The Light in the Woods

 

#29 – THE LIGHT IN THE WOODS – DECEMBER 2007

 

© Aubri Dennison 2007

 

12/2/07 Inspirations             I used to scoff at the technique of visualization during meditation as kind of a spiritual walking-stick that might trip you up as easily as it might support you. Thoughts from my intellect are susceptible enough to error, and thoughts from my imagination would have to be even more so. Then, during a meditation, I was suddenly, without conscious decision, using the visualization technique and I got a great benefit out of it. During one of Jesus’ falls under the weight of the cross, His crown of thorns came loose and the soldiers were ramming it back into His head with the sides of their swords. As I watched I thought to myself ”But what if it really is the Son of God you’re doing this to?” Maybe it’s one more thing that God hoped to accomplish in us through Christ – to be able to doubt our doubt. God knows as weak human beings we will doubt the supernatural, so one task of Jesus was to make us question why we doubt. Visualization helped me answer my own question of why God would allow Jesus such shameful suffering – to bring home the awesome sacrifice He made. The soldiers were hurting God Himself, like we do every time we sin. Willfully hurting the Creator of the universe; spitting on the Author of Life! Let’s take each sin as seriously as if we were forcing the crown of thorns onto Jesus’ head ourselves. That’s really what we’re doing.

 

12/2/07 Insights from Study         Often, it seems, Jesus spoke on two levels. Consider the phrase “Arise, go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole.” This was said to the leper, who Jesus had just cleansed and who came back to thank Him. The leper’s faith had made him whole physically because he was one of ten lepers who believed that Jesus would heal them if they called out to Him. But his faith made him whole spiritually as well, since he was the only one who came back to give glory to God. (Luke 17:11-19)

 

12/3/07 Reflections          If I were to write a book, on the back page – the biography page – I would have to put that I have no divinity degree, no formal spiritual counseling training, no church affiliation, no organizational participation, no missionary experience. I just live in the woods, getting revelations from God and writing them down. I think my remote location and lack of credentials is part of God’s plan. I’m a clean slate that nobody writes on but God. I have the quiet that’s so necessary to purify my spirit, and the means to share the word with others. I wait, patiently hope, for my “niche”; for the one revelation I know enough to anticipate. That is, the means God chooses in which I can serve Him.

 

12/3/07 Reflections            In internet forum discussions on spirituality, they always ask each other how they know it’s God speaking and not something else. When you receive information from your senses you know how you’ve received it, but when you receive information supernaturally it doesn’t appear much different from worldly sources of past information that has been stored in your brain. In other words, we worry that our ideas come from our subconscious and not from God. Yet, it seems to me that in any scenario our thoughts are brought forth for a reason – a sequence which is supernaturally encoded – placed either by God gifting us with good thoughts or God withholding his protection from bad thoughts. Either way, it’s God’s work for God’s plan. Even a naturally-controlled sequence such as the input from our senses is supernaturally supervised, in that it was created by God for God’s reasons. So the answer to the forum question is that all phenomena is divinely presented. The elements for all information are there to be discovered – humanity was created with perfect knowledge and all spirituality is a return to that state that was lost to sin. The part of it that we learn through our senses is familiar to us; the hidden part that we recognize through Mysticism is a glimpse of our former perfect knowledge, with varying degrees of clarity. Like everything else, it’s God’s desire.

 

12/4/07 Insights from Prayer           Don’t be ashamed that God has taken a special interest in you. Your embarrassment over your supposed vanity is a human reaction that should be ignored. Instead, use this fear of spiritual pride to remind you to keep your humility under your own scrutiny. But don’t let others accuse you of feeling “holier-than-thou” if your distinctiveness shows though. Despite your humility there are times when God will use your unique aura to attract others to Him. Don’t worry if they’re attracted in negative ways as well as positive ways – these things are God’s business and you aren’t meant to take them on as your own worry. You know that you’re being treated in a special way in order to serve God in a way that He deems right – don’t belittle God’s choice by giving in to the human need to fit in with peoples’ expectations instead of God’s decisions. If God chooses to elevate you, accept that and direct your though to Him instead of to how you appear to the temporal world. God is taking care of that to His own ends. We can learn about this from John the Baptist. It was his very humility that showcased his exceptional relationship to Jesus. That he be seen as special was God’s plan for him to be the forerunner for Jesus, who told him that God had planned things this way to fulfill all righteousness (Matthew 3)

