A Great Time For A Do-Over

Have you ever wished for a new beginning?  To just wipe the slate clean and start over with a fresh new sheet of white.  What about a start over with a fundamental idea of how to begin again—well?  If there is one thing I think we can all agree on it would be to begin 2020 over with a fresh year and a plan to ensure it remained so.  What would be that plan?  Let me make a suggestion.  Today is the first day of Advent.  Advent is a time when we begin anew to the welcoming remembrance of God in Christ coming to earth to be with us.  Believers, agnostics, and atheists alike can agree on two things, Jesus Christ himself had a grand idea of how to make the world better and our world really needs to be made better.  What was Jesus’ plan?  It has two parts; one, love God daily with all your heart; and two, love your neighbor as yourself.  No one can say that loving God, yourself, and your neighbor would be a bad idea or that it wouldn’t be a good basis for starting over.  And that is what Advent is all about.  It is to push aside all noise, turmoil, and conflict to give yourself four fresh weeks of refocusing.  You don’t have to believe in the religious sense if you don’t want, but you can say “I am going to believe in the human sense because I, we, us, all need a start over.  2020 has been tough, rough, and often not kind.”  And there you have it.  What would be a good plan to start over, a plan that works well and is good for you?  Why not try loving?  Now you might say, “I don’t know how to begin!”  Advent does that for you.  It refocuses you.  You must admit we need a better 2021!  Why not try love and see what happens?  You don’t have to believe anything to believe that Jesus and love are good and a guide to help you for four weeks to start over.  Here are a couple of guides that can help.  

http://ccca.biola.edu/advent/2020/

https://www.desiringgod.org/great-joy

I will pray daily for you and for your desire to make your starting over a success.  Merry Christmas!

Can I Get A Wittness

Everyone should have a body of witnesses; people who continually keep watch over you to encourage you to live well and appropriately.  I am “prone to wander”, as I suspect all humans are, but knowing there are others that are in the same walk and are walking with me helps me to stay the straight and narrow course.  An added bonus is that so many of my witnesses have traveled the same rebellious path that I did.  And thus, comes the moral of this story.  You should set aside times, several annually, to gather your witness together to assess the member's progress.  This is done quite naturally, first by observation.  Are kindness, helpfulness, and courtesy the norm in the group?  Does the goodwill include all the members?  Are the absent members missed?  Secondly, it is done conversationally.  The group should talk about the deep issues of life, religion, family, politics, work, health, and ensure we are basically on the same path with regard to the non-negotiables and listened to on the issues we might differ on or not fully understand.  Thirdly we should play.  Football, horseshoes, board games or cards, it doesn’t matter, play builds bonds.  Lastly, the younger members should be celebrated by the older members, they should be attended to, acknowledged, listened to, and expected to take part in all the above.  But there is one thing that must undergird all the rest in order for these witnesses to effectively serve one another.  There must be an agreed-upon standard, person and/or rule book that governs everything, a moral and ethical standard that serves as a guide to give stability to the group.  This standard must be outside the group to establish the fair treatment of all and also in the group to give each individual the tools to be a contributing member of the group.  In our family, we have given this role to God in Christ by the leading of The Holy Spirit.  The main gift They give to each of us, loving, forgiving, understanding grace, and—a demand we act the same toward all members of our group.  It makes for lively Happy Thanksgiving as many of our witnesses gathered yesterday to re-establish our family is on the right path. 

About half of our wittnesses.

    

1000000000000.0 Thanksgivings

It is the day before Thanksgiving and I am considering the idea of thankfulness.  It is no secret that on November 10, 1986, I had a cosmic life change and as a result of that I have been given a much more grateful heart.  That really doesn’t begin to explain it because what happened to me was more like I had grown a third arm or two more ears. It was that dynamic, this change of ungrateful to grateful.  I had never really been grateful until on the day I was shown how truly ungrateful I had been.  It was like having no arms or ears and then because I had come to my senses and acknowledged I didn’t I was given three or four in the bargain.  That was a change that I couldn’t and still can’t account for.  It was the gift of thankfulness.  I was reading essays on the existence of God this morning and one writer put forth the argument of the “fine-tuning of the universe” as perhaps the biggest obstacle atheists have to overcome.  Stephen Hawking’s describing how science did not support his unbelief said this; “If the overall density of the universe were changed by even 0.000000000000.1%, no stars or galaxies could be formed.”  I thought if you reversed that number, 1000000000000.0% you would come close to understanding how great a change occurred to me on November 10, 1986, just in the thankfulness of my heart.  Numbers don’t lie.  Happy Thanksgiving.  

