talked, but Alonzo cut him off.

"You sure, Flor? Hidalgo caught you staring. Better watch out for him. And me."

As the Dead Kids again left as a unit and barely dug into their lunches, Florante surprised himself by calling out to Estanislao, "My name is not Flor! It's Florante!"

'Flor is a girl's name,' he added to himself.

***

As luck would have it—whether it was bad or good luck was anyone's guess—Florante ended up in the same club as three of the Dead Kids.

He had decided to be part of the Art Club for this school year.

The others elected to go to other clubs like the Computer Club or the Science Club. There was even a Literature Club, which was where Benjo and Kiko ended up in.

Oh sorry. Benjamin and Celestino. Why was he thinking of them in such familiar terms? He barely knew them.

Regardless, the Hidalgo twins and Estanislao ended up in the same club as Galang.

The thing about high school clubs was that anyone could join them regardless of their year. Whether they were freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or seniors (or first to fourth year) of high school, they could mingle in one class as long as they passed the initial exam.

The Art Club had the motherly figure of Mrs. Marisol Mancenido as their advisor. She looked 20 years young even though she was actually forty-something.

Her approach to proctoring the Art Club was encouraging, hands-off, and motivational.

Her "detractors" would probably claim she was too soft on the kids with the way she babied them and let them do anything they wanted in the Art Club for the sake of their "creative freedom", but she had no such detractors at Fatima High.

Everyone in the high school loved Mrs. Mancenido. She was like a Filipina Julie Andrews mixed with a young Gloria Romero.

She was the nicest teacher Florante had ever met. This was probably why he ended up in the Art Club in the first place despite having no talent in art to speak of.

It was his way to get away from First Year St. Francis. Away from the withering, cold looks that Laura gave to him after she rejected his romantic advances.

How embarrassing.

After all the nice things he'd done for her, like help her with errands like getting her photographs developed or hold her lunch tray out for her, she ended up rejecting him.

If she never saw him that way, then why'd she take advantage of him and turn him into her gopher or something? It wasn't fair.

Then again, the only connection he had with Laura was that their first names coincidentally matched the names of the romantic couple in a Filipino literary classic. The Philippine equivalent of Romeo and Juliet.

With that in mind, he found himself longing for the companionship of another female. Perhaps another one who'd also reject his advances, but at least she was much nicer about it than Laura.

Ah yes. Dalisay Hidalgo.

The Goth chick with the surprisingly soft-spoken voice.

He introduced himself to her in the clubroom one day, saying, "Hey, I'm Florante Galang. I'm from Section St. Francis."

She looked at him and nodded with a thin-lipped not-smile, brushing a stray lock of her hair behind her ear. "Hello. I'm Dalisay Hildago. From St. Valentine."

"Oh okay. Hi."

"...."

So he barely knew Dalisay and it was apparent by their awkward silences when together.

Perhaps starting with a more platonic relationship with Dalisay was in order, yes? He should learn from his mistakes with Laura. He was never popular with the pretty girls. They found him either too wimpy or too creepy.

However, an obvious obstacle kept him from getting close to Dalisay.

First, there was her overprotective brother Kalantiaw. Second, there was another guy from their "friend circle" who was also after her.

They should lay off of him, man. He only wanted to be friends with Dalisay, for goodness's sake.

'Susmaryosep,' he thought, remembering the way his mother would say the same thing whenever she was frustrated before he continued with the current Art Club activity they had for that day.

They had to make their own painting using watercolors. He frowned at the way he used too much water, nearly ripping the bond paper he painted on.

Meanwhile, Dalisay's brush strokes were all clean and perfect, like her. The way she instead used black-colored paper and white paint was a stroke of genius on her part.

Nevertheless, he kept concentrating on his work and stopped himself from peeking occasionally from the screen of his hair bangs at the mysterious yet lovely girl next to him.

This was because during the whole class, he could feel the same girl's brother not relax from his stiff position on the edge of his seat, sitting as far away from them as possible yet telescopically staring holes at them like a hawk hovering over his prey.

A tiny hawk but a hawk nonetheless. Or an angry rustling black bush.

He then peeked at Kalantiaw, regretting his decision immediately.

His crimson eyes glared back, making him feel like a newspaper left out in the rain. A messy sopping pulp not even fit for wrapping around dried tinapa (Filipino smoked fish).

As he flinched away from the male Hidalgo, slinking back against his chair's backrest, Mr. Cool Kid with the tan complexion and sunglasses lounged right behind them (since there was no set seating plan).

Alonzo Estanislao was quite... smiley that day for some reason.

What an insufferable bunch. Was it too much to ask for him to make friends with one pretty girl?

The school bell then loudly rung, which made him jump. From there, the trio of Dead Kids was out of their seats. They fluidly rose and turned in their work to Mrs. Mancenido.

He stared blankly at them, with Dalisay giggling at whatever weird remark Alonzo said, only for the taller kid with sunglasses to strangely reel back from the glaring short, petulant kid brother between them.

They barely talked to Florante and yet he felt more comfortable around them than he did most of his classmates in St. Francis of Assisi.

He had his suspicions on his first day of school, but the first-year class he ended up in was a whole class full of bullies and class clowns. Galang was more often than not always the butt of their jokes. Especially when it came to Gerry Jacinto.

Gerry made fun of everything about Florante, from the way he dressed with an unironed uniform to his old undershirt being practically see-through and threadbare that one time they were changing to their P.E. uniforms during gym class.

Jacinto was so mean. It wasn't fair.

Florante felt more at ease at the Art Club than in his own class and with his classmates.

Regardless, he started gathering his things and turn in his own almost finished work.

He suppressed the anger and frustration that filled him inside, fearing that his eyes would tear up and then one or several of his classmates would notice their redness, leading to more bullying and teasing.

Or he tried his best to do so. For whatever reason, his tear ducts were linked to his temper, which made his angry outbursts come off as tantrums.

He had no other outlet for his resentment. Dammit.

***

In fairness, it was kind of his fault why the boys (and it was mostly boys) from his section were bullying him extra hard.

The outcast of First Year Section St. Francis ended up doing something he shouldn't have done to their class idol Laura Reyes earlier that year

He cringed, wishing again that the ground would swallow him up as he remembered the embarrassing thing he did.

One of his bullies dared him to draw Laura from memory, which in and of itself wasn't so bad. However, in his desperation to win over his classmates, he ended up drawing her in the nude.

Well, that wasn't exactly what happened. Perish the thought.

They had dared him to do it and he teased doing it by drawing a rough sketch with blocky shapes for her body that looked nude but was actually just how artists "built" a drawing through sketching.

Like drawing a circle first before drawing the rest of the face. Or drawing a "nude" body first before drawing the clothes.

However, one of them told (snitched to, really) Laura about it and she caught him red-handed with what looked like him drawing her nude.

"Ew. That's gross, Flor. Stop that."

"N-No! You got it all wrong, Laura! It's not what it looks like...!"

No amount of frantic explanation was enough to keep Laura from thinking Florante was a disgusting pervert, and he even had to explain himself at the principle's office afterwards when several teachers got involved in the mess.

Naturally, the many admirers of Laura Reyes dog-piled him for his cringe-inducing antics, even though it was all his bullies' fault for making him draw Laura nude and then telling on him.

Ever since then, his bullying got so bad that he had to list off names of those who bullied him to get some of his teachers to intervene.

His listing of names mitigated the bullying but made making friends in his classroom or outside of the Dead Kids difficult due to his reputation as being a snitch.

He was looked down upon for snitching on bullies he couldn't fight back against.

***

He wished he was dead. To end his suffering.

If only he could die in the place of someone else. Someone he loved. Like family or friends. Even a lover. A girlfriend. At least that would've been something noble. He'd be a hero. Instead of a bully victim.

What if he died for nothing? What worth would his life be then?

If he were to die now, he wished he could die a nobler death.

However, from his experience of having deaths in his family, death was almost always sad or embarrassing. Nothing remotely romantic, gallant, or dignified about it.

Also, a lonely, sheltered teenaged boy like him had no one to love romantically, to be honest. He barely had friends at his new school, even.

He should've never moved from one school to another. If only his old grade school had a high school to graduate to. It just got worse, though.

For most of the first and second quarter of the school year, he opted to sink deeper and deeper into his Art Club activities with his kind-of friends (more like acquaintances) known to the rest of the school campus as the Dead Kids.

The Art Club tasked them to do any sort of major project for the class as their final test, be it a children's book or comics. Florante opted for comics.

He drew the comics on his sketchbook. On the back of his notebook. On any sheets of paper he could get his hands on. He copied characters and backgrounds from published comic books and posters before he felt confident enough to create designs of his own.

He mixed and matched the clothes he copied from his big sisters' fashion magazines unto the characters he made that he based on the shows he watched and the people he interacted with.

He even drew comics made of stapled-together scratch bond paper from used printouts, drawing at the blank parts of the paper with pencil sketches and panels made with rulers and whatnot.

Not just for the Art Club. But for himself. For fun. For the attention it got him every time he drew someone's favorite anime or cartoon character.

He even featured some of his, well, acquaintances, and classmates in the scratchy, sketchy comics he made with sparse backgrounds and honestly questionable anatomy.

It was his only way of connecting with people, since he was such a socially awkward kid.

Because they belonged in a quite religious high school founded and funded by Franciscan Capuchins, the superheroes and protagonists of the comics Florante made were all based on Christian mythology, particularly about angels.

He got the idea of making comics about angels one day after reading "Paradise Lost". Or the condensed CliffNotes study guide version of it since he didn't have a copy of the original book and he found reading passages of the poem to be quite boring.

It was part of the series of CliffNotes available in Fatima High's library, which also included novels like "The Pearl" and "Canterbury Tales".

Inside "Paradise Lost" (or its complete summary, at the very least), he learned about the four most famous angels. Archangels, to be exact.

He fell in love with the idea of angels battling demons through the centuries, from the infancy of man to the present.

He also read about demons since every angel needed a demon to fight, right? Even though demons and angels were two sides of the same coin.

He then incorporated many of his classmates in his comics. He even dreamed of them becoming angels and demons in his so-called works.

Some of the characters were his friends, the Dead Kids. Others were his acquaintances and classmates he knew of but barely interacted with. Many of them were his bullies portrayed as antagonists. As demons.

It served as his way of coping. His only method of venting.

He dreamed of the stories concerning all of them in their angel and demon forms and then put them to paper. Even though some of the girls in his class chided him for drawing girls with huge boobs and questionable anatomy.

His quaint little comics served as his dream journal of sorts. His bullies ended up becoming the demon antagonists of his made-up stories, even though he never revealed their names or drew them too accurately enough for them to notice his use of their likenesses in his works.

His comics was one of the ways he dealt with the constant bullying he got from his classmates or even his so-called friends that treated him more as their mascot or gopher for drinks and odd errands than an actual comrade.

They were treating him no different than Laura did, actually.

***

Back to the relative present...

Tonight, Florante dreamed.

He dreamed of doing things he normally couldn't do. Out of wishful thinking. Dissatisfaction. Despair. Hope.

