Lost Crusader #142 Now and Later

 “For bodily exercise profits little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come.”

St. Paul

In another place, Paul told Christians that we will not all sleep (die) but we will all be changed. There is an indispensable transition from the present life dominated by the physical to a life dominated by the spiritual. While the change is beyond our immediate comprehension, it is not as great a change as many suppose. The two major changes seem to usher in everything else.

The first change is a bodily one. In the shared divine life of the spirit, there is also a body. Paul calls it a celestial body—the same term we use for the galaxies, stars, planets, and moons.

I think the best model for this celestial body is that of the post-resurrected Christ. He appeared at will, unhindered by walls, doors, or windows while at the same time being solid enough to touch. He ate food. He spoke. It seems he also had the ability to be known to and/or unrecognizable to others as he willed. But whether this trait was true only in regard to mortal humans is debatable.

Therefore, since the scripture says that we shall both see him as he is and be like him (1John 3:2), it is safe to assume the same qualities will belong to us once we shuffle off the mortal coil.

The other huge difference is time—not only our perception of it but our thinking in a timeless existence. Every moment will be or can be the present moment. We will still be living the life we always lived, thinking our own thoughts, feeling our own emotions, exercising the same gifts and talents we have possessed, and valuing the same things we have always treasured.

The life we live now with its pains and sufferings, seen from a timeless view, will ever appear to be our choosing godliness and so ever be seen as our victory and our joy.

This present life never really ends, it is extended into eternity headed in the same direction it is now going. If we are moving toward God (even in the minutest increments) we will continue in God. This can be nothing but Heaven, eternal bliss.

If we are currently moving away from God, we will continue to do so into what Jesus termed outer darkness. This is Hell, the torment of separation from the divine.

Are you on the road you wish to be on? We are free, as long as we are in this body, to change direction. Moving toward godliness will not only make us more loving, joyous, peaceable, gentler, good, faithful, meeker, and temperate in this life, but it will bring all of those things into full bloom and abundant fruit in the life to come. What greater profit is there in all the world worth trading for these things?

Maranatha

Know Jack #354 It’s Alive!

 Well, the monster seems to have come to life. I’ve laid the Colonel to rest and I’m moving away from much of the writing theme here in favor of doing that on the House of Honor Books blog. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to talk about my writing at all. It only means it will have a different slant to it.

I have finished the first draft of Ed Landry’s newest adventure, Voodoo Moon. It has been a bit of a struggle. I started and restarted the book four or five times trying to get it right. I celebrated the wrap up on Thursday night at karaoke with a couple of New Orleans songs.

Ed Landry’s back in Louisiana for Voodoo Moon and I have brought back some of the characters from Bayou Moon. It amazes me when I get comments from readers asking about the characters in this series. They are real enough to me, but for other people…?

My friend Cameron Buckner of Dixie Cryptid, who narrated the first two Ed Landry audiobooks has said he’s not letting me off the hook for killing off Penny in the Blood Moon. It seems he’s not alone.

I finished reading The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis not long ago. It is a wonderful story about a bus ride that begins on the outskirts of Hell, from a kind of Purgatory, that makes a stop in Heaven where the passengers are met by people from their past who try to convince them to stay. It has great insights into how people view life, its purpose, and where it’s going.

I also stumbled across a book that I hadn’t heard about by Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon). This one is called Cari Mora. I don’t know how this one got in the bargain bin, but I’m glad I found it.

I think the greatest gift a person can give themselves is to turn off the Tv and pick up a good book. It’s more than just the content of the stories—reading engages the mind, it’s entertainment that you become involved in. That’s the reason some people don’t read. 

I’m grateful for people who choose to read, whether they buy my books or not. Of course, I am grateful for all the people that surround me. We may not always be conscious of it, but each one of us is busy writing their life story, and what a blessing those lives are to share.

Maranatha

  

 

Lost Crusader #141 Turning a Profit

 “But godliness with contentment is great gain.”

1Timothy 6:6

 

It is ironic that the wisest man who lived was perhaps also the world’s biggest fool. When he was a young man Solomon was asked by God to name what he wanted, and it would be given to him. He asked for wisdom. God, pleased with his choice, gave him not only wisdom, but riches, and long life.

People flocked to hear his wisdom and admire the opulent temple he built. Israel enjoyed peace on all sides. Sadly, it wasn’t enough. Solomon began to undertake a massive building campaign, sent ships searching for more riches, and married the daughters of the kings that surrounded him until he drew the anger of God.

Success is not measured by the continued amassing of more—at least, that’s not how God measures it. Success is being happy, grateful, and at peace with what you do have. Paul said he knew how to be content whether suffering lack or abounding in good things.