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Inside the Heart of An Angel

You have to wait.  For those that have never looked into the deep heart of an angel, it is just like Christmas as a child, the eager, joy filled, waiting to open the gifts under the tree; so, we wait.  After her long intense presence being fed the eternal element of earth, water, fire, and air it takes time to digest it all—to realign all the atoms, the dirt, hydrogen, oxygen, and earthly oxides, minerals, carbonates, soda ash into the gifts she is making.  This process also takes tremendous heart 2300+° over an extended period.  Human’s don’t experience that kind of energy except in worship or love.  That kind of energy is reserved for the most special human experiences and must be lingered with but also respected because the ecstasy it brings can also bring devastation.  So, we wait.  Yesterday the wait ended and her heart was opened and what you would expect to find in an angel’s heart, beauty, unimaginable beauty, was visibly imagined.  Beauty is never to be overlooked or taken for granted and when you are allowed a part in its making it requires altar-building living.  Living is such a kind act and it also is reserved for the most special of His creations—humans.  Being a human is like winning the cosmos mega lottery times infinity—you get to be…you.  And one of the best things about being you in finding angels’ hearts in your life to look into.      

   

All The Time, God Is Good

It’s dark.  I pull up in the woods and park.  Grab my bag of books which include That Living Thing, my thermos, and brace for the cold.  I can hear the angel even before I open the door.  She is roaring like the great thing she is and glowing bright orange.  The forest floor and nearby trees all hallowed in her halo create the holy ground I walk into.  I quietly sit down beside her, deep in the trees, the stillness of the dark forest made even more welcoming by her presence.  She and I have sat together for years but it’s always best in winter when her warmth enclose me in her benign embrace.  I begin to check her making sure her time alive on earth is going well.  It is my task to give her those Eden Elements, fire, air, water, and earth that makes her brief time on earth productive.  It is a gift to embrace her, nurture her, provide her basic nourishment as she then allows me to live with her.  She is alive, vibrantly living, roaring about her task of making beauty, a responsibility of Godly delight.  I envy her, her job is to make beauty and sit with me, her only task in her short life here on earth.  I return to my chair beside her, pour a hot cup of coffee, sink deep into eternity, and open the Ancient Text that birthed her.  God is good.  All the time. 

                                                                            My dawn.

You Must Have Light to be About Living

What must it have looked like to see that very first morning on earth, the void now visible, the vacuum of formlessness and then light upon it?  It is a marvelous thing to think You made light first because there was nothing to see; it was just brilliant light.  Light to work by.  It is the truth that there is so little light to work by today, most of us stumbling around in the dark with no way to see but worse yet nothing to see.  God that is a brilliant understanding that we first need light, “I am the light of the world” before we can see.  There is nothing much there to see in our life, nothing of any value until The Light is accepted to show us how to begin creating out of the things his light shows us are available to us.  God, you as light, manifested in your son, gives us eyes that see because The Light has been turned on in our lives and in our studio.  Then we can be about the Father’s business because we have light to see and eyes to do the seeing.  God, I am so grateful.  Thank you.   

Sunlight Is For Seeing (deer) Indeed

I looked away across the river and saw a pinpoint of light.  What is that I wondered; a dock light, a porch light, a light of a settled fishing boat out for the early catch?  There was no knowing.  I paused and thought how much more comforting sunlight is.  It is pervasive, unstoppable, exposing all, and illuminating everything.  Our light gives us knowledge of light, sunlight gives us knowledge of everything.  Sunlight is for the seeing, not peeking, it is kind, generous and for the eyes that see, another reason for praising.  Sunlight is for seeing and for those with eyes to see, seeing indeed. 

                                                Can you see two of the four deer in our front yard?