Sizzling, Snapping, Boiling Over Love

I am reading Exodus.  

Yesterday evening we sat on the porch as the day waned and the sun set.  My lover looked at me and said, “What are you thinking?” 

I reply stumbling through the words trying to think of perfect words and only common ones come out; “I don’t know, sometimes I have feelings that are so powerful.”  

“Like sadness?” she asks.

I am thinking of my love for her and of this place Fair Haven and it comes out as His gospel. 

“No,” I say. 

“Yes!” I say as I don’t know.  

I try to know how to express my feelings.  

“Like a deep ecstasy, powerfully meaningful, like a gripping knowing, and you turn and look at the sunset and imagine, that’s it, the pillar of fire, and I have pulled my seat outside my tent and sit and stare at it and know, ‘There’s my God, right there!’”  

The next morning still reading Exodus.

Good morning, Father Designer on the mountain, Christ Jesus our Mercy Seat, and Holy Spirit who guides us in all wisdom.  These are the passages where You give Moses the specific designs for the Tabernacle and its utensils.  You are very interested in us worshiping You and You aid by creating things to see to help us worship.  You establish great mysteries, use wonderful, costly, and colorful material, making perfect measurements, and blood is splashed on everything.  It is the beauty and the tragedy of the blood, staining everything and everyone.  The crimson stain, the deep red blood, the spilling of same which makes it all holy, acceptable to You Three.  It is the precursor to what is to come, all this gold, color, rings, wood, bronze, poles, angels, and lamps are all precious because they encircle the blood that will one day be Your Son’s.  

All this is done on top of a mountain, it is laid out up there, it is the greatest story ever told, the greatest love story, and it begins up in the fiery clouds of the mountaintop, sizzling, snapping, boiling over love, seeping into the earth and stones, flowing down onto the hearts and lives of millions upon millions of soon sainted believers.  The original mountain top experience. Because when You come calling You don’t need a pulpit, You need a mountain and a fount of Precious Blood because You are going to wash us in it. 

 

 

I Am the Most Powerful Person Over Me

Civil governance is established by God.  It is His exclusive right to establish.  It is intended that a large swath of Godly people will engage in all areas of civil life.  Christians must be an active part of all areas of civic life.  It is for the purpose of maintaining a just, kind, and fair civil order.  It is to protect us from the government and from each other.  If we decide we are the authority, we establish civil(ity),  and we can order ourselves to ensure just, kind, and fair public behavior the result is the America we see today.  Our government, schools, and public behavior degrades to one all-encompassing oversight, power, the one with the most power, rules.  There is no more egregious or greater breeding ground for civic disaster than this, I am the most powerful person over me. 

Me and the worm in My Front Yard

*I am so fortunate that You (God) left me a record, that You spoke, shared Your heart with me, and had someone write it down.  I am fortunate You gave me rules so that I am not wandering around making it up as I go.  I am also thankful that although much of it is beyond my understanding nothing calling for my obedience is.  I liken it to be much like me and the thousands of worms living in my yard.  The worm cannot march into my house and make me prove myself to it but that doesn’t mean that when I find the worm on the deadly concrete of my front porch I don’t reach down, pick it up, and toss it into my grass where it can live its perfect and rewarding life eating my dirt in my front yard.  Humility and a true sense of my fallenness are the keys to a healthy and rewarding life with God Almighty in His front yard.  The same goes for a knowledge of His record He left me.  ‘God’s Decree. ‘“For as the sky soars high above the earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think.”’ Isaiah 55:9 The Message

*Written after reading the account of God’s first revealing of Himself to the chosen people.

 

Quiet Convalescing With Beauty

Learning to adapt is one of the greatest gifts of God.  I am recovering again after major surgery, confined to the home and the front yard.  I love to work, being productive is balm for me.  Normally I am tending our 12 acres, making art, biking, and hiking, all part of His plan for our personal relationship involving beauty.  In my forced stillness I have begun to make small flower arrangements from the flowers growing around our home and displaying them in small sculptures Aaron has made.  It brings me a kind joy.  The act of living in purposeful relationship with The Ancient of Days, El Shaddai, is acknowledging His salvation of me in showing me how to adapt a fallen body to an unfallen relationship, allowing His beauty to save my days of quiet convalescing.   

Relationship With God Will Often Leave You Sore

There are adventures in life even at 66.  Yesterday my brother Billy drug my lover and me over Black Mountain, in our mules, his a hot rod, my a farmer’s worker.  Through swamps, ruts, boulder-strewn run-offs, and an old resort golf course on Renegade Mountain that he and I had helped build 50 years ago, now just an overgrown part of the wilds of Bat Town.  After an hour and a half, my lover and I quit.  You can only stay in a tumble dryer for so long.  We limped off the mountain, found some easier trial, and ended back at Kemmer’s Store where we had begun.  This morning, I read the story of Abram’s beginning with God.  His personal relationship with God was marked by hikes, altar building, finding great trees, camping, fire building, and bloodletting.  It is Sabbath morning and as is my habit I will attend and participate in worship but my personal relationship with God is mainly done outdoors, in great forests, long forgotten backsides of mountains, joys of the wilds, and a brother laughing at the old me all along the way.  This is the God we may have forgotten but is the One who wants us to come along with Him, away from our comfortable religion and into the wild of the good earth He made just for our relationship with Him.  And one other thing, friendship with God and little brothers will often leave you terribly sore.  

           

Whispering Words of Wisdom

“Let there be” is so kind.  It is so simple but encompasses such authority, power, potential and goodness.  “Let there be” is not a force or an effort, it is a releasing of, a great transfer of creative exuberance from You to nothing allowing something.  “Let there be” is like unto an offering of your smile to another, it is a gift of tremendous kindness, so simple but profoundly touching.  “Let there be” is gentle, an overflowing of what is normal, a flooding slowly, a love spreading out, manifesting nothingness with charity.  'Whispering words of wisdom, Let there be.’

On reading the opening of The Ancient Text.

  

The Gift, Owner or Artist

I have been gifted a gift of the meaning of life experiences and the gift urges me on to greater experiences. By experiences I mean the gift allows me to see more, hear more, feel more, and love more.  It opens the world to me, a world I would never have seen or known before.  It gives meaning to meaning, real meaning, this is difficult to explain but it is like reading poetry in English class and the meaning is so cloaked in words until the professor begins to explain it and opens its fullness and you are transported by its beauty, and each verse gives you a keener sense of life, love, and meaning.  It is like the English language is mastered and you know all the meanings of all the words so you can choose the right word to say what you mean; it is this in reverse, the words of the gift began to be alive and open to you a kaleidoscope of meaning and the meanings is true and it trueness proves it true. You are set free to know as only it can let you know.  And one greater thing; it confirms there is so much more to know, so much more beauty, love, and truth which we are unable at present to see, hear, touch, and understand.  The gift has made me so much better; I am such a better human being.  Not that I am morally better, but that I am better at being a human being, like a towering Sequoia tree is better at being a tree than a Pine.  I have been made, not me making,  a more advanced lee, my heart, senses, and soul have been fully developed.  It might be understood by this; someone owning a great sculpture or someone being able to sculpt a great sculpture; owner or artist, the Gift allows you personal access to The Artist.

The Gift?  Reading the Bible everyday.