 

12/5/07 Insights from Study           I was reading a devotional on the Eucharist by Henri J. M. Nouwen, but doing it half-heartedly because the Eucharist is a sore point for me. At one time communion was as important and uplifting to me as it was for Nouwen. Then followed my “uncaring” years when my church attendance was very spotty, but the Eucharist did for me what it used to. Then came my spiritual awakening three years ago – my spirituality came full circle and I tried to incorporate the Eucharist into it. That was a disaster. I thought I could just pick up where I left off being the good Catholic. I bought a catechism and studied Catholic doctrine from various sources. One thing I found was that the church discourages a parishioner who is in an invalid marriage (I married a divorced man) from participating in the Eucharist. You can commit any sin but that one and if you repent you can take communion. But I’m not sorry I married my husband, and I don’t repent of it. So I tried to go back to taking communion to see how it felt in my heart, which is where I discern right from wrong. An incident with the suspicious churchman who called me out was my answer – that and the following consolation from God during my devotions. So now I’m at last done being comfortable in either organized religion or church services. How like God to change the whole playbook when I asked for guidance on one of the rules! I’m so grateful to Him that He made me understand the answer to my prayer for guidance. He didn’t say yes or no to my question as to whether it was right for me to take communion. He said belonging to a church should not be important to me; that He will tell me how I should go with Him. Well today, as I read my devotional, I realized something else, or rather I just put together things I already knew. God has been pointing me to this path all my life and spurring me on by giving me a distinctive feeling of having something He wants me to do. My big decisions in life have always never seemed to have been mine alone. The events of my life always seem to be like putting together a jigsaw puzzle – it’s after the pieces fit that I realize how obviously they were meant to fit. If I go to make a decision, I’m often struck by a coma-like inaction that lasts until the situation no longer calls for my decision, or I do what God had in mind all along. And through it all is that “perfectly sure” feeling that God has something important for me to do. It may be a general thing that next to other great world events is unnoticeable, but to God it’s important. But here’s the main thing – we have to relax in our own expectations in order to recognize and follow the will of God. If we don’t, we are always fighting Him, and that only brings sorrow and confusion. Yes, we have free will and can struggle against God if we want to, but if we have the right faith and trust in God’s love for us, we won’t want our own way in favor of His. And there are those instances where God really wants something of you – He won’t make you do it, but He’ll make you want to do it. I think that’s where I am now, and whenever I read about the importance of the Eucharist, I understand it but I don’t embrace if for me, because God wants something else. I’m happy with that. Sometimes overwhelmed, but always awestruck with it.

 

12/6/07 Reflections         It irritates me when fundamentalists take the Bible literally, and then when someone calls them on it, they quote the very source that the disbeliever holds in contempt. It puts a stain on God’s word that trumps anything an unbeliever could do. I don’t see why a person can’t use the Bible for their guidance without having to take it word-for-word when exploring its truths – not just to avoid confrontation, but to trust in the Bible by giving leeway to the way it developed. It’s full of metaphor because it had to appeal to the people who it was being passed along to, or it would have passed them by completely. As an extra-Biblical example: It’s easier to say “Look at the beautiful sunrise!” than to say “Look at the beautiful way the sun appears as the Earth on its eastward rotation exposes it over the horizon.” Or how would you like it if you told someone “There were so many stars out last night!” and instead of being enthused by such a beautiful thought, they answered “The stars are still out, you dope, it’s just that during the light of day you can’t see them. And a couple of those so-called stars are really planets, you deluded sap”? Even if the Bible is inspired by God, it was written for man – after a long time of being passed around by word of mouth. I don’t take it literally any more than I really believe the sun rises and the stars come out at night. These are just expressions that we all accept for getting the point across in a way we all understand. The Bible does the same thing. Just because the words that are traditionally used to describe them are unscientific doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend the appearance of the sun and stars aren’t real. It’s the glory of their Creator that concerns me, and the glory of the Creator that the Bible is about. Just because human beings are too weak to be able to describe it perfectly doesn’t lessen its impact.