That kind of contentment comes about only by our accepting the ups and downs of life as streaming from God’s design. Heaven (an eternity with God) is not a reward for a certain lifestyle, but the everlasting continuation of a life lived in accord with God.

Jesus asked, “what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

What did Solomon’s building, trading, and alliances profit him? What did he gain that was better than what he received at Gibeon? Or put another way, what did he lose by compromising what he had in order to improve upon God’s gift, by building bigger and bigger storehouses?

 There is no gain that exceeds the things God has already trusted to our care—our gifts, our talents, and our worship.

Maranatha

 

The Colonel #103 Taps

 “…As we go, this we know, God is nigh.” –Taps

Jack:

“Colonel, we’re retiring you. Time for the old soldier’s home.”

Me clutching my chest and staggering:

“Oh it’s the big one! You hear that, Flora Belle? I’m coming to join you, honey!”

Life is so unfair. Before I fade away, there’s time for one last frontal assault on the massed artillery. We live in perilous times. If you are familiar with St. Paul’s warning to Timothy, you have had a glimpse of the evil we do. Honestly, those perils have existed at all times and our time is no different, except in one very special way. We are in the process of celebrating the removal of any stigma of evil associated with such behavior.

While capable of producing the uncomfortable feelings of guilt and shame so despised by the masses today, objective morality has always been a shield against all manner of evil. It is a safeguard that sets us apart as humans. It is a truth we can hold to against the storms of life.

That truth is being systematically dismantled in favor of subjectivity—My Truth, My Feeling, My Identity. The sad part is that it is not even our own subjectivity, but a set of nebulous ideas handed down by those who suppose themselves superior in intellect, in reasoning, and ergo, in possession of real humanity.

Those in opposition are being dehumanized by political, communication, and economic systems. Ignorance, laziness, and misplaced trust in authority have ever-growing numbers of people buying into the process.

Ironically, those dozing while their liberty, peace, and life slip away call themselves “Woke”. Like bees in an impersonal hive, they are being cozened into mindless service.

It is much more difficult to be free than to be safe; to question is harder than to accept, and to think is harder than to be schooled. Well does the scripture say, “for when they shall say, Peace and safety: then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.”

Americans once knew this and we stood up next to each other to preserve our humanity. Today we’d rather run to our safe zone. Maybe there we will read T.S. Eliot.

“We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw.

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Play the bugle, play it loud, for the Colonel is passing into the darkness.

As we go, this we know, God is nigh.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Know Jack #353 Creating a Monster

 “I was working in the lab late one night, when my eyes beheld an eerie sight…”

What do writers do when they are working things out? I’m not just talking about plots and scenes and “writing” stuff. I mean like when they feel like quitting, are faced with a moral dilemma, or just need to kick things around within the group that lives in their head? They write.

It doesn’t have to be a novel or even a story other than the one playing in them at the moment. It doesn’t even have to make sense to anyone else—shouldn’t make sense to anyone else. After years as a minister and then as a nurse, let me just say, having my advice ignored has just about sealed off all inclination to offer oral comments/opinions.

It hasn’t stopped people from asking in hopes I will agree. It just makes getting an unvarnished, unequivocal opinion very difficult to get. I don’t believe this is caused by a desire to avoid confrontation. Although I do not like face-to-face confrontation (done enough of that), I readily seek it out on the written page.

 That is not to say that I will argue in writing more than I will in person—I generally won’t. I rarely feel the need to convince anyone of anything. In fact, if I do argue with you, it probably means that I like you and value your opinion. It does mean that, when it comes to written communication, I will deliberately poke a sleeping bear with a stick just to get a reaction.

So, if you’ve been paying attention, you see how writing, for writers, is a kind of therapy or self-evaluation. It’s the writer’s equivalent of women getting together to discuss their feelings. If that sounds sexist, so be it. I’ve never sat around discussing my feelings with other guys, cannot picture myself doing it, and know of no guys who would want to—at least not when sober.

Another reason for this little tête-à-tête is that my Know Jack blog going to be moving away from writing in some ways and moving into a more personal kind of rambling—what I’m reading, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking and what I am writing about.

It’s an experiment. I may be creating a monster. It may not work out the way I foresee it. One thing for certain, I’ll never know until I try it. That’s how experiments work, you see.

I do plan to continue blogging about writing and being a writer/publisher on the House of Honor Books website and FB page where I hope some of the company’s other writers will join in.

You sang the opening line, didn’t you?

Jack

Know Jack #352 The Plot Thickens

 “By the way, Jesus forgives, but I don't think I can ever forgive you for killing Penny of Fat Girls Cafe off. I just can't let you off the hook for that one, Jack.”