He did it to vent his real-life frustrations elsewhere.

It was during these dreams that his innermost desires were realized. Embarrassing ones he couldn't verbalize since it involved admitting to himself some shameful things.

Like the fact that he didn't have any friends in his classroom. Or the fact that he felt more like a gopher than a friend to the Dead Kids, who were supposed to be his fellow weirdoes, in his desperate bid to belong.

Or the fact that he was one of the most heavily bullied or perhaps the most heavily bullied kid in their class. A "Dead Kid" in his own right.

Regardless, his dreams served as painkillers or Novocain to his bitter, nerve-wracking reality of loneliness and despair as a friendless outcast in his own school.

He was the new kid on the block who couldn't adjust to his new school, but then again he was also bullied back in his old school as well.

Tonight, he could pretend to be "normal" for once, while his brain had clocked out and his consciousness drifted to slumber, his tears staining his pillows at memories he tried to block out.

Traces of these traumatizing past events remained in his psyche, as evidenced by the things that he dreamed about. This allowed him to connect the dots on why he was dreaming what he dreamed.

For example, the beautiful visage of Dalisay Hidalgo quickly crossed his mind, with her smiling at him and actually talking to him while ignoring her brother and Alonzo.

Like that would ever happen. But it was a harmless dream, so it was okay for him to indulge in his fantasies.

She looked so cute. Like an angel, really. A Gothic Lolita angel with a defiant fashion sense that rebelled against their plain school uniform of plaid skirts and cotton button-down blouses.

She was much nicer than Laura, whom he once unwittingly sang a sarcastic happy birthday to thinking it was her gay best friend's birthday instead. When he found out it was her birthday instead, he wished that the ground would swallow him whole.

He inwardly cringed. She must've thought of him as such a loser.

He also dreamed what any 14-year-old boy would dream about.

He dreamed about girls. He dreamed about romance. He dreamed about naughty things.

However, in between those dreams of passion and desire were dreams about his countless regrets.

He dreamed that his bullies would leave him alone. He dreamed about getting real friends, or at least getting closer to the so-called Dead Kids. Even they seemed ashamed of hanging out with him, and they were the school's designated weirdo group!

He dreamed of never doing that cringy thing with drawing Laura's face and placing it unto a nude body (or a rough sketch of one) like some sort of thirsty stalker.

He dreamed that Laura would forgive him or realize what had happened between them was a simple misunderstanding.

He dreamed of him and her becoming friends instead of her giving him the cold shoulder since that fateful day.

He dreamed that they'd fall in love, get married, have babies, and die old together.

Even if none of those dreams happened, he still wanted to become a normal high school kid that wasn't the butt of everyone's jokes, dammit!

But tonight, his dream was different.

More intense. Stranger. Like it wasn't a dream at all.

But somehow, he was aware it was all a dream. A lucid dream, perhaps?

Regardless, it was in this dreamscape where he acted upon his most violent fantasies. He was in control of himself and the events surrounding him this time around, so he got to boss around his bullies for once.

He did in the dream things he couldn't do in real life or even draw in his comics against the so-called demons of his life.

He punished them. Humiliated them.

He then murdered them. He had the power to do so now. In his dream, he had the same powers as the protagonist of his comics. The power of a lightning storm or one of those raging typhoons that regularly battered the Philippines.

Better he do it within the confines of a dream than in real life, right? He could "vent" better that way. It was a healthy, therapeutic method of venting.

However, when he woke up, his dream became horrible reality.

What he had taught had happened during midnight in his dreams had instead occurred in the early morning while classes were supposed to be going on.

He looked down and saw that his hands were covered in blood. Not his own.

'...Eh? What's going on?'

Right before him were the bodies of people on the floor. Many of them his classmates. Some of them not. Several of them burning to a crisp. Like something out of Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted.

'Susmaryosep!'

Wait, what had happened here?

No, he hadn't woken up! He was still dreaming, right? This was all a nightmare!

He then saw her.

The angelic winged beauty made of floating water that reminded him of one of the four most famous angels appeared before him.

She was a breathtakingly gorgeous, angelic woman. Or the huge statue of one brought to life. She looked really familiar, though.

Faintly, as if his half-awake mind was still dreaming in shock and in pure disbelief of what had happened, he wondered what the person before him reminded him of.

He was at the mercy of a terribly beautiful sight from the ether, her strands of hair flowing upwards like they were underwater or a bonfire, her fingertips engulfed in dancing tendrils of water.

Looking at her was like dying from a siren's song, but more visually impactful rather than visceral. So like staring straight into the sun. Or Medusa's eyes.

Except this time, Medusa was an attractive young woman instead of a monster with snakes for hair.

"This is the end of the line for you. I won't let you hurt anyone else, Flor. Prepare to die."

Man, his mind was such a mess. How did he get there? What happened? Who was this beautifully horrifying creature? This biblical angel?

Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Azrael.

Or was it Uriel?

Anyway, those were the Four Archangels, right?

...Right?

***

To Be Continued...

The first chapter is finally done. My first completely original work not based on someone else's idea. I've had this title and this work in my head since the 1990s. I'm glad I now have the opportunity to make it into reality.

Farewell, Abdiel

#angels #gabriel #raphael #demons #philippines #fantasy of evolution #original fiction

0 notes

ryodan · 7 years ago

Note

I was wondering what interested you about your religion enough to convert to it,I'm sorry if This is to personal a question,and I hope I haven't offended you.(I myself am not religious)

I am fine with personal questions, anon, so it’s okay. Well to be honest with you it was a lot of things that drew me to Islam. First off, I’d like to say that I’ve always been a very logical person. I like clear cut, direct facts, and that’s why I’m a physics student haha. When I was first in my ‘religion search phase’, most of the ones I had come across were based off spirituality and all these lovely things that I personally couldn’t find a religion in as they seemed more like an ideology than a religion to follow. I gave Judaism some thought, but although I have come to have a soft spot for their familial values, It wasn’t enough for me to convert. As for Christianity, and I know a lot of Christians say this chapter is allegorical, but I was ready to rule it out by the first chapter of the book of genesis. As I said as a person who likes facts, reading something like the Earth and plants were created first and then the sun was a bit too far fetched to commit to. I did continue reading, and searching, but that only made me shy away from it further. I think the quote i’d use her is ‘so you began to follow a religion and called it “love” in disguise because love can be good but love can be blind’. The worshiping of Jesus is also a man made invention so again, Christianity is a religion I heavily shy away from. When I came to read the Quran (I am half arab so I started reading it in Arabic, altho it was very hard at times, it is the only way to see its beauty, none arab Muslims get shown this beauty by either going through the steep road of learning Arabic, or us Arab speakers doing our prophet given duty of teaching the message of God to humanity when they ask to ofc) I think I was really surprised by how phonic and beautifully strung it is. The internal rhythm, the rhyming that lasted an entire chapter, the words were always strong, never even remotely colloquial, and I always still say the book you truly feel the power of a God from is the Quran, in fact in the shortest chapter of the quran there are 11 linguistic devices used in 3 words, including a prophecy that came true. And that is not even a new concept to the Quran, the language of it in itself is a miracle, there is a nice example of this in a lecture i quite like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Z25CLXE1w. And a good chapter showing how phonic it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WvHMNuhH3Y I also really appreciated how even if the words were incredibly poetic, it was still a very direct book. I liked the morals behind it. Equity, freedom of thought, justice, freeing of slaves, kindness, compassion, pity, tolerance, brotherhood, love, it’s peaceful but it’s not pacifist, the power of God truly comes to show in the format that’s like ‘here is why you should believe, here are things you should keep in mind if you do..if you dont want to, there is no compulsion in anything, its not exactly like God who created this entire universe needs you, but if you do want to save yourself from a hell so gruesome it makes your days on earth feel like hours,then I suggest you have an open mind’. I also liked the story of creation, in the sense that it wasn’t a damnation onto Earth as in the bible, I also liked how the angels themselves predicted how humanity would act with the blood shed and corruption. Stories of prophets even though had their fair share of glittery miracles, were still logical. For example: Jesus’s birth in the Quran is a lot less fun than in the bible, there are no mangers or Josephs or singing angels, it’s a woman in hard labor, in the middle of the desert screaming in agony, at some point even hoping she would just die instead of face all of this pain and probable future humiliation on her own, until God comforts in a miracle her through her own child, and surprisingly it feels a whole lot more authentic and touching than a singing angel. I personally prefer this to be the first miracle rather than water to wine one haha ‘So she conceived him, and she withdrew with him to a remote place.And the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree. She said, “Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.” But he called her from below her, “Do not grieve; your Lord has provided beneath you a stream. And shake toward you the trunk of the palm tree; it will drop upon you ripe, fresh dates.So eat and drink and be contented. And if you see from among humanity anyone, say, ‘Indeed, I have vowed to the Most Merciful abstention, so I will not speak today to [any] man.’ ”Then she brought him to her people, carrying him. They said, “O Mary, you have certainly done a thing unprecedented.O sister of Aaron, your father was not a man of evil, nor was your mother unchaste.”So she pointed to him. They said, “How can we speak to one who is in the cradle a child?”[Jesus] said, “Indeed, I am the servant of God . He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet. And He has made me blessed wherever I am and has enjoined upon me prayer and charity as long as I remain alive And [made me] dutiful to my mother, and He has not made me a wretched tyrant.And peace is on me the day I was born and the day I will die and the day I am raised alive.”

Okay, so if there are so many miracles which seem outside the scope of logic, and you are a person of science how did you convert? I think the actual time where I started crying realizing I was already a Muslim was when I was reading the verse ‘And the heaven We constructed with strength, and indeed, We are [its] expander.‘. The Quran is full of science that in no way shape or form was known to the 7th century arabians living in a desert. From the expansion of the universe, to the embryonic development, to the orbit of the planets, to the reflection of light and to the finger prints we have. There is a video mentioning most of the scientific miracles of the Quran here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d16CpWp-ok&t=304s. It also predicted battle outcomes after the prophets death, and identified points in the land that were yet to be known to humanity and then it hit me that all of this was revealed to man 1400 years ago,to a man who could not read or write but would just recite what he was told. That was when I fell in love with not only the merciful God of islam (who said when he first created the universe he decreed upon himself that his mercy precedes his anger) but truly the greatest man to have walked this earth Mohammed Ibnu Abdullah. If I were to explain this mans appeal, and how strong his message was I’d use his followers to vouch for it, The first muslims were tortured severely, and the first martyr in Islam was a woman named Sumayah, who was stabbed in her privates,spat on, and murdered but she still would not go back on her faith no matter what they did to her. Another story of a companion,a black slave called Bilal Ibn Rabah who was forced to labor with a sizzling hot rock on his back, as well as whipped and yet proclaimed ‘ahad, ahad’ ‘one God, one God’ to the pagans of Arabia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49SpfNxy4_8

what drew them individually to Islam was (at first) the man who’s message demanded for womens rights at a time were women were buried alive, and demanded rights for black people saying that there is no difference between a black man and a white man except by righteousness and good action. He was soft and lenient, but still a respected leader. A man who he didnt even let animal rights out of his sight, forbidding his followers from even showing the cattle the knife when you slay it to eat it as not to scare it ‘you have no right to kill the animal twice’, a man who entered the city that tortured him, threw him out with his head hung low saying ‘today is the day of forgiveness’ , a man who walked through a city that stoned him until his shoe was filed with his blood yet harbored no ill feelings to the people, saying there might be a future believer among them, a man who just as God stated is ‘a mercy to all of man kind’ Here is a series about him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al8VKtn3ilI and a slam poem about terrorists tainting his name https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQVMdh6d3h0

