Lost Crusader #149 I’m Satisfied

 “O God, you are my God; early will I seek you: my soul thirsts for you, my flesh longs for you in a dry and thirsty land…”

Psalm 63

The first and great commandment is to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. If anyone cannot do this of their own freewill, they may find all else is vanity. The Spirit does not ask a person to love God for naught. Love is not some nebulous titillation of the senses. It is a reciprocal action between two like beings.

God is love and the source of it. The human heart has a natural enmity toward God. Thus it is impossible for us to initiate a loving relationship with the divine. Fortunately, God does not expect us to do so. We are called upon to love God because He first loved us.

This love was manifested in His offering of Himself to abolish the enmity between us and to extend the opportunity to be adopted into the eternal, divine life. The price has been paid for peace with God. Many do not experience it because accepting God’s offer comes with terms and conditions. You can’t just sign in without accepting God’s terms because the terms are what constitutes love for God.

That is, you agree to love God and your neighbor as yourself. Do this and you will find that ever after only these two things truly satisfy your soul. Many an unhappy “Christian” is walking around out there because they never realized what they agreed to nor did they choose to let those things be their guide.

I hope it is clear from this little discussion that a person does not have to accept God’s terms to be loved by God. God still loves everyone, even those who curse and reject Him. Furthermore, it is not God’s will that any should miss out on a loving relationship with Him. The will to avoid a relationship with God originates in the human heart that refuses His love and is satisfied with their world. God (and by extension, the Church) is a handy scapegoat for many looking for a place to lay the blame for their misery.

We are made for more than our current experience in a world bound by physical conditions. We are made to share the life of God in the expanse of all that has been created. That this is not for everyone is obvious. Some are happy with themselves as they are, and so they shall ever be.

If you find the present world does not satisfy the deepest longings of your soul, you are not alone. C.S. Lewis wrote, “If nothing in this world satisfies me, perhaps it is because I was made for another world.”

In the words of the old, now largely discarded, hymn, “I love to tell the story, because I know ‘tis true, it satisfies my longing, as nothing else can do.”

Maranatha

Know Jack #361 I Talk to Myself

 “Oh the tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

Sir Walter Scott

You might have seen one of those social media posts where you’re asked to tell what you do for a living in an obscure/funny way. I usually answer that I tell lies for a living. Of course, then I have to explain that I’m not a politician, but a fiction writer.

I’ve been reading The Republic by Plato and stumbled upon this conversation between Socrates and Adeimantus that spoke to me about writing.

Socrates: “You are aware, I suppose, that all mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or to come?”

“Certainly,” he replied.

Socrates: “And narration may be either simple narration or imitation, or a union of the two?

“You know the first lines of the Iliad…‘And he prayed all the Greeks, but especially the two sons of Atreus, the chiefs of the people…’

“The poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose that he is anyone else. But in what follows he takes the person of Chryses, and then does all that he can to make us believe that the speaker is not Homer, but the aged priest himself.”

To tell a tale well, a writer must take on another personality, or in most cases, multiple personalities. It’s much like an actor getting into character---except in my case, it’s a one-man show and I have to change costumes really fast.

Writing dialog is like talking to myself as two different people with different points of view and all the while watching hidden on the sidelines to make sure I keep the conversation moving and make sure none of my personalities spoil the ending.

The difference between telling and showing is to remain invisible, to be the all-powerful wizard hidden behind the curtain pulling the strings. If you see me, if I don’t stay behind the curtain, the show’s over—the deception, and so the story fails.

Make no mistake about it, deception is what fiction writing is about. It’s kind of in the name of the thing. The object is to spin a web so tangled the reader gets lost between realities and just as wrapped up in it as I did while I was writing it.

Once when asked why I wrote three blogs instead of one, I said the answer was simple. Those are the three personalities that can’t keep their mouths shut. It’s okay if people just don’t get why I write or where I go while doing it. They may be just one person. If you find that boring too, you might be a writer.

Maranatha

Lost Crusader #148 Rock Solid

 “When my heart is overwhelmed; lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”

Psalm 61

 

Life can be overwhelming at times. Even when all is going according to plan, the wise person understands that they are not really in charge. It is in those moments we are most certain of our ability to stand on our own that we ought to beware of falling flat on our faces.

Confidence and faith are not synonymous though they are often mistaken for one another. Confidence is an inward assurance, which may or may not be born of faith. Faith is an upward reaching action based on the knowledge that there is something higher of which to take hold.

