"Love........................."

With the granddaughter and one of her friends occupying my recliner this morning, an overnight slumber party allowing them some late night TV, it seemed as good a time as any for my three-mile walk. The sun was just up, rising over the hills to the east, causing the trees on the far side of the road to spread their shadows over me as I turned north. The city park has a back entrance beside the railroad underpass, the path yet a bit caked in dry mud from recent flooding, but nothing so bad as to hinder my pace. The few hundred feet to the bridge across the creek and that span, itself, had already been conquered, my option to initially turn south finding me now about to enter the picnic area, when something on the ground before me caught my eye. A child’s puzzle piece, one of those foam letters of the alphabet, strange in that it was this particular member of the twenty-six, as if, indeed, “X” did “mark the spot"...

Buried treasure? I would doubt it. More likely some mother’s child on a family outing had it stolen by some bird that, upon discovering it wasn’t food, dropped it from on high. No matter the circumstances of its current position, though, it couldn’t entice me with promise of anything, not even if an old pirate’s map instead of an attempt to exercise was what had led me to the location. Something much more precious than gold was waiting for me at home. By now, Beth should be up with the girls, getting them ready for breakfast at Bob Evans. With at least a twenty minute stretch in front of me, I picked up speed in anticipation……

"Ecclesiastes....................."

A trip to Pensacola over the weekend also embraced a slight departure from our usual route, penetrating into south central Alabama for a visit with some old navy friends. We were stationed together at Rota, Spain in the late sixties, he and I, while there, sharing a few months of cramped space, temporarily attached to duty aboard a submarine; and it was good, now, to reconnect after all these years, both of us a little older, both of them still the same pleasant people we knew so long ago. A brief return to civilian life had brought decision, on his part, to re-enlist, allowing them to fully experience what that branch of service promises: a chance to see the world. If their home (that sits beside the small United Methodist church he now pastors) was filled with oh so many mementos of global encounters, though, it was quite clear to me that what really held their hearts was four children and eight grandchildren who, along the way, were the main substance of what life was all about. The message wasn’t merely a matter of pictures, photos framed here and there. Bedrooms yet reflected identities, old personal treasures retained, a new generation’s toys added as they came. If there was any doubt that a “family” yet occupied this space, no matter the actual separation endured, one section of their upper level had been converted into a “castle”, a “kids’ place”, where everything about it just spelled “fun”. Sitting on their porch that evening, reminiscing and catching up the decades between, was enjoyable; but the witness of what Christ produces in one’s existence, the rewards far beyond a promise of heaven, has lingered with me since…..

"Definitions....................."

The weather, around here at least, has been really weird lately. Monday a rain storm blew through, its dark clouds dropping so low as to touch the earth, the sunlight so obscured as to make the expressway I was navigating at the time enveloped in thick, smoky darkness. While the downpour on that occasion remained merely enough to warrant an umbrella, it was followed Tuesday by a gulley-washer, several hours of what appeared to be heavenly rivers emptied into our midst, producing flooding that somehow avoided our immediate neighborhood, but covered the main road above us and just south of us with 8-10 inches of water. Tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes in diverse locations: surely there are those who must be seriously pondering the Mayan forecast for 2012. Whatever one’s views on Biblical prophecies, Nostradamus, and the Farmer’s Almanac, to me it all boils down to today, this hour, this moment, what if the next tick of the clock served me notice that it’s all over, my mood, I suppose, brought on by an early morning perusal of Psalms. “The ungodly,” it read, “shall not stand in the judgment.” People have all kinds of opinions about that final word, some believing themselves, as Christians, to be the ones escaping that part of eternity all together, some holding that the event is merely a matter of them receiving whatever rewards they earned in His service. It was, however, the first term that penetrated my thoughts. Just who are “the ungodly”? Who among us can boldly lay claim to that label? I like what the preacher brought forth last night, the particular way he chose to describe his status in Him. “In me,” he stated, “dwells a righteousness, a representative of the Godhead, holy in all that He is, and willing to walk with me in the mess that I am.” However it all comes to pass, He, alone, is my assurance……

"Poetry....................."

“Creed” by Steve Turner

We believe in Marxfreudanddarwin. We believe everything is OK as long as you don’t hurt anyone to the best of your definition of hurt and to the best of your knowledge. We believe in sex before, during, and after marriage. We believe in the therapy of sin. We believe that adultery is fun. We believe that sodomy is Ok. We believe that taboos are taboo.We believe that everything’s getting better despite evidence to the contrary. The evidence must be investigated and you can prove anything with evidence.

We believe there’s something in horoscopes, UFOs and bent spoons. Jesus was a good man just like Buddha, Mohammed, and ourselves. He was a good moral teacher although we think His morals were bad. We believe that all religions are basically the same, at least the one that we read was. They all believe in love and goodness. They only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.