 

12/6/07 Reflections            On the radio today someone was arguing that if anyone running for president lets their religious beliefs dictate their policies they’re insulting to secularists like herself. I thought to myself “Then why don’t you take out an AK-47 and kill them all, seeing as there’s no God to judge you and no moral feeling within you to prevent it?” If science is your God, then show me the morality gene that makes you too uncomfortable to walk around naked in public. Everyone has morals put there by the Creator, even those who don’t believe in Him. Not everyone follows the dictates of their morals, but they are there nonetheless. Morality itself is a religious nature, and this woman had better hope that a president follows theirs.

 

12/7/07 Insights from Prayer         “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord they God”. In other words, don’t insist on signs and miracles to define your relationship with God. Enjoy them when they come, but know they come because you’ve made your spirit receptive to God and His gifts; not because you’ve demanded them. If you leave off of your devotion to God because He doesn’t give you your demands, where will you go, and aren’t you just hurting yourself?

 

12/7/07 Reflections          Sometimes there’s such a slight coloring difference between the types of insights I record, I’m often confused myself over how I catalog them. The difference is only important to me, and when it comes to naming my insights I figure it out right away. But when I go back and wonder how I know what the differences are, I’m never sure. Revelations are revelations, and they are very clearly given during God’s visits. Presentations are also easy to identify, because they are “events” that happen; not thoughts. Study isn’t too bad, because I get the insights as I’m studying and conversation isn’t too bad, because I get the insights as I’m praying. But it’s only during Lectio Divina that I’m not sure whether to put them under study or conversation or reflection. Maybe I should have a new category for Lectio Divina. Inspirations are revelations that happen when God is not “visiting”, merely influencing, but they have to be distinguished from reflections by their intensity and importance. That leaves reflections, which is the most confusing because all insights are reflections in some ways. Today it occurred to me that the types of insights correspond to the parts of Lectio Divina. Study insights come from reading, reflection insights come from meditation, conversation insights come from prayer, and revelations come from contemplation. That leaves inspirations and presentations, which are different anyway because they “come out of the blue”, so it’s natural that they would not correspond to Lectio Divina. There is a method to this, one that has evolved as my devotion has evolved. Interesting how it all comes together.

 

12/7/07 Inspirations          You can try to explain the means of mysticism, but the end of it is unexplainable and shouldn’t be alluded to other than to reveal its affects. To pass mysticism along you must teach, but teaching is sort of not what mysticism is about – mysticism generally leaves you unable and unwilling to explain, so as a teaching method it’s not very conducive. Today I was studying Mysticism (Evelyn Underhill) and I realized that there really should be no problem in my needing to give up organized religion and church. Some of God’s children just go beyond that. The church would never say so, but God may say so. If He has chosen me and I’m going the way my heart tells me to go, it’s the right path. It does go against all I’ve been taught, but I must never forget that I’m specially chosen, and what I’ve been taught can only take me so far. Organized religion and church attendance can only go so far. These things may be the ends to others, but only the means to me. God takes me the rest of the way. As I go further beyond where others stop, I shouldn’t look back on the path everyone else is taking, and I shouldn’t be ashamed to be what God makes me. If I have to go against centuries of theological premise and doctrine, it’s because I’ve been chosen to do this. I’m thankful for my religious training, but now it’s time to say goodbye to it and follow God beyond what the church can teach me about Him.