Faith does not grasp at straws or flail blindly for purchase, it reaches for a proven object—one that functions as a shield. I have been told that my faith is a crutch. The words were meant to be a derogatory comment regarding my personal weakness. It failed to wound me because I know a crutch to be an instrument of healing.

I used to work on a ward that dealt almost exclusively in horrific diabetic foot ulcers. Cratered heels, dissolving bones and dead flesh was our stock in trade. To each person afflicted with such wounds, a crutch was given with the instructions to keep their weight off the injured foot by leaning on their crutch.

A soul, wounded as mine was, needed a crutch to lean on. When healing came, I could live without constantly leaning on the crutch—but I didn’t throw it away. I shared it instead. Now, when I am wounded and in need of something to bear me up there are those ready and willing to share their crutch with me.

Pilate asked Jesus what the truth was. The Truth is a person. Life has a way. The Way is also a person. For the overwhelmed soul there is a rock to cling to amid the flood. The Rock is a person—Jesus Christ.

“On Christ the solid Rock, I stand—all other ground is sinking sand.”

Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I.

Maranatha

Know Jack #360 Still Dreaming

 “Dreams, so they say, are for fools and they let ‘em slip away…”

Seals and Croft

There are dreams we have when our eyes close in sleep. According to some these dreams are a type of story our mind stages to work out the issues of the day. Others say they can be the messengers of God. Perhaps both are true. God must surely be interested in how we work out the issues of the day and, on occasion, we really need some direct divine guidance.

Then there are the dreams that live in our minds, shifting between levels of consciousness while our eyes are wide open. I have always lived a quixotic kind of life acting on my dreams even if they are not tethered to reason.

Logic, reason, and truth all have their proper roles to play in life, the formation of sound judgment, and wise decision-making. But they are not constants. “To every thing there is a season and a time for every purpose under the heaven.” There is a time to lay all else aside and chase a dream.

I’m a writer now because I didn’t listen to reason. I had ventured down the dream-chasing road once before. I had been badly burned so I really should have listened this time—I didn’t.

Dreams unpursued bear no fruit, they wither and die. Chasing after your dreams will likely leave you battle-scarred. However, there is no more indelible scar a soul can bear than what might have been. The opportunity to dream may come around more than once, and dreams may haunt us but they do not chase us.

It is true that some dreams, whether the waking or the sleeping kind, are nightmares. However, we don’t give up sleeping, and neither should we give up dreaming. The next turn in the road just might be where you catch up to that elusive dream.

Maranatha

Lost Crusader #147 Better Lepers

 “Then they said to one another, ‘We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news, and we remain silent’.”

2 Kings 7:9

 

I have been reading Plato’s Republic this past week and engaged in the philosophical argument between Socrates and his fellows about justice and injustice. Those favoring injustice, cloaked by an appearance of justice, advanced many of the arguments the new “Woke” crowd of today espouses. This position, they said, was more profitable and engendered more happiness than being just. The story I shared a line from today could be used by this crowd as a case in point.

I’m going to set the scene for you. The capital of Israel has been under siege. A cup of dove’s dung was selling for two ounces of silver—if you could find it. Living up against the city walls were four men. Neither side cared about them. They were lepers, cast out from society as unclean, disease-spreading vermin.

The king of Israel blamed the prophet Elisha for the entire situation, and as kings do, hatched a plot to rid the country of the voice of opposition. Meanwhile, the four lepers decided they would rather die by the sword than starvation. They went to surrender to the Syrian army only to find everyone gone. All the tents, animals and supplies were there but the army was nowhere to be found.

It's true that they ate all they could hold and took some treasure for themselves. But it dawned on them that such action was not right with an entire city starving behind the walls. So, they went and told it. The city was saved, but what of the lepers?

As far as we know, they went right back to living up against the outside of the city wall. They remained lepers. No one thanked them for their bravery or their sense of justice that moved them to share the good news. Their just action availed them nothing and cost them whatever treasure they might yet have carried off.

Do not expect the world to grant you the least kindness or imitate whatever right actions you model. Injustice, wearing the cloak of repairing past wrongs, is the rule of the day. Just action is for fools, clingers to old ways, and those who have passed from usefulness.

Closing churches in the name of the good of all or some misplaced sense of caring for neighbors is to negate the underlying truth that we need loyalty to God and right action more than vaccines and the departing from divine commandment. Better to be disgusting social lepers than the servant whom the king leans upon.

          “Therefore to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.”