Reading his stories, his sayings and the book of God that he recited made me whole heartedly believe in this religion. Islam brings me ease of mind, I love it more and more the more I read and search into it (i recommend the blog @partytilfajr for clearing up any questions you might have and I can help in any way too), it makes reasonable and scientific sense and yet it is such a beautiful miraculous message. It mixes ideology and faith, but still encourages free thinking and freedom and I am proud to say I have submitted my will to God and I bear witness that there is only one God and Mohammed is his final messenger 😊

To my past atheist self I say

He Was The Creator of the Universe, for all we know even Moreand So Whatif we can’t see him, i mean what you acting like our universe is smalli mean there still so much we’re still yet to explorei mean there’s still so many things as human beings we still haven’tseentouchedheardor sawi mean our eyes can’t even handle the sight of the Sunso how can we possibly handle the sight of our Lord

#ask #Islam #Quran #Muslim convert #long post

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catcomixzstudios · 7 years ago

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How To Life Chapter 43 - Christianity

The Abrahamic God Quartet Part 2: God Takes A Fucking Chill Pill

You remember the God of Abraham, don’t you? That weird genocidal asshole who could never quite get humanity to be the way he wanted? Well, he’s back and… oddly much more chill than before.

Welcome to the second part of the Abrahamic God Quartet: Christianity. My personal feelings on this one are mixed to say the least. On the one hand, it is currently the largest faith in the world and has historically and currently done tons of good for it. It’s considered pretty much the foundation for Western culture (for better or worse) and has influenced many people to do and create great things.

But you can’t be a part of the largest religion in the world and not have some horrible things come out of it too. Along with the good, Christianity has also brought us the Crusades, Inquisitions, and televangelists. The story behind the faith itself has way less bloodshed than the prequel, which instead gets largely replaced with guilt-tripping. So there’s that.

Like most religions before it, I’m willing to wager that a majority of people involved are reasonably decent people. I may have some disagreements about certain aspects of their faith, but I’m by no means trying to take away people’s ability to believe in what they do. In exchange, however, I plan to poke fun and point out serious flaws to it because I also have the right to believe what I do.

You remember back in the first part, the scene where God got pissed at Adam and Eve from eating an apple that gave them knowledge of good and evil? Well God still has a hate-on about that. Because of that (completely preventable) event, humanity was forever doomed to be sinful (sin being something that upsets God). After how things went with the last Testament, God had decided to take a new approach to try and fix this issue he’s technically responsible for. Much like getting cold diarrhea on a hot day, God’s way of helping seems like it would make things better, but it really just makes a bigger mess.

Christianity kind of picks up where the Old Testament left off; God had kind of just fucked off after multiple bouts of genocide and strange dickitry. Things were quiet for a while, until God told a woman, Mary, that she is going to have a surprise baby complements of the holy spirit (whatever that used to be slang for). Her husband Joseph was naturally thrown off by this (since the two have never had sex), but he eventually dreamed about an angel telling him that God’s the baby-daddy, so everything’s good.

The baby, Jesus, was kind of a big deal. Many considered him to be the King of the Jews. Word began to spread about this and eventually reached the ears of King Herod. Being kind of a prick, he ordered all of the male infants be put to death in the city the family is residing him, Bethlehem. Luckily, Joseph got another angel dream warning him to get the fuck out before said baby massacre. They eventually found themselves in Nazareth.

We jump ahead to Jesus working to become a minister. The first step was his baptism. The man Jesus picked for the job, John, was immediately in awe of Jesus. That probably got exacerbated by the sky opening up and a booming voice telling John that Jesus is his son. (Jesus is kind of also God himself too, but explaining that particular relationship would take a whole other book.) More people reasonably began to believe that Jesus might just be an important figure. So important is he that the Devil (an alleged douchebag) visited Jesus while he’s alone fasting (or rather, starving) in a desert. The Devil tempted Jesus, but he ain’t having none of that shit.

Jesus really started to gain followers by that point. He had a relatively successful sermon with some good points, turned loaves of bread into fish (thanks?), and walked on water. He appointed twelve apostles to act as his main bros and help spread the overall mostly good messages he had. Jesus was on a roll.

He continued to travel around, magically curing diseases and preaching about ridding yourself of sin and devoting yourself to God. And it’s easy to make a good case for yourself when you’re literally bringing people back from the dead with your magic powers. Jesus even made time to hang with some of his apostle bros, where he is surrounded by a cloud that claims him as his son. They chose to believe that it was the voice of God, and not some jackass with a fog machine and a megaphone behind some rocks.

Shit started getting a little more heavy around this point, though. Jesus had gained enemies as well as followers, and their time for retribution is coming. The Man himself, meanwhile, started getting more aggressive with his campaign, including one instance where he starts wrecking up a temple that he alleges is full of thieves and scoundrels. He began prophesying about stuff like wars, earthquakes, and the cosmos themselves going ape-shit within the time of the people listening to his words. He even started getting in conflicts with the other Jewish leaders of the time.

The enemies Jesus had gained finally catch up with him. During what was dubbed “The Last Supper”, he foresaw that one of his apostles would betray him. I imagine one of them, Judas, was probably very nervous at that dinner after that for no particular reason. Immediately after that bummer of a dinner, Jesus was caught by the cops. Surprise surprise, it turned out that Judas sold him out to a Jewish elder who had gotten quite sick of Jesus muscling in on their turf.

Jesus was put on trial. The overseeing judge was reluctant to punish Jesus, but luck was not on his side, and he got sent to be crucified anyway. After his death, he was wrapped up and they store him in a rock tomb. The tomb was put under guard by the request of the Jewish priests.

That isn’t the end of the story, however. When someone went to check up on what should have been Jesus’ dead body, they find the place empty! The only logical answer was that he rose from the dead. This got apparently proven as he began appearing to the apostles who didn’t betray him and telling them to spread the word about his teachings. Once he was done screwing around on Earth, he got beamed up by a ray of light up to Heaven (or possibly to an alien spaceship) to be the right hand of God (whatever that used to be slang for).

That’s pretty much the end of the interesting stuff in the New Testament. Alot of it is repeating stuff from before followed by boring stories. The only other point of interest I found was the very last book, The Book of Revelations. Man, it’s mostly boring up to that point, but the New Testament goes out in a spectacular bang of insanity.

As for afterlife beliefs, Christianity comes with Heaven (the good afterlife) and Hell (the bad one). Whether you end up where you do is because of deeds or how you worship depends on what branch you believe in. Honestly, neither is really to my tastes; Heaven seems to boringly good, and Hell seems too full of fire and pain.

GOOD IDEAS:

- Jesus did teach some good ideas (treat others the way you want to be treated, judge not or you’ll be judged, respect others, etc)

- I will give it props for being the most “down-to-Earth” religion that has been covered so far. Most are just about Gods dicking around humanity, but this one actually seems to care about us

- Revelations is completely bat-shit insane and hilarious read

BAD IDEAS:

- Jesus didn’t come up with the golden rule before anyone else did

- Judaism didn’t really have a concept of an afterlife, but Christianity just had to bring one in

- Jesus is a mary-sue

LIKELIHOOD OF TRUTH: ~51%. While Christianity does bring forth many good morals, some of these end up ignored by the people who still believe in it today. The story itself does have a more personal touch since the human characters actually have a role in the story (besides being targets for sex/murder from gods). The suffering that Jesus went through loses a bit of its edge when you consider that, as Matt Dillahunty of the Atheist Experience best described it, it’s basically “God sacrificing himself to himself to serve as a loophole for rules he himself created.” I get that he apparently died for our sins, but usually the tragic part of martyrs is the fact that they die and stay dead for a cause. In terms of content, it’s certainly not the worst. It is followed by all kinds of people (for better or worse) and remains a cornerstone of Western culture. And for what it’s worth, has a way more interesting story than the next entry in the Abrahamic God Quartet.

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#how to life #htl #chapter 43 #christianity #religions #advice #humanity #life #philosophy #humor

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goswagcollectorfire · 4 years ago

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CARL’S BLOG: BLUE SKIES OF EL DORADO, ARKANSAS; carlsblog.online; http://sbpra.com/CarlJBarger

5-26-20: Catherine Bradford’s Christmas message to her entire family.

Mother was normally the first to start off the sharing time,

but today she announced she wanted to be last.

Finally, the time came, and Mother stepped forward.

“I know you’ve wondered why I wanted to be last. Well, to

tell you the truth I have got a lot to say. Please excuse me if I get

sentimental and emotional.

“I want to start by saying this year, 1866, has been the best

year of my life. I can’t think of another year that can top this one.

“One of the hardest things I’ve ever endured in my life

was leaving part of my children and grandchildren behind in

Autauga and Dallas Counties. I started praying after coming to

Union County that someday God would bring those from Dallas

and Autauga Counties here.

“Take a good look around this room. Today every member

of my family is present. Praise the Lord for answered prayer!”

Everyone in the parlor started applauding.

“I know if James could be here, he would be praising the

Lord and rejoicing with me.

“I want all you to know how much I love you. You are the

reason I live. Every morning when I wake up, I thank my Lord

for my large family. God has given me Godly children and marvelous

grandchildren. Every day I look forward to getting up

and helping Penelope with my grandchildren. There is not a day

goes by that I am not thinking about every one of you and what

amazing things you are doing in your lives.

“I’m proud of all of you. You give me hope and something

to look forward to daily.

“I’m amazed to see what my older grandchildren have

already accomplished in their lives.

“Today, I want to do something I’ve never done at Christmas.

Dent has already shared with everyone his traditional

reading of the Christmas Story. He always does a great job. My

story is a little different, in that it consists of certain events of

the Bible that have sequentially come about because of God’s

plan for all of us.

“It means a lot to me and has given me reassurance over

the years that we have a loving God, one who meets our every

need. It is a story that we should remember all through our lives,

a story that I have treasured throughout my adult life and from the

time I first came to know Jesus Christ as my savior.

“Several years ago, I taught a girls’ Sunday school class. It

gave me great pleasure to work with those girls. At first, not all

the girls knew Jesus Christ as their savior, but before I stopped

teaching the class, every one of them had accepted Jesus.

“To pave the way to salvation, I taught them a brief history

of whom God really is. I did this through exposing them to Bible

facts. Here is that story.

“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.

“He then created man in His own image. He made the first

man, from clay and breathed life into him. God called him Adam.

“After God created Adam, He saw that Adam was lonely. He

decided that Adam needed a helpmate, so he put him into a deep

sleep and removed one of his ribs and made a woman. He called

her Eve. Eve became Adam’s wife and helpmate.