 

12/8/07 Reflections            Utopia already exists, but it’s in God’s heavenly kingdom and will never again be possible in His Earthly kingdom. The good news is, you may be slated to enter this Utopia at any time – maybe tonight as you sleep. The bad news is, you must have repented from sin in order to enter this perfect world, and once you’re dead your chance to do it is over. Your job in an imperfect world isn’t to make it perfect. Your job is to worship and serve God however He wants you to. This is how you reach the Utopia that’s already waiting. God may use you to make this world better, not because that is the goal, but because it’s the means for you and your neighbor to reach the real goal of eternal life with God. This world is not the way God wants it. If He’s all-powerful why doesn’t He make it the way He wants it? Because to do that He would have to take away your free will. The sins you commit, such as worshiping and serving something worldly instead of God, is a result of you using your free will. If God were to take away our free will, we would be like the animals, which don’t sin because they can’t. God doesn’t want that here, even if the result would be a perfect world on Earth, because Earth isn’t what’s important. God wants us to approach perfection willingly by putting Him above everything else. Instead of waiting for God to make the world perfect, why don’t you start the ball rolling? Make the free-will choice to give up your free-will to the guidance of God. If everyone did that, the world would desire the perfection God does; if only some of us did that, the world would approach perfection; if you were the only one to do that, you would be a long way along the path to perfection. It all starts with you giving yourself to God.

 

12/9/07 Inspirations               As I strive to eliminate anything in my life that isn’t God-toward, I have to distinguish between those things that distract me from God and those that enhance my enjoyment of Him. God forbid that I should keep the wrong thing or give up the right thing as well. In this, I don’t aspire to life in the desert as some do – the desert, where there is nothing. Instead, I aspire to live in the wilderness – where there’s not only nothing to distract me from God but, unlike the desert, something at every turn showing me the glorious presence of God through His awesome creation. The point isn’t to deprive myself into nothingness, but to purify myself into the everythingness of God. For what good is it to give up everything for the love of God, only to reject His gifts of true worth?

 

12/16/07 Inspirations            The difference between occult and devotional Mysticism is in the nature of the onset and the nature of the goal. Any seeking of extra-sensory gifts for the purpose of self-expression begins and ends in the ego; the human need for more – more wisdom, more knowledge, more emotion, more recognition, more happiness, more power, more sensual joy. Occult practices are goaled towards self-satisfaction, brought on by self-toward curiosity. Devotional mysticism is the opposite; self-disregard brought on by an external invitation from the Creator. It’s goal is for less ego – the abandonment of self in order to absorb the nature of God. The gifts are infinitely greater because devotional practices transcend the focus of this life and speak to the glory to come.

 

12/16/07 Insights from Prayer            I wake up in the night a lot, look out the window and pray myself back to sleep. Last night, each time I woke up I realized my previous prayer was bringing about a certain thought I didn’t understand the implications of. I was each time conscious of the insight that there is a place inside of us where what we’ve learned of our spirits through God is kept. Why would such a common notion need to be stressed over and over? I already knew this – why was it so insistently repeated even though it’s a logical inference and not extraordinary at all? Maybe it’s something I will need to refer to later on, and so it was being overly imprinted.

 

12/18/07 Inspirations              I have God in my spirit and it colors everything I do. Inside, I have more power, intelligence, and goodness than I can fully experience or accurately express. And yet, here’s the thing – I have absolutely no desire to express this gift to anyone else except in the writing that I am inspired to do. In other words, it’s OK to write down my thoughts and feelings for the instruction of others, but it’s not OK to try to explain things face to face with anybody. I find that the thought of trying to explain to others how God comes to me is extremely distasteful as well as next to impossible. If I read something in an online forum that I feel inspired to respond to, it’s with the hope that there will be no reply, as that would be like a face-to-face confrontation. The revelation that I am told to “State, don’t debate” must have really taken hold in me, because now to do otherwise seems distasteful and out-of-character. It’s a prohibition in the way that a dog is prohibited from walking on two feet – he can try it, but he wouldn’t dream of that unless there was an overpowering need to do it.