Cameron Buckner

 

I have a history of killing off popular characters. When I wrote Bayou Moon and read the first chapter for a writer’s group there were two big complaints. The first was, “you got us really liking Delmer, then you went and killed him.” The second was a thinly veiled threat that I better not let his dog die. Oops, poor Pepe. (He did die a hero though.) I am hoping Cameron lets me slide at least enough to lend his voice to the narration of Voodoo Moon.

All this talk of the demise of character has a point which I’ll get to shortly. First, the good news. House of Honor Books is doing better than I imagined and so we are looking to expand. Live podcasts and Facebook Live are in our future, though I can’t supply a date just yet. Before that happens, we are starting a blog on the House of Honor website called Author Antics. The first post is up and the second is coming Friday.

I’m moving my ramblings on writing to that blog and Know Jack will go back to the more personal whatever-I’m-thinking-at-the-moment subject matter. Accordingly, Know Jack is going to be posted on Saturday. Which means something’s got to give. That something, or should I say someone, is the Colonel. Tomorrow will be his farewell to the troops post.

That being said, if you know jack about Jack, then you know writing and politics are too deeply ingrained in me to be forgotten entirely. If recent news is any indication, Brandon and Company will surely be the rant of the day for many a day.

A friend once asked me to name a character in one of my books after him, then quickly added, “But don’t kill me off!” I named two characters in the book after him, so I only half killed him. I did comfort him a bit by telling him that just because you die in one of my books, doesn’t mean you are out of the story. Johnny St. Pierre is still around two books after he died. (And Cam, Penny makes a cameo in Voodoo Moon.)

Colonel Y.T. Saulteen, (give yourself a pat on the back if you knew that was his name) we salute you. Perhaps, you’ll rise again.

 Maranatha

Lost Crusader #140 From Forsaken to Fruitful

“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying… My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Matthew 27:46

Entry into the Kingdom of God, contrary to popular notions, begins with dismay—knowledge of our own forsakenness, and our moral barrenness that moves the bankrupt soul to cry out to God. Joy may come in the morning, but not without enduring a night of weeping.

Repentance is continually represented in the New Testament as a type of death. We are told we must die to all that we are so that the Spirit can bestow a new life upon us. This type of death may be more difficult and painful than physical death because it is a conscious choice. That is why few choose it.

Within the Passion of Christ is a lesson glossed over by most Christians. It is an honest mistake because, looking backward, they are zeroed in on the resurrection of Jesus. The atonement of the cross and the resurrection from the dead are important to the doctrine of salvation and eternal life. However, they are not the real lesson necessary for practical Christian living in the world today.

That lesson is obedience. And you will recall that, for those striving to live a godly life, obedience is better than sacrifice. It was Christ’s obedience to the will of God, the Father, that sent him to Pilate’s Hall, Calvary, and the grave. The elements of that obedience—the broken body and the blood—are the tokens by which we have communion with him in his suffering.

We are mistaken to think our identification with the obedience of Jesus ends with wine and a wafer. Faith in God is painful. Suffering awakens us to our need for God and our own frail insufficiency. We, like our Lord, are meant to suffer for our faith.

Here, I will lose many of you because people do not want to suffer and are more than ready to say that a God of love would not ask them to suffer.

To this, I have two objections. Christian or non-Christian people suffer, most often in response to their own actions. Suffering is in the world; God simply asks us to face it head-on trusting Him to see us through. We are here to live life, not avoid it.

Suffering or discomfort, if you prefer, is a teacher of lasting lessons. Of the few things I seem to really know, you can bet I learned those lessons by being knocked flat by them.

Jesus was not a masochist, he did not want to be beaten, flogged, and crucified, so he asked for the cup of suffering to pass from him—but only if the Father wished it that way. Therefore, the scripture says, “…he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”

Obedient unto death, that is the example left to his disciples. Obedience, when it is finished brings joy though it doesn’t always seem so in the moment. However, when time ceases to be, we will see that every act of obedience to God was always joyous because it pleased him.

The result of doing the will of God is always joy unspeakable and full of glory. Any suffering or momentary affliction, endured in this life as a result of doing the will of God, serves to work for us “an exceeding and eternal weight of glory”. There is no greater joy than the six words the Christian longs to hear God speak, “Well done good and faithful servant.”

Maranatha

 

The Colonel #102 Choose to be Free

 “Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.”

C.S. Lewis

Beyond our mortality, in the place where God dwells, there is no time as we know it. Every moment is this moment—every action, every choice, every consequence is known because it is happening now. If that’s hard to wrap your head around, then all is as it should be. You are not meant to understand it.