“God gave Adam and Eve a beautiful place to live, the Garden

of Eden. God instructed Adam that he and Eve could eat

any fruit in the garden, except that from the tree of knowledge

of good and evil. God said, ‘If you do, you will surely die.’

“In the Garden of Eden, Satan lived. Satan, with his

craftiness, convinced Eve that she and Adam would not die if

they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

They disobeyed God and ate fruit from the tree of knowledge

of good and evil. Their disobedience brought sin into the

world. As a punishment, God expelled them from the Garden

of Eden.

“Although God was angry with Adam and Eve, He blessed

them with three sons, Cain, Abel, and Seth. Cain killed his

brother, Abel, out of greed and jealousy and fled the country.

“Many years passed, and the earth was populated with sinful

people. God grieved that he had created man.

“God looked down from Heaven and spoke to a man named

Noah. Noah was a Godly man who found favor with God, and

God chose him to build an Ark. Noah filled the Ark with two

of every kind of animals, reptiles, and anything that could walk,

crawl, or fly.

“After the Ark was built, God caused a great flood to come

upon the earth. The rain fell for forty days and forty nights and

covered the entire earth. Every living human being and creature

that God had created was destroyed except for Noah and his

family and the life Noah took onto the Ark.

“After the rain stopped, the waters eventually receded into

the seas and rivers. Noah and his family left the ark and started

replenishing the earth. God blessed Noah and his family.

“Several years after the flood, mankind returned to their

sinful and wicked ways. Instead of destroying mankind again,

God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to be born of Mary, a virgin, for

the purpose of saving mankind. Jesus was born in Bethlehem of

Judea. He grew up in the city of Nazareth. He worked with his

earthly father, Joseph, as a carpenter.

“At the age of thirty, he started His ministry, by calling out

twelve disciples to accompany Him in His ministry. He taught

them many good things. Jesus enabled them to heal the sick and

afflicted and perform miracles.

“During the three-year period that Jesus ministered to the

lost, he faced opposition every day from the Pharisees and Sadducees.

They considered Jesus’ teaching a threat to what they

taught regarding the Law of Moses or Jewish law.

“After seeing the many followers of Jesus, the Pharisees

and Sadducees made plans to kill Jesus. They were successful

in turning the heart of one of Jesus’ disciples, Judas, to plot a

way to have Jesus arrested. They were successful, and Jesus was

brought before Herod and was later crucified on the cross.

“Jesus paid the price for our sins by dying on the cross. He

was buried in a tomb with a large rock rolled over the entrance

of the tomb. He lay in the tomb for three days and three nights.

On the third day, an angel of the Lord came and rolled back the

rock from the empty tomb.

“After Jesus rose from the grave, He joined his disciples for

a meal. Jesus continued his teaching to his Apostles and was

seen by more than five hundred people during the forty-five

days before ascending to his Father in Heaven.

“Our Jesus lives today in Heaven. He intercedes for us in our

prayer lives. He is there for us to call upon any minute of the day.

He is our one and only savior.

“The Bible tells us that whosoever believes that Jesus Christ

is the Son of God can be saved. All we have to do is confess our

sins, repent, and ask Jesus to come into our hearts and we will

be saved.

“John 3:16, says, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave

His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should

not perish but have everlasting life. ‘

“The Bible teaches us that God loves us despite our sins.

“He gives us a way to be forgiven of our sins by praying for

forgiveness. It is not His will that any man should perish and go

to hell. He has prepared a place called Heaven, where we will

live with Him for an eternity.

“My whole point in telling you this story is to remind everyone

here that we are all sinners. We are saved by grace and not

by works. It is my hope that everyone in this room will come to

know Jesus Christ as their one and only savior.

“I want to end my talk with these words of encouragement.

It is worked for me all these years, and it will work for you as

well.

“Always pray, keep your faith, trust Him in all you do, and

sit back and count your blessings. There will be many; I can

assure you of that!”

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updcbc · 5 years ago

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March 10, 2019 - “Defining Our Faith in Christ: The Confession of Peter” Matthew 16:13-23

Click READ MORE to read the full sermon.

Introduction

Jesus is the most revered and the worst despised person on earth. This is such a sobering thought. A prophetic word about him was indeed true. When Jesus was a child, his earthly parents, Joseph and Mary, consecrated him before the LORD in the temple in Jerusalem. Simeon was then at the temple courts. He was an elderly and righteous Hebrew who earnestly waited for the coming of the Messiah. When he saw Jesus, he took him in his arms and worshiped God who honored his dream to see the Messiah before he would die. And he declared a revealing prophecy about Jesus.

“This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.” (Lk. 2:34b-35a)

Among the Hebrew people, there is a great divide among them between those who embrace Jesus and those who blaspheme him. And among the Gentiles, there is a clear distinction between the wise and the fool for those who love Jesus and from those who hate him. Who really is Jesus? This is a staggering question that unveils the inmost thought and pierces the heart of every human being. We make it more personal. Who really is Jesus to us? This defines our lives and determines our eternal destiny. When Simon Peter followed Jesus to become fisher of men, he set his hope on him as the Messiah. Yet as he walked with him every day, listened to his wise teachings and saw his awesome miracles, he wondered who Jesus really was. Who really was Jesus that even the dead became alive and the wind and the wave obeyed him at his word.

Jesus set the historic moment of his self disclosure. It took place in Caesaria Philippi after almost three years he had been with his twelve apostles. In a private setting he asked them of who he was as understood by the people and by them as his close disciples (16:13-15). Simon Peter stood up and gave a revealing confession about Jesus (16:16-20). Jesus affirmed his confession and foretold his true mission on earth (16:21-23). The self-disclosure of Jesus was a defining moment for the apostles. At this crucial crossroad we can either follow or abandon Jesus.

A. The Defining Question (16:13-15)

Jesus knew that the hour of his departure was near and he must fulfill his work on earth in accordance to the will of his Father in heaven as written in the Scriptures. And the time had come for him to reveal himself to his close disciples. The essence of his mysterious redemptive work can only be understood in light of the true knowledge of who he really was. Given this absolute necessity Jesus disclosed himself to his apostles.

1. The Public Opinion

Jesus posed a disturbing question to his twelve apostles.

“When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’ They replied, ‘Some say, John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’” (16:13-14)

In the earthly ministry of Jesus, the farthest place he traveled with his apostles was Caesaria Philippi. It was the northeastern-most part of Israel called the Golan Heights near the ancient territory of Dan. It is located in the foothills of Mount Hermon, known by the Arabs as “Mountain of the Chief” since it is the highest mountain in Palestine. At Caesaria Philippi there is a massive wall of rock more than 100 feet (31 meters) straight up and about 500 feet (156 meters) wide. On top of this enormous rock the city of Caesaria Philippi was built. Beneath the massive rock was a large cave known in ancient times as a gate to the underworld or the gate of hell where pagans committed idolatry and immorality in the name of their gods. The original name of the city was Paneas in honor of the Greek god Pan, a half-man, half-goat deity. Philip, a son of Herod the Great and tetrarch of the region of Iturea, the modern Syria, renamed the city to Caesaria Philippi, in tribute to Augustus Caesar the Emperor of Rome who claimed himself as a god to be worshiped in the Empire. The ancient Caesaria Philippi, a royal city built upon a massive rock, was a center of cultic and idolatrous worship.

It was in this city that Jesus asked his apostles, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” Jesus called himself the “Son of Man” though he was fully conscious of who he really was. In the gospel narratives, this was the first time that Jesus made this direct question to his apostles. He had been with them for almost three years. They saw the great crowd who followed Jesus and heard the public opinion about him. Jesus knew well about it. He was not simply soliciting for mindset information but on how the apostles internalized such public perception.

The apostles gave a categorical answer. The primary figure that the people perceived of Jesus was a prophet. They took him as a prophet like that of John the Baptist who then had been put to death by King Herod (Mk. 6:27). He was also believed to have the spirit of the prophet Elijah whom the Jews were expecting as spoken by the prophet Malachi (Mal. 4:5). He was also perceived like the prophet Jeremiah in whose time had grieved for the suffering of his people and called them to return to the LORD (Jer. 1:5). The Jews took Jesus as the coming prophet whom Moses had prophesied who would teach Israel the word of God and lead them as his flock (Deut. 18:15).

The apostles themselves shared the same public opinion about Jesus as a prophet. Indeed, Jesus was a prophet, but he was more than a great prophet. Moreover, people believed in him as a Rabbi who taught with authority and power, but he was more than a great Teacher. The crowd followed him as a man of wonders who made awesome miracles, but he was more than a great miraculous worker. The Israelites knew that Jesus was from Nazareth. And because he came from an obscure village and was raised from a poor family, the people questioned his credibility and doubted if he could ever lead them into significant path of greatness. Yes, Jesus was a Nazarene, but he was more than an ordinary man. Who then really is Jesus of Nazareth? Such lingering thought bewildered the apostles. It is a deep concern for everyone who seeks the absolute truth.

2. The Apostolic Dilemma

The apostles did not expect for Jesus to make a direct question to them. “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am” (16:15)? They were confronted with the most difficult question in their lives. In their long journey with Jesus they wrestled with this serious inquiry amongst themselves. Now, they must settle the matter once and for all. And their answer would define their lives and faith in Jesus. We could imagine the deafening silence in their midst. In the corner of their eyes they glanced to one another with a staggering thought. Inwardly they asked each other, “What shall we say?” In great fear no one seemed to dare speak. We ask ourselves, “What is our answer to the crucial question of Jesus?”

B. The Great Revelation (16:16-20)

In that defining crossroad at Caesaria Philippi, the world of the apostles stood still and their faith in Jesus was in a balance. Jesus personally asked them, “But how about you, who do you say I am?” Simon Peter broke the dreadful silence in their midst. And he spoke of who Jesus was. The wonder of it all, his great confession served as the solid foundation of the Christian faith. How can we be sure of this?

1. The Confession of Peter

Listen to the word of Peter. And the world must take this to heart.

“Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." (16:16)

Let us give a careful thought to the confession of Simon Peter. What is the manner of his confession? His confession was not in a form of a question, “Aren’t you the Christ, the Son of the living God?” To do such would suggest, on one hand, that he was not presumptuous and dogmatic and yearned for confirmation to his inquiry. On the other hand, should he have had answered in question that would be understood that he was not certain of his answer—and we presume that was not the kind of answer Jesus desired to hear. We also observe that Peter did not say, “I think you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” If that would be the case, it would be taken as a mere personal opinion and defies the rule of absolute truth. Furthermore, we also notice that Peter did not say, “I believe you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Faith is definitely important for without such it would be impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6). Nevertheless, if Peter would have had stated his confession on this higher level, the Christian faith seemed to anchor upon his subjective personal faith instead of the objective plain truth of who Jesus is. How then did Simon Peter answer the question of Jesus? Listen to his word, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Peter declared his confession with deep conviction and defined certainty. And we may say it emphatically that his great confession was anchored upon absolute truth which he embraced with solid faith without any shadow of doubt.