 

12/21/07 Insights from Study                      We must quit limiting ourselves by getting stuck in the hopelessness of deferring to a transcendent God. When we say “God is all-powerful, so I can never please Him” we are closing the door on the relationship God wants with us. When we say “God can have anything He wants for Himself, so there’s nothing I can do” we shut out our participation in creation and our communion with the creator. But when we realize that what we do or don’t do does affect God, it answers a lot of the philosophical questions that so often seem no more than unknowable exercises of intellect. Those questions become answerable when we start from the premise that though God doesn’t have to allow us to affect Him, it is an indication of His infinite love that He does allow us to affect Him. For what good is love if it cannot be returned? Why would the universe be created if its creation couldn’t have any affect on the creator? No doubt, God is transcendent in that we cannot destroy Him with our sin and disregard, but it’s a matter of His being all-loving rather than all-powerful. If we can’t hurt God, it’s because He is all-forgiving in His boundless love of us. And if we can please Him it’s because though He doesn’t need us in order to exist, He wants us – our love, our relationship, our petitions, our loyalty, and our appreciation. Once you can get your mind around this, it keeps reminding you of your great value; your own divinity. It colors everything you do, for once you understand that you can actually please God you are motivated to do it. It’s not a matter of reward or punishment – it’s a matter of wanting a right-relationship and knowing it’s what God wants too. From there things that you never hoped to understand begin to fall into place.

 

12/22/07 Insights from Study        Religions are about awaiting for a savior – someone to come to redeem us from this vale of tears. Christians, however, await the second coming of this savior, believing there is more than life on Earth because of what we learned from the first coming of Jesus. This first coming changed our relationship with God in such a way as that we can relax in this life knowing that death from it has no potency to destroy what we have built up in our spirits. This first coming made us worthy of this new relationship with God through the new possibility of the purifying of our sins. In the state that we inherit from the sacrifice of Jesus, we are able to receive and deliver the love that passes between heaven and earth – the love for the sake of love and nothing else; the love that we learned from Jesus.

 

12/23/07 Reflections           I want to live in the kind of society that, when it hears “fall on your knees”, it thinks of angel voices and not Monica Lewinsky. I’m so tired of gutter minds. Everything you try to say has to be tempered by guarding against something lewd someone might be reminded of in your words or your art. It’s awfully hard to anticipate every pitfall, every phrase, every concept that someone might latch onto and dirty with their snickering snorts. Nothing is so innocent that it can’t be ruined by our potty-brained society. How does God stand us – and why?

 

12/23/07 Inspirations               How do I know I’ve been specially touched by God? Because I don’t recognize myself in the person I’ve become from the person I was. Because this change happened in a moment of miracle. Because all my life I’ve been confused over the feeling that I have been guided in major life decisions and the assurance that I was meant to do something I didn’t as yet understand – now there is no surprise; I’ve come to know that fruition comes naturally from letting go and being the will of God. Because there is a drive within me that was never there before. Because the thoughts I write down are not my own – they contain words I don’t know the meaning of and concepts that I didn’t agree with until the moment my pen put them on my paper. Because when I put down my pen and go on with my day, something will happen to illustrate what I just wrote, or I’ll read the same thought written by someone long ago but read by me only after I had just put the same idea down on paper. Because I’m pursuing something unknown to me, as if pushed forward by an unseen hand. Because I now live in recognizable joy where before I lived in negativity and didn’t even know it. Because I now experience tears of love in contrast to the cold heart and flat-lined emotions of my disordered soul of three years ago. Because I talk to my Creator as if I’ve been doing it all my life, with a familiarity and friendliness I’ve been taught no one can be worthy of. Because there is a certainty behind what I’ve been told through intuition that is not possible by any other route, for the things I am sure of are things that cannot be proved. Because I suddenly no longer value, and often despise, the worldly things that used to be the foundation of my life. And because I don’t miss the world going by doing what it does while I go my own way in peace and contentment, whereas before my goal was to “fit in” despite my own feelings. On the road to Damascus Paul was blinded and hurled to the ground. And when he picked himself up and the scales fell from his eyes he discovered that he was not the person he used to be. He still had the memory of his old self, and it was this contrast between then and now that gave him the certainty that he had been touched by a miracle and was being protected by the miracle-worker. Who could that be but God Himself? That question is my answer too, although I hope I’m never asked because the proof of my closeness to God is precious to me. I must silently keep it close to my heart when it’s in danger of being cheapened by exposure, but also loudly shout it from the rooftops when God decides it’s time to let it do someone else some good.