We believe that after death comes the Nothing, because when you ask the dead what happens, they say nothing. If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then it’s compulsory heaven for all, excepting perhaps Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan.

We believe in Masters and Johnson. What’s selected is average. What’s average is normal. What’s normal is good. We believe in total disarmament. We believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed. Americans should beat their guns into tractors and the Russians would be sure to follow.

We believe that man is essentially good. It’s only his behavior that lets him down. This is the fault of society. Society is the fault of conditions. Conditions are the fault of society.

We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him. Reality will adapt accordingly. The universe will readjust. History will alter. We believe that there is no absolute truth excepting the truth that there is no absolute truth. We believe in the rejection of creeds and the flowering of individual thought.

If chance be the Father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky, and when you hear: State of emergency! Sniper Kills Ten! Troops on Rampage! Whites go Looting! Bomb blasts School! It is but the sound of man worshipping his maker….

"Reflections........................."

“Much of what has passed for the Christian message has been nothing more than frothy God-talk – mindless, thoughtless, and in its exploitation of people, heartless; but just as much as anti-theistic thinking, when scrutinized, is found to be impoverished in so far as making any sense, so also can much of our religious verbiage, bereft of reason and seeped in emotional drivel, be tossed at unsuspecting audiences in the name of orthodoxy. The ruinous end of the latter, in its destruction of lives plundered, both materially and spiritually, may be greater than the ideas perpetrated by the openly cynical”….

Ravi Zacharias, like C.S. Lewis, can get into Christian apologetics and have my brain swimming in a thick philosophical soup almost before I can blink. Thankfully, though, the author’s books, for the most part, shift into linguistics much easier for me to contemplate, the three I possess not only a good read, but also a good “feed” again and again. In Chapter Two of “Can a Man Live Without God”, he gives several definitions of atheism, but what struck me on this occasion was a Madalyn Murray O’Hair quote wherein she expressed such “theology” as rational thinking, a belief in the “technical philosophy of materialism”. Asserting that nothing exists but natural phenomena, she concludes that “We atheists believe that nature simply exists. Matter is. Material is.” In other words, she requires no explanation for those things she can see or touch. They just “are” and therefore they, indeed, are….Why, I wonder, do so many in Christianity find fault with such thinking? In truth, the majority of us seem likewise content with founding our faith on similar statements, as if “belief” is all that’s required, a Bible verse sufficient for others to accept the validity of our witness…..

"House-cleaning....................."

I was cleaning out my old e-mails this weekend and re-visited a story sent to me about a seminary instructor quoting another man’s brief synopsis of the Church’s history as follows: “Christianity,” it began, “started in Palestine as a fellowship, moved to Greece and became a philosophy, spread to Italy and turned into an institution, taken to Europe and evolved into a culture, and finally brought to America where it is now an enterprise.” Then, to better clarify that last term to his young students, he repeated it and added: “a business.” When a young girl, though, raised her hand to ask if it wasn’t Biblically supposed to be a “body”, he was without words momentarily, simply somewhat stuttering “yes” in reply, and she quizzically continued: “But if a body becomes a business, isn’t it a prostitute?”…… The rest of the tale, true or not, offered the instructor’s thoughts about the incident. My own, however, took me back to the temple where, Jesus, Himself, as a child, wondered why Mary and Joseph didn’t realize that He must be about His “Father’s business”; and it seems to me that the accusation only possesses validity in so much as we, as believers, market the Gospel for self-gain. Guilty as charged? That takes an individual self-examination overseen by the Holy Ghost…..

"Anchored....................."

Browsing through Alfred Edersheim’s “Bible History of the Old Testament”, I came upon the following statement: “It should be distinctly marked that on this, as on ever other occasion in Abraham’s life, his faith determined his obedience.” Within the teachings of the Church, such a declaration might indeed stand out as an example for all to follow; yet if the believer doesn’t stop to examine the fullness of what can be crammed into the linking of those five words, what does he or she really possess in terms of a foundation for his life? Cogito; ergo sum. I think; therefore I am. In truth, surely it is safe to say that all of us, for the most part, simply stumble down the path by our own reasoning and to whatever degree we find to trust in someone or some thing. What makes great God’s covenant with us is “grace”. Not, though, in the sense that unto us is given the freedom to define it, but in that “it” is the reality of who He is, Christ “in” me, another name for the Holy Ghost every bit as much as peace, assurance, forgiveness, joy – the list goes on. He does not make us any less human; He goes with us in the next step; and even in lieu of the fact that we all too often are prone to “lose” Him in our religiousity…..