If the Church truly believed 2 Chronicles 7:14 was an answer to the country’s ills, it would repent en masse for its shameful actions of the last two years. We need not expect to prosper until we do.

Maranatha

Know Jack #359 Ripples not Waves

 “There is a road, no simple highway

Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow…”                           Jerry Garcia

 

I’ve made some waves in my time. I have also been caught in the riptide they created. All in all, I have very few regrets. This is no valedictory, and I don’t assume I have peaked. Some situations and subjects are simply too tempting for me not to blurt out a contradictory opinion just for the sake of sparking a spirited discussion.

 

My life goal, however, is to create ripples rather than waves. What’s the difference, ripples are just little waves, right? In a sense, that’s true. Besides size, I see the cause as a difference between the two. The Dead’s song about a ripple not caused by tossed stones or blowing wind strikes a chord with me.

 

What if each moment of life sends out a ripple through time and space within the universe and the sum of those ripples is the creation of our eternal existence? Of course, that idea (unlike those of the pure energy religions) presupposes a mathematician standing, above and independent of, time, space, and the multiverse. One who knows when things don’t add up and when they do.

 

I generally begin each day with a request for divine direction. If I stop and review those requests, I find each one has been answered in a positive manner. That does not mean I took the advice, or I didn’t try doing it my own way first, or that I even heard it, but I have not gone without direction. It means that the ripples I make are, in fact, of my own making. The consequences of those ripples and any possible correction of them rests upon my shoulders.

 

If my soul is scarred, the wounds were all self-inflicted. The pain I may have felt, however, has engendered divine empathy that affected mercy on my behalf. I believe that I have been granted a peek into my life beyond this body that I now inhabit. That I don’t charge off towards it shows I may have developed some patience after all. No one is more surprised by that epiphany than I am.

 

I have passed up some very tempting opportunities to make waves lately. To say I’m learning, I’m improving, or I’m more desirous of peace is premature. Let’s just say I am more prepared to watch people go over the falls than to warn them it exists. If they will not hear the roar of falling water, see the rushing surface, or feel the acceleration of the current, do they really need my voice?

 

I say that and then, each Sunday, don my crusader outfit. It doesn’t make me a hypocrite, just a fool. As the song said, it’s not a simple highway and the path is a solitary one.

 Maranatha

 

 

Lost Crusader #146 Remind Me, Lord

 “This second epistle, beloved, I write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance.”

2 Peter 3

In a type of open letter to Christians Peter hits upon an important truth—though his message is directed to those who are led by the Spirit of God, it is for everyone. That truth is that people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.

Made in God’s likeness, there is born in us a knowledge of right and wrong. This knowledge is added to by family, society, and culture but it exists independently. Those who argue against this cannot escape the fact that they rely on this inherent sense of right and wrong.

“Liar!’

“Cheater!”

“You’re mean!”

These charges explode from the wokest of naysayers on a regular basis. Why? If a person’s truth originates within them and is unique to them, why charge someone else with ignoring it? It makes absolutely no sense unless they are somehow inferior and not entitled to a truth all their own that is as equally valid as the speaker’s truth.

We cannot say the law has brainwashed us because except under very limited circumstances, it is not illegal to lie, cheat, or be mean. Nevertheless, it is declared wrong by those being lied to, cheated, or bullied, and in such a way that the other person is expected to know these things are wrong.

Another objection is that right and wrong vary by culture. That is true to a degree, but the differences are not as many as the similarities. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, one culture may allow a man to have one wife while another culture may allow multiple wives, but no culture allows a man to have any woman he wants—especially one who is another man’s wife.

Look across the spectrum of those who maintain the existence of some deity and you will find a version of “love thy neighbor as thyself”.

Objective morality exists and its very existence argues for the existence of God. Even those who discount God in favor of a pure energy-derived universe, like that of quantum mechanics, will tell you that behavior influences vibration. They point to studies of plants and water subjected to various influences and the differences various stimuli produce. Yet they claim one of the stimuli produced a good or better outcome, and another produced a bad or distorted outcome. But where did the idea that one venation rate is good or higher, and another is bad or lower come from? They are tempted to answer that the observer creates the good versus bad effect. However, the observer is subject to the same affect, so they cannot be the source or origin of it.

We know the law of Right and Wrong. Yet, we break it. We don’t often need a lecture or sermon to do more than remind us that we are made in God’s image. Good lives in us. Peter was reminding his audience to let it shine.

This was also the message of James who wrote, “therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”

Maranatha