 

12/24/07 Insights from Prayer               I want more than to be able to live the most sinless life possible. I want to spread the joy of righteousness as far as I can take it. I want to move forward even through the mire of my imperfection. I want to not only faithfully answer God when He calls out to me, but to remain in the state of grace so that there is union of will even when I’m not being called.

 

 

12/25/07 Reflections             When you’ve been given the gift of mystical insight you simply assume things that others must take great ponderings on. I don’t claim to understand God fully, but I do understand what things He has put in front of me. Some of these things are great questions in scholarly minds. To me these are simple truths. It isn’t that I’m smarter than the next person, but that God has chosen to make my spirit more receptive than most. This is a great blessing, but it’s tempered by things I don’t understand. The most important one to me is why such good things have to remain secret. God allows me in my writings to state simply what I’ve learned, but so far He doesn’t want me to take up a cause, to market these insights, or even share the good news with people around me. If I should try, He makes sure I fail. It may be that I’m just not ready yet, and this will come to pass eventually. But I wonder, because mystics throughout the centuries have noted that they feel held back by God from lucid explanation and, therefore, the acceptance by others of the message. Why this is, I don’t know – all I know is there’s a reason and it’s a good one. But I do have an idea, though it’s not an insight because I’m not at all sure of it at this time. It seems like it would do no good to explain because no other human being could relate to unveiled spiritual secrets that another has experienced. These things are between God and the individual. Like trying to convey the feelings brought about by a dream, it doesn’t suffice to merely relate the events that took place in the dream, because the feelings that make the events meaningful come from inside and can never be shared by someone else. In mystic spirituality, we are at a loss for words because the explanation lies inside our individual spirit and can’t have the same meaning for another. The spark has to come from God – my job is only to get people to welcome that spark, because nothing I can say about my own spark will ring as true as a call from God. The problem is that God pumps us up full of joy and the desire to spread that joy to others; then limits the effect we can have. Maybe it’s to keep us humble so no one is tempted to give us credit instead of God. But whatever the explanation, there’s no doubt I get impatient.

 

12/26/07 Insights from Prayer            Lord, it hurts so good for me to pray to You and feel absolutely nothing there. It hurts because I feel so far away from You after having experienced You close up. And yet it’s good because I know that I’m not going to give up in the face of this trial. I know I will keep availing myself to You and that You will smile on my devotion. I can even use Your apparent “disregard” to try out an attitude I don’t have, to see how it would feel to say “This proves there can’t be a good God”. When my contemplation brings no result, I can pretend to myself that You no longer love me that you no longer want my love, or even that You don’t exist. When I try this, none of it rings true, and I know my trial has taught me to touch upon my real feelings. This is part of Your plan, and I know this and never seriously doubt it. Certitude is a gift that lasts and lasts.

 

12/28/07 Insights from Prayer            God doesn’t need me any more than I need one of the ants that are curled up in the frozen trees outside my window. This makes it all the more awesome to realize how much God loves me and wants my regard for Him despite my inconsequentiality. God’s power is what makes human pride such a sin – it’s illogical to place so much importance in what we know when we have to admit the immensity of what we don’t know. Recognizing how humble we should be highlights how blessed by God we really are.