And what is the message of his confession? First of all, Jesus is the Messiah. The Hebrew word “Messiah” with its Greek equivalent “Christ,” means, “The Anointed One.” What does this mean? Jesus is the One whom the Father in heaven has chosen as the perfect divine revelation for human beings to know God and through him alone brought the great salvation of the sinful world and established the kingdom of God on earth under his sovereign rule (Heb. 1:1-3). The whole of creation, including the Empire of Rome and our personal lives as well, are in the hands of Jesus who is the Lord of all (Col. 1:16-17).

Secondly, Jesus is the Son of the living God. Peter made this confession at Caesaria Philippi, a Roman city dedicated for emperor worship and pagan idolatry. Who is Jesus? The confession of Simon Peter was staggering. Jesus is the eternal Son of God equal with God the Father in heaven! When Simon Peter made his confession, in effect, he defied Caesar as god and rid of any form of idolatrous worship. Jesus as God is worthy of absolute worship.

We ask a serious question. Is the confession of Peter expressed the communal faith of the twelve apostles? In light of the biblical narratives, the confession of Peter was a manifesto of the apostolic faith in Jesus. Andrew believed in Jesus as the Lamb of God and the Messiah (Jn. 1:36, 41). Thomas affirmed his faith in Jesus and called him, “My Lord and my God” (Jn. 20:28). John the Beloved testified in his gospel account that Jesus is the eternal God the Son who became flesh (Jn. 1:1, 14). Even Judas Iscariot was fully convinced that Jesus is God for when he betrayed him he was filled with remorse that he betrayed an innocent blood (Mt. 27:4). Matthew and Luke closed their gospel accounts with the eleven apostles worshiping Jesus before he ascended to heaven (Mt. 28:17; Lk. 24:52). In the Scriptures, no one is worshiped but God.

What does this mean to us? We also wrestle with the universal question, “Who is Jesus?” In a personal note, “Who really is Jesus to us?” Indeed, Jesus is more than a great Jewish Rabbi. He is more than a great miraculous worker. He is more than an ordinary carpenter from Nazareth. And he is more than a good man with the highest moral standards. Rather, Jesus is the Messiah, the full divine revelation through whom we can know God and for us to experience his saving grace and enjoy the fullness of life (Jn. 1:18, 29; 10:10). Above all, Jesus is the Son of the living God, the eternal God the Son equal with God the Father and with God the Holy Spirit (Lk. 3:21-22; 2 Cor. 13:14; 1 Pet. 1:2). And at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that “Jesus Christ is Lord” for the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:10-11). The confession of Simon Peter was the solid foundation of the Christian faith. And how can we really be sure of this?

2. The Affirmation of Jesus

Listen to the word of Jesus.

“Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.’” (16:17)

The confession of Peter was the revelation of God the Father. The word “revelation,” apokalupsis in Greek, literally means uncovering or unveiling of a divine truth that is presented to the human mind as a direct work of God. Such was the case of the divine revelation of the Person of Jesus as the very work of God the Father directly given to Simon Peter. And why was Peter singled out? Our humble answer is to uphold the sovereign will of God. And we are deeply grateful that God chose to disclose himself to mortals. For no one can know who Jesus really is without the revealing work of God. Jesus declared of this absolute truth. And Jesus himself confirmed to Peter that he indeed, as revealed by his Father in heaven, is the Messiah and the Son of the living God. And we can stand upon this solid foundation of the Christian faith because it is written in the Scriptures, the living and enduring Word of God, under the sovereign inspiration of God the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. 1:20-21). The Bible is the revelation of God in history. And our faith in Jesus Christ the Son of God rests upon a sure and firm foundation.

We have to remind ourselves of a solemn warning. Not all who confess the name of Jesus and proclaim his name believe and embrace the true Jesus as revealed by God the Father and as written in the Holy Scriptures. We have to be warned that there are false teachers who are expert in twisting the teachings of the Bible who profess to know Jesus but in reality they are anti-Christ for they teach another Jesus. Who really is Jesus? Our Father in heaven revealed to Simon Peter that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. This is the solid confession of Peter that laid the firm foundation of the Christian faith. Jesus is God the Son, the second Person of the Triune God, who became flesh. Any teaching contrary to this divine revelation comes from the Evil One who is the father of lies (Jn. 8:44; 1 Jn. 2:22; 4:1-3). For us who believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God, like Peter, we are truly blessed before God.

3. The Declaration of Jesus

In an idolatrous city of Caesaria Philippi, Jesus revealed who he really is to his apostles. And in this ancient city built upon an enormous bedrock foundation, Jesus declared to his disciples his mission on earth.

“‘And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’” (16:18-19)

Jesus revealed that he will build his church on earth. In this particular passage, the word church, in Greek, ekklesia, literally means the called out ones, which Jesus referred to the whole company of the redeemed throughout in the present era of the New Testament. His declaration was in the future tense, “I will build my church.”

When Jesus said, “and on this rock I will build my church,” what “rock” was he referring to? Based on context and semantics, it seems to point to Peter himself and his confession of who Jesus is. Partly so, yes, because Peter is one among the apostles, together with the prophets, who served as pillars in laying the foundational truth of the church of Jesus Christ (Eph. 2:19-20a). In interpreting this passage, however, besides context and semantics, we also have to observe the hermeneutical rule about the meaning of words. The name “Peter” came from the Greek word “Petros” with an equivalent Aramaic word, “Cephas.” Petros or Cephas means literally a “detached stone.” Whereas, the word “rock” upon which Jesus will build his church came from the Greek word “Petra,” which literally means a “mass of rock” like the bedrock of Caesaria Philippi. What does this mean? The Petra which meant a massive rock was used as a metaphor that ultimately points to Jesus as the solid foundation and chief cornerstone of the church (1 Cor. 3:11; Eph. 2:20b).

Based upon this biblical perspective, we can have a better grasp about the Church. First of all, the Church exclusively belongs to Christ. Jesus said, “My church.” Second, Jesus is the absolute builder of his Church. Jesus said, “I will build my church.” Finally, Jesus is the great defender of his Church. Jesus said, “And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” The “gates of Hell’’ as pictured of the dark cave in Caesaria Philippi refers to all powers of darkness including Satan, demons and evildoers.

What does this mean to us? If we are in Christ, we belong to his Church. And in Jesus Christ, we exclusively belong to him as the absolute builder of our lives and the great guardian of our souls. Jesus himself is the “Petra” or the solid Rock in whom we anchor our lives (Is. 26:4).

The divine authority of binding and loosing is directly connected to the keys of the kingdom. In a natural realm, a key is used to unlock a closed door. Applied in a spiritual realm, the “keys of the kingdom” refer to the sovereign movement of God in opening the door of faith to the Jews and Gentiles through the proclamation of the gospel of Christ entrusted to the Church as the primary institution in advancing the kingdom of God on earth. The gospel of Christ was anchored upon the revelation of God the Father to Peter that Jesus is the Christ and the Son of the living God. It is of great interest for us to note that after Jesus revealed himself to his apostles he began to teach to them about his death and resurrection—the essence of his gospel of salvation.

The divine authority of binding and loosing that was given, not only to Peter and the apostles but to the whole church, is to proclaim the gospel of Christ that serves as the absolute key in calling out people through the gospel of Christ so they would be ushered into the kingdom of God. For those who believe the gospel will be “loosed” from sin and darkness and to be with God forever in heaven. But for those who do not believe they will remain “bound” in sin and darkness and cast away in hell forever. The authority of loosing and binding does not rest upon man but in God alone and the power of his Word. And our eternal destiny is determined by our response to the Son of the living God. Jesus gives a categorical pronouncement: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, but God’s wrath remains on him” (Jn. 3:36). The decision is ours.

4. The Prohibition of Jesus

At Caesaria Philippi, thus far, two great revelations were given to the apostles. The first is the revelation of God the Father that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of the living God. The second one is the revelation of Jesus that he will build his church as the primary agent in advancing his kingdom on earth. Having given these amazing revelations, he gave a warning to his apostles. “Then he warned his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ” (16:20). Why? It was because the people embraced a political agenda to enthrone Jesus as their king to build his own kingdom and liberate them from the Roman Empire. In fact, such messianic hope was likewise embraced by the apostles.

We pause awhile and ask ourselves. Who is Jesus to us and why do we follow him? It could be that we, like the people in the past, have a false knowledge about Jesus and follow him for wrong reasons. Or we, like the apostles, could have a true knowledge of who Jesus is but still follow him for our selfish ends. This calls for much searching of our hearts.

C. The Redemptive Declaration (16:21-23)

The great transition in the earthly ministry of Jesus took place at Caesaria Philippi. In that idolatrous city built upon a massive bedrock foundation, Jesus revealed himself to his disciples and his mission to build his church. This was followed with another disclosure about his redemptive work that unsettled them to the core.

1. The Disturbing Revelation

Here was the great twist of event.

“From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” (16:21)

After Jesus revealed his Person and his mission, he now disclosed to them privately about his sufferings in the hands of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. The apostles could have recalled the reason why they left Jerusalem was because the Jewish authorities plotted to kill him. Now, Jesus himself was saying a different tune. He foretold about his death and resurrection. Death! That grim word devastated the apostles.

2. Peter Confronted Jesus

It was the impulsive Simon who grabbed Jesus at a corner and confronted him face to face. “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ‘Never, Lord!’ he said. ‘This shall never happen to you’” (16:22)

What a contradiction! He called Jesus, “Lord,” yet he acted as one lording over him. At times we do just that as if we know better and place God under our command. And what an irony! Earlier Peter made a great confession about Jesus but now he was airing an outrageous contempt against him. In his defiant protest he used a strong word twice, Never! And he meant his word. No one dare touch Jesus. Peter would defend him to death. Why not? Jesus was their Messiah as King of the Jews!

3. Jesus Rebuked Peter

Jesus gave Simon a brazen look.

“Jesus turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.’” (16:23)

Such was a stern rebuke in its strongest expression. Simon Peter was making a journey between two worlds. He set his heart to follow Jesus but in his own terms. He left everything in following Jesus but gave no room whatsoever for his untimely death. Such closed mindedness if left unchecked would harden his heart from the gospel truth. And Jesus rebuked Peter affront for he was following the footstep of Satan whose only desire is to be a scheming stumbling block in outright opposition to the will of God. Such cutting edge confrontation was painful indeed. Yet Jesus had to be firm to bend the will and refine the heart of Peter. Jesus knew it well that his apostles could not comprehend the essence of his redemptive work in building his church through his death and resurrection. This great transition in his journey with his disciples was hard for them to bear. But Jesus must lead them to a higher ground of discipleship. Anyone who must follow him must take him at his word and yield his life at the cross of Christ even to death (16:24-25).

Conclusion

At Caesaria Philippi, Jesus made a historic transition in his earthly ministry. In that ancient idolatrous city built upon a massive bedrock foundation, Jesus made three great revelations to his apostles. First, he revealed himself as the Messiah and the Son of the living God. Second, he revealed his mission to build his Church. Third, he revealed his redemptive work anchored upon his death and resurrection. These threefold revelations are integrated. Jesus Christ the Son of God is the absolute builder of his Church through his atoning death at the cross and glorious resurrection from the grave. This revealing truth is the firm foundation of the Christian faith. We now define our terms in following Jesus.