We are meant, for the present, to live each moment as it comes to us along a line of time. Without the march of time, we would no longer be free to honestly make a choice derived from our will. When we pass from the grip of linear time, we will have made every choice, actually The Choice concerning the nature of our eternity.

As Americans, we like to believe that we are free. In the sense that we live a somewhat less regulated life than most of the world—we are. Since the early 20th century, that becomes less true with each passing day. However, no government has bestowed freedom upon us, and no government may truly take it from us.

We may be financially ruined, isolated, shamed, imprisoned, and even executed, but the choice to suffer these things is ours to make. We may choose to conform to the current thinking and behavior of society, wave with every new breeze, or choose to be the person upon whom the Creator bestowed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, life, liberty, and happiness are not abstract notions we define, nor are they social constructs. They are the gift of a Creator and exist for mankind only as divinely designed. We are free to be drunkards, liars, thieves, and murderers, to be as amoral as we choose to be.

That will not engender life, liberty, or happiness. They do not exist outside of God no matter how much we wish they did. In our freedom, we possess the opportunity to grow to resemble God, to fully take on the divine likeness and image of creation, and thus enter into eternal, timeless, reality.

Governments do not make us free, constitutions and declarations do not make us free—choosing to receive the Truth makes us free. Choose freedom every day.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Know Jack #351 Dancing in the Dark.

 “Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”

Erica Jong

 

I may be terribly wrong, but in one sense, a writer’s life is not meant to be a happy place—that is if his writing is any good. He must continually endanger and stress his imaginary friends in worst-case scenarios. All the while the writer is ever searching for a way to dig them out only so that he can dump them into the next pit he has prepared.

The writer has to think like a villain as often as he dons the role of a hero. He must ponder the one’s defeat as he writes the other’s happily ever after. And just where does the writer come up with all this? From within. I suppose that’s why I don’t write comedies and the faithful dogs and horses of my heroes always end up dead.

There’s an old saying that to sing/play the blues, you have to live the dues. It doesn’t take much to send me into a melancholy funk. It certainly isn’t courage that takes me there, nor is it anything but stubbornness that drags me out again. But darned if I don’t find some good ideas there (my apologies, Ed).

My grandson was in the first grade when he accidentally knocked something off his desk. “Shit fire and save the matches!” was his response. There was no doubt in our small town about where he learned that colorful line. If my characters are prone to self-doubt, well…

 I do take some measure of solace knowing that Stephen King threw Carrie away. I have a hard time giving credence to writers who are confident in their talent. I’m sure they exist somewhere, but then I believe Bigfoot is real too. Actually, Bigfoot might be the more plausible of the two beliefs.

Don’t get me wrong, I love writing, it’s an essential ingredient in life like love and coffee. It is a joy, even when it’s work, but talent will only take you so far. At some point, you’ve got to take all the toxic junk that people tell you to forget or leave in the past, throw that load up on your shoulders and walk off into the dark places to write real characters who think like real people.

Maranatha 

Lost Crusader #139 So Let it be Written

 “Now Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross. And the writing was:

JESUS OF NAZARETH,

KING OF THE JEWS

“Then many of the Jews read this title…therefore the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘He said, “I am the King of the Jews.”’

“Pilate answered, ‘What I have written, I have written.’”

Even two thousand years ago there were those who were offended by what others posted. Pilate’s wife warned him not to get involved. His personal interview with Jesus seemed to confirm her fears. However, a riot on the streets of Jerusalem would look bad when reported to Caesar. So, he decided to crucify a man he believed to be innocent to prevent one.

Life was cheaper than Roman honor. Pilate wrote his assessment for crucifixion based on his judgment and refused to back up. He then publicly washed his hands of the entire affair.

Ironically, the only one in a long list of named historical figures in this story whose existence is in doubt is the centerpiece of the entire story. Jesus Christ, whatever your assessment of him might be, became with his crucifixion and resurrection the pivotal point of history.

Whether you write Anno Domini (AD)or Before Christian Era (BCE), you are still acknowledging the historical truth that all that came before Him was looking forward to His life and all that has happened since looks outward on his inextinguishable life.

As St. Paul later testified to the facts of Jesus’ history before King Agrippa… “this thing was not done in a corner.” When the fullness of time had come, the eternal expression of God Himself took on a human body, lived a sinless life, and paid the just wages of sin—death. He then threw off the bonds of death and proclaimed eternal life in union with God to all who would receive it. This life is not one lost in God as a drop entering a boundless sea, but a life freely lived eternally unique and shared with God.

There is no religious or supernatural mystery to it. God spoke it from the beginning. He had it written down. Then, He brought it to pass. To quote an old movie line, “So let it be written, so let it be done.”

Maranatha