 

12/28/07 Inspirations          There are three ways of seeing things. We see with our body, our soul, and our spirit; each level higher than the one before and taking over from what came before. The difference between how we see with the soul instead of with the body can illuminate how we can see with the spirit – a concept too hard to explain in words. Many of us have had the experience of falling head-over-heels in love. It started out by us seeing the object of our love, and graduated into that curious infusion of the other person’s soul into ours. “Seeing” them in our soul manifests itself in infatuation and longing, abandonment of our desires in behalf of theirs, and need to be the object of their love as well. What we “see” with our souls is a perfection that our bodily eyes cannot see and in fact would belie if we weren’t registering only with our soul (our emotions). When mystics state they are “seeing within the spirit”, it is like that only one step beyond – the object of their love is God. The inability to explain this process is much more difficult than explaining how one “sees” another person emotionally, but the concept is similar — once you understand their way of “seeing”, it makes anything else they describe fall into place in a more understandable way.

 

12/29/07 Insights from Study         What does it feel like to be loved by God? It feels a lot like being loved by family and friends and loving strangers. It feels this way because God fits His attributes so that they are bearable and able to be experienced by human beings. It brings an overpowering and unbearably perfect love into the human realm, so that it can be experienced by us. It’s the reason God manifested Himself not only in His divine ever-presence, but in His fleshly form — Jesus Christ. Jesus’ love for us, and the proof of it on the cross, is something we can experience here on Earth, even though it reaches its perfection in the heavenly kingdom. It give us us comfort and hope in a weary world, and it points the way to a better life in the next. Some people, out of ignorance or obstinacy, go out of their way to avoid feeling this love. My hope is that someday God’s spirit will fall on such people in a way that brings them lasting joy.

 

12/29/07 Reflections          I wish I had more to give to the Christian underground. Right now with all the political fighting and infighting over our own rights, it’s a good time to remember those in other countries who have real problems. How disingenuous of anyone living in America today to whine about how persecuted they are! In other countries where there is real persecution they don’t dare say so — I wish we here could put our energies into being a voice for them. It’s the duty of the rich and free to help the poor and persecuted, but let’s make sure they are truly deserving and appreciative, because if they aren’t we are wasting our time and money and keeping our assets from those who could really use them. Sadly, many in America are only playing the system for what they can get. In America, we’ve been specially blessed by God for the very purpose of aiding those less fortunate; so blessed that we forget that the sorry state of other places is the Earth’s norm, cursed by sin and relegated to being a place of suffering. We haven’t been blessed because we’re more deserving – we’ve been blessed because we have been welcoming to God’s moral procedure. I pray that we keep what righteousness we have, improve ourselves in the light of the morality we seem to be losing, and share our enormous graces with those who are not allowed to openly display their own graces and their God-given right to live and worship in a way that’s right for them.

 

12/30/07 Reflections              Here’s why the spreading of freedom worldwide is so important: with freedom comes opportunity, with opportunity comes prosperity, with prosperity comes communication and relevancy, with communication and relevancy comes accountability of powers, with accountability of powers comes tolerance, with tolerance comes peace. The key lies in communication – the more interconnected the world is the more exposed persecutors are, infusing a measure of accountability into the equation. But no matter how instantly we know of persecution and injustice, it does no good if we aren’t both outraged and moderate in our response. To fight immoral forces we must remain moral ourselves, and yet that doesn’t mean we have to submit to martyrdom, or let others submit to it, when we have the means to defend ourselves and them. People point to Jesus a a pacifist because He let Himself be martyred. The point they miss is that Jesus didn’t preach peace at any price – He went out and corrected the wrong-headedness of His time. He showed us it was OK to say “This is right” and “This is wrong” in matters of morals – He didn’t try to be either a rabble-rouser or an adherent of political correctness. He practiced moderation with an iron will, because His cause was so important. It still is.