Is Jesus the God of our lives? The personal question of Jesus to his apostles if for all of us, “Who do you say that I am?” Jesus made a good confession, “You are the Christ the Son of the living God.” Jesus the Messiah is the eternal God the Son, the second Person of the Triune God. This sets apart biblical Christianity from all religions in the world. Jesus our God is absolutely worthy of our pure worship, wholehearted love and joyful service.

Is Jesus the Builder of our lives? Jesus declared, “Upon this rock I will build my church.” Jesus as the Rock is the absolute foundation and builder of his Church. If we believe in Jesus and yield our all to him, we belong to his Church the redeemed family of God. We belong to Jesus. We are safe in his hands. And he is at work to finish the good work he began in our lives.

Is Jesus the Redeemer of our lives? Jesus foretold of his death and resurrection for the salvation of the world. When Jesus rose from the dead, the disciples understood and embraced the redemptive work of Christ. Jesus created the universe by the power of his word. And he redeemed the world through his precious blood. It is inconceivable that the God who created us is the very God who redeemed us! The Creator is our Redeemer. At the Cross we humbly embrace the saving grace of God and truly find rest for our weary souls. Blessed are those who anchor their faith in Jesus Christ.

#God #Christ #Jesus #sermon #sermons #Peter #confession #Redeemer #surrender #trust #faith #updcbc

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christianlivingtoday-blog · 5 years ago

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The Sins and Fall of Lucifer

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. …

Genesis 1:31

God created good things! God saw everything that He had made and knew that it was good! So how did a wicked and cruel creature like Satan come into existence? Where did all the evil in our world arise from? Where are all the dreadful murders, tortures and sad events in our world from? Where are all the monsters in our world from? Where are all the demons and evil spirits in our world from? What inspires men to do so much evil?

Well, there are clear points that led to the existence of Satan as we know him today. The Bible gives us glimpses into the creation of the evil world. There are seven clear steps that have led to the existence of fallen angels. God did not set about to create evil. God saw all that He had created and knew that it was good. God created good things! God created very good things! Somehow, evil also came into existence. Let’s now go through the steps that led to the existence of Satan.

1. The creation of free-willed angels:

Angels are good spirits that were created by the Lord. The Bible clearly teaches us that angels were made by God in heaven. “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they bethrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:” (Colossians 1:16). A special but important quality that angels possess, is their free will. This free will is the important quality that would allow angels to obey or disobey God if they wanted to. Most of us think that angels do not have a choice as to whether they want to serve God or not. But they do! God gave them a free will. And that is why some of them were able to rebel.

2. The creation of archangels:

The second step leading to the existence of evil spirits is the establishment of superior angels in the angel community. The Bible makes mention of three of these archangels or senior angels.

Michael is specifically referred to as an archangel.

“Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee” (Jude 1:9).

Michael is also referred to as a chief prince.

“But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia” (Daniel 10:13).

Another prominent angel who is mentioned is angel Gabriel, who was sent to Mary to announce the birth of Jesus and also sent to Zachariah to announce the birth of John the Baptist.

And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.

Luke 1:26-27

And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him. But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John . . .

And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years. And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings

Luke 1:11-13, 18-19

The other prominent angel mentioned in the Bible is Lucifer. When he was a good angel, he was called the “anointed cherub” who walked up and down in the holy mountain of God.

Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.

Ezekiel 28:14

These passages give us the impression that there were only three archangels but there are probably several other archangels.

As you know, the Bible mentions “a host of angels” and “thousands of angels”. There are millions of angels around us. Indeed, other manuscripts like the Book of Enoch describe other senior angels and even give them names like Raphael, Uriel, Raguel, Ramiel and Sariel. Remember that Michael the archangel was only one of several chief princes.

3. The pride, independence and separatism of an archangel.

The third step leading up to the existence of Satan and evil spirits is the development of pride and independence in one of the senior/arch angels.

The evil of separatism, independence and pride entered the heart of one of the senior angels who had been created in purity and innocence.

Notice how an independent vision developed in Lucifer’s heart when he said, “I will ascend! I will be like the Most High!”

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascendinto heaven, I will exaltmy throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascendabove the heights of the clouds; I will be likethe most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit” (Isaiah 14:12-15).

Satan’s speech was full of “I will”, “I will be”, “I will exalt”, “I will ascend”. It was not “We will”, “We will be”, “We will rise”. He had developed an independent and separate agenda. He wanted to get somewhere and he wanted to become something independently. He felt he did not need God. He felt independent. He did not want God. He felt like being on his own. He wanted to be like God! In fact, he wanted to displace God if possible.

Be careful about trying to be separate and independent! It is a satanic trait and it is what has brought all the evil that we have in our world today. Try to stay together! Fight the tendency to be separate! Fight the tendency to be alone! The desire to separate originates from Lucifer.

Watch out when you experience the urge to separate yourself from your fellowship and family.

4. The rejection of the independent archangel by loyal angels.

Apparently, this independent, prideful and separatist attitude by the senior archangel was not received well by many other angels. Most of the angels rejected Lucifer’s ideas to separate and become independent. Several angels were offended by Lucifer’s prideful ideas. Some angels however, were deceived and actually thought that Lucifer’s ideas to separate and be independent would work.

Throughout the Bible, you find various conflicts erupting between good angels and bad angels. The independent, disloyal, prideful and separatist angels were rejected by other loyal angels. The loyal angels were not impressed with the separatist ideas and had no intention of following them. This brought about a conflict between good angels and bad angels. There was now a war in the family of angels. Angels who had been brothers and family friends for thousands of years were forced to become enemies of each other.

Peaceful heaven was transformed into a place of conflict. Angels disagreed on the independent archangel’s ideas to be separate. Angels engaged in fights at their level without any interference from God Himself. God seems to have allowed them to fight it out. God expects you to fight for what is right and not just sit back allow evil and separatism to flourish.

Some angels fought for the honour of God, whilst the independent, wicked, pride-filled, discontented and disloyal angels fought to carve out for themselves a separate existence.

Every church has people who seek a separate and independent agenda. These are the separatists who follow the Satanic pattern. God expects the good angels and the loyal people to fearlessly fight the separatists.

Do not be bewildered because you have to fight disloyal people. You will always have to fight disloyal people. Do not be sad when you have to fight your own brothers because of the honour of God. It is a choice you have to make. Michael, Lucifer and Gabriel were good friends and brothers before the rebellion. It is a sad thing to have to fight your own brother. Michael and Gabriel had to make the choice to part with their long-standing friend and brother, Lucifer.

Thankfully, Michael and Gabriel chose to oppose their brother, Lucifer. I do not think it was easy for Gabriel and Michael to make that decision. But they chose right! They chose to support the higher authority! They rejected Lucifer’s ideas! They pointed out to him that he was making a mistake. They told Lucifer to repent and to stop speaking those high-sounding and prideful words. Lucifer must have been surprised at Gabriel’s attitude! Perhaps, he thought that the more junior archangel would be sympathetic to his vision. Perhaps Lucifer thought Gabriel would follow his leadership as the anointed cherub who walked up and down the holy mountain on the coals of fire.

Gabriel, however, was not fooled. Michael was adamant that Lucifer had gone mad. Michael and Gabriel probably had several meetings with Lucifer to resolve the crisis. They probably shared God’s wisdom with Lucifer, but he was too proud to listen to them.

Lucifer probably told Gabriel and Michael, “You guys don’t know much. I have been here from the beginning. I’ve been through a lot. I’ve been up and down that holy mountain for a thousand years. There is no future here! You can never be promoted here! You can never rise up above those who were here before you! Only one person is promoted in this system!”

It is these kinds of words that birthed the first break-up and rebellion. It is these kinds of words that spoil churches. It is this kind of speaking that breeds confusion in the church. It is this separatist attitude that Satan seeks to impart to men, making them independent, conflict-prone and separatist. It is this negative and independent attitude of Lucifer that brought all the conflict, quarrel and division into peaceful heaven.

It is good that Michael would not stand for Lucifer’s nonsense. Loyal assistants must not tolerate this kind of rubbish. Do not let rebellious people destroy the honour of God. Do not let disloyal people break up the church.

Fighting disloyal people is a good thing! Never retreat from a good fight against the evil of disloyalty. It is a good and angelic trait to fight against people who want to destroy the peace and divide the family and the church. Fight disloyalty with all your heart. Do not step back from the open confrontation with evil. Jesus is building His church! You must fight all those who are breaking it down! Don’t try to be nicer or better than the good angels of heaven!

Indeed, there are several well-documented fights between good angels and bad separatist angels.

The Bible records an all-out war between loyal angels and independent rebellious angels. This all-out war was between Michael, the angels under his command, and the dragon and his angels. (Angelic Battle 1)

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,

Revelation 12:7

There is another recorded fight between Michael and a being called the prince of Persia. (Angelic Battle 2)

But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.

Daniel 10:13

There is also a recorded confrontation between Michael and Satan over the body of Moses. (Angelic Battle 3)

Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.

Jude 1:9

5. The defeat and casting away of the independent and rebellious angels by loyal angels.

The Bible records the defeat of the dragon and his angels by the good angels.

“And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” (Revelation 12:9).

After the good angels successfully routed Lucifer and his followers, it was clear that they would not be welcome in heaven any longer. The bad angels were so bad that they would have to be dismissed! Indeed, the doors and windows of heaven were opened and Lucifer was thrown down to the earth.

People who develop an independent spirit and a separatist attitude lose their position and place in the church. These angels suffered terribly for the mistake of trying to separate themselves from God. Instead of trying to separate yourself, find out how to get closer and stay connected to God and to His church. Always remember the scripture in Jude 19 “These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit.”

Satan wants to separate you. Make sure he is not successful in turning you into one of the separatist and fallen angels. Do not allow yourself to follow the twisted minds of discontented and rebellious pastors!

6. The transformation of Lucifer: From an anointed cherub into a dragon.

Upon the fall of Lucifer, his outward nature was transformed into an ugly dragon. A terrible degenerative darkness and ugliness came upon him and he became a dragon. We know that this ugly dragon was originally a beautiful angel because the Bible says so. It is amazing how sin can turn a beautiful person into the ugliest and darkest creature. “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (Revelation 12:9).

Satan is now this contorted and twisted creature without a home nor a resting place who is forced to roam around on earth, far below his original glorious position. You should see the fallen state of some associate pastors who moved out of their position. Their ill-fated lives can only be described as dark, distorted and unfortunate.

Satan’s banishment to the earth was a step towards his permanent locking up in hell. Many criminals are taken from prison to prison, while they serve their sentence. Lucifer is equally moving from prison to prison as he serves his sentence for rebellion.

7. The wandering of the displaced dragon and fallen angels on earth.

With the banishment from heaven, the dragon and his angels became homeless, banished beings who roam about on the earth. It is these beings with their leader who are today known as Satan and the princes of the underworld. In the book of Daniel, the evil powers that fought Michael were called princes. They are princes because they were probably powerful or senior angels before they fell. As we said earlier, there are thousands and thousands of angels. Unfortunately, the rebellion misled a section of the angels of both junior and senior ranks.

