Our Fun Play

The big day is at hand, the first stone is to be laid, and labor and force, meaning and poem, scripture and prayer will all be woven together with young muscle and fledgling sweat to complete the sculpture.  Making large-scale stone sculpture is an eternal attempt of man.  If we are to be in His image we will forever seek to create eternity.  The great joy is that our futility creates in Him a pride for His beloved children and their childhood play.

How Your Neighbor Will Know A Counterfeiter & A Counterfeit

Don’t expect your enemy to accurately represent you.  That’s a lesson the church should learn.  Have you ever noticed how when the media wants a statement representing the south they will find the one southerner that matches their stereotype?  Same with the church, the media is always looking for someone from Westboro Baptist Church.  The Church will never convince the media of the truth of who we are.  The only way to do it is walk across the street and be The Church to your neighbor.  Then the neighbor will know a counterfeiter and counterfeit when they watch TV.    

I AM or you are not!

I got word a young family member just died.  Long coming accompanied by terrible suffering until his end.  Hate death.  One moment you are and the next moment you are not!

I AM.  The greatest declaration ever made to man.  If it is true, and every man must decide for himself, then earthly reality is something akin to deep fog in a cold hollow.  It means that there is a reality, only revealed at death, which far exceeds the entire scope of the cosmos and is truly beyond our most poetic imaginations.  I AM…or you are not!

Whose Corral Are You In?

I have never met anyone I could not befriend.  I thought long before writing that sentence.  I wondered about the truth of it.  The truth is much longer than 9 words.  It is foolish to think this power to befriend is generated in me.  It is a treasured gift not earned or deserved but freely given. It is in large part because we are all humans and in that have much more in common than differences.  This too is a gift.  We do not make myself nor am I capable of making another.  As I continued to wonder about this “befriending” miracle I realized that there is another force in the world.  This force is always seeking to destroy my “befriending” gift.  There is a sad quandary to all of this.  All humans align themselves with one of these forces and eventually like “sheep or goats” we will be penned eternally.

America Is Not Sodom and Gomorrah

I heard a believer compare America to Sodom and Gomorrah.  I can ease his heart in declaring that there are 10 righteous people in our family and thousands in Jackson TN.  Public media is just one sided. 

I am convinced that one of the greatest needs in our families today is for us to train our children and grand children in the faith.

-Training does not mean teaching.  Training is rigorous, continual, repetitive effort.
     Organized sports serves as a good example.
-Loving God is rigorous, continual, repetitive effort.
-Loving others is rigorous, continual, repetitive effort.

A gathering of 41 at Union.

Know What Love Means Before You Use The Word To Support Your Worldview

Two truths the world needs to understand.  You cannot change the set morality of the universe, the black and white of it, the absoluteness of right and wrong.  Secondly, hate cannot stop Jesus or His followers from loving others because that is the ultimate moral, rightness,  “God is love…He loved us and sent his Son…we also ought to love one another.”

Another truth worth noting; ‘if you believe that God is love, even intellectually, you are subscribing to nothing less than the Christian view of the universe and of the meaning and destiny of human life.  No other religion or movement declares this.  It is the highest concept of Devine nature that man can hold, it implies that all God’s actions are based in love and God’s greatest act that supports this is,’  “In this was manifested the love of God toward us...because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world...that we might live through him.”

Jesus is the one and only complete manifestation of your belief, either by faith or intellectually, that “God is love.”

(‘’= Paul W. Hoon.  I do not know how to credit citations on a Mac)

Un-done Love

We’ve been undone by our word “love”.  Most people never acknowledge real love but willingly substitute DESIRE.  This substitution is as fraudulent as sewage is to fresh water.  “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.”

Stop and consider for a moment the difference between the desire to have sex with someone and willingly giving up your child to save the life of someone who hated you.  We can understand the first.  The real word “love” remains un-done by us by the second.

One of the first altars our family ever built.  Black Mountain TN.