In the New Testament, we are told that the princes of this world wanted to crucify Jesus Christ and actually followed through with their plan to do so. The princes of this world are the fallen archangels and senior angels who wield authority over evil spirits in the dark world.

“Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, eventhe hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:6-8).

Jesus Christ has been raised up above all such fallen angels and authorities. He has been given power and dominion over all wicked creatures, wherever they may be.

Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places,

Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come:

Ephesians 1:20-21

by Dag Heward-Mills

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mkkusi1990 · 6 years ago

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God got me pregnant

I make no apologies for what I am about to say because it is important. The testimony of Jesus says God shall be born of a Virgin. This is the truest fact ever said. Let us examine.

The testimony of Jesus says that He shall be born of a Virgin. But without Christ it does not make the sense it does, because Christ is the most essential component. The language of the Spirit of God is prophecy, and its Google Translator is the Blood of Jesus. Revelation 19:10 says “Then I fell at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, "Don't do that! I am a fellow slave with you and your brothers who have the testimony about Jesus. Worship God, because the testimony about Jesus is the spirit of prophecy."

People abroad have already replicated birth without a man. So it is not just the virgin birth that is important. In order to understand the Virgin Birth you have to understand both the birth and the contraction. The birth is Christ, and the contraction is the Holy Spirit. The father is God, because his seed was put forth in Christ on the Earth. If one is missing, it does not work. Birth without contractions is Frankenstein. Contractions without a birth is a stomach virus, probably caused by the romaine lettuce that they recalled. Virgin Birth without a prophecy has no context, the prophecy about the birth of Christ without a virgin birth loses its meaning. So you need the two together, both the virgin birth and the prophecy. This is the RHEMA and LOGOS word. LOGOS is the written word of God and RHEMA is the spoken Word of God. The prophecy is the Logos Word that was written by God and the virgin birth is the Rhema Word spoken into existence.

Some people say the Devil made me do it but it’s a special anointing to say God made me pregnant. Imagine if Maury got Mary to come on her show and the paternity test said God is the Father. But there is no more truth because God is our Father, and he is a good, good father. The seed represents both the virginity of Mary, and the fatherhood of God. Since Mary was a virgin, God was the father of Jesus just as he is the father of us. Before Jesus was the Root of Jesse, the Living Water, and the Bright and Morning Star he was a seed. This was divine hydroponic technology, this was an all-encompassing because he was self-contained to save. The Living water that bubbled up back and forth helped with the growth of the Seed. The Seed that was planted was held there by the Root of Jesse. The Bright and Morning Star helped to shine a light that could not be dimmed.

It is a good thing Joseph thought of putting Mary out quietly. Think of the catastrophe, A lot of the Bible would be misunderstood because it pertained to Jesus. So we would be worshipping the three true Gods, and tripping over snakes. Isn’t that what the Fall is without Christ. A religion not similar at all to what we worship but one totally different. When God said Let us, it would be a separate God talking and a separate God listening. When God talks about man fighting with a snakes it would be like someone taking the Black Mamba nickname too literally. It would be polytheism mixed with someone who wanted to either shoot like Kobe, or was mad because he could not shut Kobe down in the NBA. Like he ever had the chance, or we could have the chance to stop Satan without Christ. Because Satan is a snake. The Sons of Sceva is a Sceva doctrine, the idea of speaking power without connectedness. It would be the God who someone else preaches rather than our God. And it would end with a beating, and us running scared.

God did not just use a snake he bruised it. God is not a snake charmer he is a conqueror. In Moses time the snake was lifted up to save, because the power was not in the snake but in God. But by Hezekiah’s time the snake had become an idol so it had to be broken.

Whatever is God must be broken and bruised and wounded to save. In the Bible the bruising is an intentional wounding. Christ is our God, but he was broken, bruised and wounded for our iniquities. When it says that it shall bruise thy head it is talking about the crown of thorns. But in that crown was caked blood which spoke deliverance to the Most High. What the Devil thought mockery God called it his death sentence. When Christ was condemned to die the Devil was condemned was condemned to death. When Christ rose up from the grave with freedom he gave us his walking papers.

The Bible says that He was bruised so he could bruise. It was reciprocity, a trial where the Accuser who is the prosecutorial Devil met the Advocate in the defense attorney Jesus at the courts of the Most High. This was a bench trial because God sat in righteous judgment as The Judge. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. Every one of these points to the power of the blood, because each of these represents an entryway through which was blood spilled. The wounding of the transgression speaks to the spear in his side. The bruising of the iniquities symbolizes the thorny crown. The chastisement of our peace is the nails in his feet. God clothed us with the sandals of peace, and Jesus is the Prince of Peace, but what ties sandals together is nails. That nail was tying us, to him.

And by his stripes is the cross on his back. He carried that cross on his back. When God wanted to create man he selected ribs from his side, but when Christ wanted to give up his life he let the spear enter his side. When we were sinners God turned his back, so Christ took the cross to us to redeem. But with Christ it is the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the foot of Christ stepping on the head of the serpent.

The Bible says that Cursed is he who hangs from a tree. But Jesus broke the curse by hanging from a tree and rising again. Luke 12:58-59 says “Make an effort to settle with him on the way, lest he drag you to the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer put you in prison. I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the very last penny.” The wages of sin is death. The Devil thought that the bank of Christ had insufficient funds so he tried to do bank fraud. He was the most corrupt prosecutor, who was so bade he was sentenced to his own prison he tried to put us in, because hell is his prison. But he was surprised when he tried to draw out blood and power came out. He put the crown of thorns and power came out. He whipped Jesus back and more power came out. He put those nails in the feet of Jesus and power came out.

He pierced Jesus side and power, power, power came out in abundance because even though the blood and the water came out, the Living Water and the Everlasting Blood came out to the ground. Where there is a will there is a way. A will can mean one of two things. You can either have the will to do something or the will to bury someone and it not come back up. So we should have the right will because the ground we stand on and put our efforts will honor our will. And Christ cannot be buried because he has done it all.

The ground that was cursed by God received deliverance because it was touched by the Living Water. When God said whomsever he meant all of whomsever, ground, sea, air. The Trinity addressed each of them. The Holy Spirit sat on the waters, the Blood of Jesus speaks from the ground, and God resides in the air. The ground that was cursed was now blessed. God is so good that when Jesus’s side was pierced, the ground was delivered and remembered its position, to bring out the Seed. It is not enough to be the Seed, the Seed must become the Branch which must become the Tree planted by the flowers of living water. The ground had to be delivered for the Seed to rise up. The blood is our currency, our coin, and that crimson stain is our dollar bill.

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gospellighthouseofprayer · 7 years ago

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Whyte House Family Devotions #354 (05/10/18): "The Purpose of God for You," by Billy Graham

https://soundcloud.com/danielwhyteiii/whyte-house-family-devotions-354-051018-the-purpose-of-god-for-you-by-billy-graham

My family and I have had morning devotions, or family altar as some people call it, every day ever since my wife, Meriqua, and I were married 30 years ago. We have prayed and read the Bible together as well as other devotional books as a family, and it is the only reason why this family has stayed together, and the only reason why God has blessed our family and used our family in ministry all of these years. We read Ephesians 5 and 6 every morning as it relates to the role of each member of the family and how that we need to put on the whole armor of God to fight against the devil who is seeking to destroy our family and all Christian families, churches, and Christians. So, now after 30 years of doing this in our home, we are opening this up to others who don't have a family to pray with, who don't have a spouse, or who are single by choice, and to encourage all families who are still intact to go back to the family altar and have devotions together every morning. In these devotions, you may hear me deal with a temptation I'm facing in my life, you may hear me rebuke my wife about not doing what she should be doing, or you may hear me get on one of my children's cases about something they're doing. Don't be shocked; this is real life. SING "DOXOLOGY" Praise God from Whom all blessings flow Praise Him, all creatures here below Praise Him above, ye heavenly hosts Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost Amen Billy Graham said, “Some people think that going to church on Sunday and owning a dust-covered Bible makes a person a Christian. That is not true. A Christian is one in whom Christ dwells, and the person’s life will give evidence of this.” ------ RECITE: THE NEW APOSTLES' CREED I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of Heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell. The third day He arose again from the dead; He was seen alive by Mary Magdalene and the other women, the disciples, and over 500 other brethren; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth on the Right Hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen. ------ EPHESIANS 6:12-13 12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. 13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stephen J. Cole writes in his commentary on this passage: "The devil and his angels are scheming and deceptive. Jesus called the devil a liar and the father of lies. Paul says that he disguises himself as an angel of light and that his servants disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. One of the main ways that he works is through false teaching that appeals to the flesh and to human pride. Pride was probably Satan’s original sin. God hates pride, because it takes away from His glory. Every false religion and cult promotes a way of salvation that allows sinful people to take some or all of the credit, thus feeding human pride. A test of sound doctrine is, does it teach salvation by grace alone through Christ alone by faith alone, so that all the glory goes to God? If it adds works to faith or teaches that faith comes from man, not from God, it feeds pride. Satan is the deceiving force behind all of these false ways of salvation." ------- PRAYER ------- DEVOTIONAL PASSAGE: Psalm 139:1-6 1 O lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. 2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. 3 Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. 4 For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. 5 Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. Regarding this passage, Matthew Henry writes: “God has perfect knowledge of us, and all our thoughts and actions are open before him. It is more profitable to meditate on Divine truths, applying them to our own cases, and with hearts lifted to God in prayer, than with a curious or disputing frame of mind. That God knows all things, is omniscient; that he is every where, is omnipresent; are truths acknowledged by all, yet they are seldom rightly believed in by mankind. God takes strict notice of every step we take, every right step and every by step. He knows what rule we walk by, what end we walk toward, and what company we walk with.” --------- PRAYER FOR THE ESTATES 1. Family 2. Clergy (church) 3. Government 4. People (citizens) 5. The press (media) 6. New media/Online journalists PRAYER FOR THE FAMILY PRAYER FOR CHURCH LEADERSHIP GOVERNMENT LEADERS 1 Timothy 2:1-2 says, "I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty." President Donald Trump and his administration Vice President Mike Pence First Lady Melania Trump Second Lady Karen Pence All White House staff including: Special Counsel to the President Ann M. Donaldson All leaders of federal agencies including: United States Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa All state governors including: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker All city mayors including: Crescent City, FL, Mayor Joseph Santa All members of Congress including: Florida Representative Ted Yoho All law enforcement officials including: Crescent City, FL, Police Chief Angelo Damiano All military leaders including: Defense Secretary James Mattis / Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark A. Milley Leaders of nations around the world including: The Netherlands King Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Mark Rutte The peace of Jerusalem PRAYER FOR THE PEOPLE / CITIZENS PRAYER FOR THE MEDIA PRAYER FOR CURRENT EVENTS AROUND THE WORLD - For the safety and protection of the people of Congo where a new ebola outbreak has been reported. - For the comfort of the families of 30 children who were killed in an air strike in Afghanistan - For the protection of the people of Hawaii who have been displaced because of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes PRAYER REQUESTS Bushebi Please bless the reopening of their Bible school and protect the students; protect and provide for the people suffering in Kenya and Somalia because of floods; help Timothy to recover completely James please bless his Children's Fund ministry Eric please bless them with the money needed to pay medical bills and get the medication they need; bless their church with sound equipment Bernadette please save her and be with her THOSE WHO HAVE ACCEPTED CHRIST AS SAVIOR Frank Joshua Lucas THOSE WHO HAVE RECOMMITTED THEIR LIVES TO CHRIST Anne Celestino Bryce DEVOTIONAL READING: “The Purpose of God for You,” by Billy Graham Romans 11:36 says, “Everything comes from God alone. Everything lives by his power, and everything is for his glory. To him be glory evermore.” “Have you ever wondered why God placed us on this planet? What our purpose is in being here? It is because God is love. There may be life on other planets, but I believe man is unique in the sense that he was created in the image of God. God created on this planet as it were “little gods” whom He could love and who would return love to Him. Reverently speaking, God was lonely. He wanted someone to love and who would return love to Him. That sounds incredible, but the Bible tells us that God loved, and so He created and put us on this planet.” - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Now, if you do not know Jesus Christ as your Savior, allow me to show you how you can place your faith and trust in Him for Salvation from sin and Hell. First, accept the fact that you are a sinner, and that you have broken God's law. The Bible says in Romans 3:23: "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." Second, accept the fact that there is a penalty for sin. The Bible states in Romans 6:23: "For the wages of sin is death…" Third, accept the fact that you are on the road to hell. Jesus Christ said in Matthew 10:28: "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." Now that is bad news, but here's the good news. Jesus Christ said in John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Just believe in your heart that Jesus Christ died for your sins, was buried, and rose from the dead by the power of God for you so that you can live eternally with Him. Pray and ask Him to come into your heart today, and He will. Romans 10:9 & 13 says, "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved… For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." If you believe that Jesus Christ died on the Cross for your sins, was buried, and rose from the dead, and you want to trust Him for your Salvation today, please pray with me this simple prayer: Holy Father God, I realize that I am a sinner and that I have done some bad things in my life. I am sorry for my sins, and today I choose to turn from my sins. For Jesus Christ sake, please forgive me of my sins. I believe with all of my heart that Jesus Christ died for me, was buried, and rose again. I trust Jesus Christ as my Savior and I choose to follow Him as Lord from this day forward. Lord Jesus, please come into my heart and save my soul and change my life today. Amen. If you just trusted Jesus Christ as your Saviour, and you prayed that prayer and meant it from your heart, I declare to you that based upon the Word of God, you are now saved from Hell and you are on your way to Heaven. Welcome to the family of God! I want to congratulate you on doing the most important thing in life and that is receiving Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. For more information to help you grow in your newfound faith in Christ, go to Gospel Light Society.com and read "What To Do After You Enter Through the Door". Jesus Christ said in John 10:9, "I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture." Until next time, May the Lord Bless You!

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watershedvademecum · 7 years ago

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First Sunday after Christmas, Dec. 31-Jan. 5

The climax of the story begins, not ends, with Jesus’ birth!

The fullness of time came when Jesus enters the scene. The climax of the story began with his birth, continuing through his life and death, and culminating in his resurrection and ascension. Simeon’s words to Mary and Joseph in Luke 2 juxtapose pain, suffering, and death with the joy of new life just witnessed in Jesus’ birth. What connections do you see between death and life? Are they mutually exclusive? Ask God to show you what death has to do with life.

Ceaseless Prayer

Oh God, guide me to know and love you, myself, others, and all creation.

Psalm Reading: [Psalm 148]

Prayer of Invitation:

Lord God Almighty, Creator and Sustainer of the world, interrupt our lives today through your creation and continued activity in our world. Amen.

Confession of Sin

Let us each now confess our sins and failures to God, to receive his mercy, love, & fullness.

Liturgy of Forgiveness

You are forgiven! We can be confident our sins are forgiven because of the Cross of Jesus Christ, and his Resurrection from the grave and his continued reign at the right hand of the Father. You are free and righteous, able to walk faithfully in partnership with God; by the Spirit, through Jesus our Savior, for our Father. Amen.

Worship Praise & Thanksgiving

Old Testament Reading: [ Isaiah 61.10-62.3]

The Apostle’s Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he arose again from the dead; he ascended in to heaven and sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

Gospel Reading: [Luke 2.22-40

]

New Testament Reading: [Hebrews 1.1-12]

Liturgy of the Word

Lord God, your Word is faithful and true; Directed by the Father, Fulfilled by the Son, Given through the Holy Spirit, A light to my path, and guide for my feet, Amen.

Reflective Silence in the Presence of the Lord: Meditation & Journaling

Prayer of Mission

Spirit, use our today’s neighbors to teach us about life-with-you. Amen.

Petitions & Supplications

The Lord’s Prayer

Our Father who fills the heavens, Hallowed be Your name. Your Kingdom come, Your will be done — on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, as we also forgive those who offend us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory — forever. Amen!

Prayer of Thanksgiving

Great King, who has reigned from before time itself, we join with creation from the beginning to offer you the praise that only you are worthy to receive. Amen.

Doxology

Praise God from whom all blessings flow Praise him all creatures here below Praise him above ye heavenly host Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

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cookiesandcreame1983-blog · 8 years ago

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Bible verses for Friday April 14,2017

Blessings bible verses Psalm 1:1 Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. Psalm 67:1-2 May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us, that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations. Psalm 121:7-8 The LORD will keep you from all harm— he will watch over your life; the LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore. Ezekiel 34:25-26 I will make a covenant of peace with them and rid the land of wild beasts so that they may live in the desert and sleep in the forests in safety. I will bless them and the places surrounding my hill. I will send down showers in season; there will be showers of blessing Luke 11:28 He replied, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.” Romans 15:33 The God of peace be with you all. Amen. 1 Corinthians 1:3 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Galatians 6:18 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, sisters and brothers. Amen. Ephesians 1:3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ May the God of your father help you; may the Almighty bless you with the blessings of the heavens above, and blessings of the watery depths below, and blessings of the breasts and womb. Genesis 49:25 (NLT) Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in obedience to him. You will eat the fruit of your labor; blessings and prosperity will be yours. Psalm 128:1-2 (NIV) With all my heart I want your blessings. Be merciful as you promised Psalm 119:58 (NLT) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Famous bible verses For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16] "Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths." [Proverbs 3:15-16] "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me." [Psalm 23:4] "I can do all things through him who strengthens me." [Philippians 4:13] "This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." [Psalms 118:24] "You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you." [Isaiah 26:3] "And Mary said, "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." And the angel departed from her." [Luke 1:38] "The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe." [Proverbs 18:10] "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," [Romans 3:23] "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope." [Jeremiah 29:11] "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." [Galatians 2:20] "And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him." [Hebrews 11:6] "So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." [Matthew 19:6] "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." [Ephesians 4:32] "Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."" [John 14:6] "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." [Matthew 10:28] "Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth." [2 Timothy 2:15] "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." [1 Corinthians 13:4-7] "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law." [Galatians 5:22-23] "Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the LORD your God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you." [Deuteronomy 31:6] ------------------------------------------------------------ Forgiveness bible verses Bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive." Colossians 3:13] "And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses." [Mark 11:25] "And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors." [Matthew 6:12] "Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven;" [Luke 6:37] "Do not say, “I will repay evil”; wait for the Lord, and he will deliver you." [Proverbs 20:22] "Do not say, “I will do to him as he has done to me; I will pay the man back for what he has done.”" [Proverbs 24:29] "Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven."" [Matthew 18:21-22] "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles," [Proverbs 24:17] "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." [Romans 12:19-21] "And if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him." [Luke 17:4] "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." [Ephesians 4:32] "if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land." [2 Chronicles 7:14] "To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against him" [Daniel 9:9] "For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you." [Psalm 86:5] "And we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure;" [1 Corinthians 4:12] "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." [1 John 1:9] "But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.” Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them." [Genesis 50:19-21] "Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing" [1 Peter 3:9] "And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments." [Luke 23:34] "“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy." [Matthew 5:7] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Grace bible verses For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God," , Ephesians 2:8] "But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”" [James 4:6] "And are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus," [Romans 3:24] "Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." [Hebrews 4:16] "As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace" [1 Peter 4:10] "The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen." [Revelation 22:21] "Grace be with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with love incorruptible." [Ephesians 6:24] "Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace" [2 Thessalonians 2:16] "You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus," [1 Timothy 2:1] "so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life." [Titus 3:7] "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich." [2 Corinthians 8:9] "But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many." [Romans 5:15] "to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved." [Ephesians 1:6] "And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work." [2 Corinthians 9:8] "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people," [Titus 2:11] "Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us, from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Father's Son, in truth and love." [2 John 1:3] "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me." [1 Corinthians 15:10] "May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord." [2 Peter 1:2] But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace." [Romans 11:6] "“But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me."" [2 Corinthians 12:9] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jeremiah bible verses Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. NIV Jeremiah 31:31 "The days are coming," declares the LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah." NIV Jeremiah 33:3 "Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.'" NIV Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations." NIV Jeremiah 6:16 This is what the LORD says: "Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, 'We will not walk in it.'" NIV Jeremiah 1:8 Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you," declares the LORD." NIV Jeremiah 29:13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. NIV Jeremiah 31:3 The LORD appeared to us in the past, saying: "I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness." NIV Jeremiah 10:10 But the LORD is the true God; he is the living God, the eternal King. When he is angry, the earth trembles; the nations cannot endure his wrath. NIV Jeremiah 17:7 "But blessed are those who trust in the LORD, whose confidence is in him." NIV Jeremiah 1:9 Then the LORD reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, "I have put my words in your mouth." NIV Jeremiah 1:12 The LORD said to me, "You have seen correctly, for I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled." NIV Jeremiah 10:23 LORD, I know that people's lives are not their own; it is not for them to direct their steps. NIV Jeremiah 1:19 They will fight against you but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you," declares the LORD." NIV ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Prayer bible verses Pray without ceasing," 1 Thessalonians 5:17 "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." [Mark 11:24] "Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he hears my voice." [Psalm 55:17] "Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near;" [Isaiah 55:6] "But I, O Lord, cry to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you." [Psalm 88:13] "But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you." Matthew 6:6] 7"Praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints," [Ephesians 6:18] "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." [Romans 8:26] "Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working." [James 5:16] "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." [Philippians 4:6] "Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness! You have given me relief when I was in distress. Be gracious to me and hear my prayer!" [Psalm 4:1] "Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord." [James 5:14] "If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life--to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should pray for that." [1 John 5:16] "Pray for us, for we are sure that we have a clear conscience, desiring to act honorably in all things." [Hebrews 13:18] "I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling;" [1 Timothy 2:8] "Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”" [Luke 11:1] "Brothers, pray for us." [1 Thessalonians 5:28] "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence." [Hebrews 5:7] "And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him." [1 John 5:14-15] "The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth." [Psalm 145:18]

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