TWISTING THE UNDERLYING IMPETUS AND MEANING OF OUR GOD-GIVEN RIGHTS

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In light of the continuing violence in our nation, I have to say that I can never understand the attitude that there shouldn't be tougher controls. Does having a license to drive a car, get married, register to vote take away any rights or freedoms? Why would greater control of dangerous weapons infringe on freedoms? And anyway, with all our freedoms there are responsibilities to our fellow citizens, family members and friends that accrue. And the lack of stricter gun controls infringes on all of our "inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" when lives are taken away, we lose the ability to feel free to enjoy the Liberty we cherish, and worry and fear diminish happiness. It won't change until we all work together to stop it!
Praying that the Lord will continue to help us have peace and security and live up to the ideals are founders believed were so important. . . and we must return the the importance of being obedient to God and honoring Him by living up to those ideals of freedom, liberty, opportunity and justice for all.

It's interesting how times as changed and how rabid people can get about not having anything religious in public schools and public places. When I taught college courses in world religions I came to realize how differently the rest of the world looks at religion compared to the way we do. For most of the world religion is just related to ethnic culture and part and parcel of who people are according to the family into which they are born.

When the framers of our Constitution set up the idea that the state would not be allowed to dictate religious beliefs or interfere with the religious practices of any citizen, it was all set up as a protection against the oppressiveness of imperial systems extant from the 8th century on where the predominant religion of the leadership of empires persecuted ethnic groups who did not believe as they did . . . like the way Imperial Russia persecuted Jewish people with full collusion of the Russian Orthodox Church and as the leadership of the Islamic Empires persecuted Christians in the regions they dominated and the way they captured and sold native Africans who had not converted to Islam. And then of course there were the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in the 17th century in England, and the Spanish Inquisition . . . so by the time the framers of our Constitution set things up, the separation of church and state and freedom of religion guaranteed by a government were good things . . . but the clause was never meant to be used to persecute and legislate against a particular religion.

The framers of our Constitution never meant the clause concerning freedom of religion to mean that people couldn't practice their religion in public places. And there was never any intention that anyone would be restricted from demonstrating what they believed in public places -- like when the Ten Commandments or a Christmas Creche are displayed. No one is forcing anyone to believe in anything even if displays concerning a particular faith are in public places. From the time we were kids and Madelyn Murray O'Hare and others started the assault against Christianity because of atheistic beliefs . . . and because of all the ways our society has gotten away from Christian principles and morals, we just keep getting further and further away from the Lord and deeper and deeper into sin and rebelliousness. I see it as a result of how devastating World War Ii was, and how much more influence there has been from Eastern religions and philosophies . . . I am all in favor of kids learning dreidel songs . . . and principles of Kwanzaa . . . or whatever . . . it's good to celebrate the diversity of cultures in our nation. But I do have a problem with only allowing the secular focus of Christmas to be celebrated.

It's just sad. Christianity is under siege -- and again, I think the current battles began during and after WW II. The defeat of all that evil that occurred not very long before we were born was very important . . . but especially most people in Europe and in the former British Empire, including Australia rejected Christianity and of all the English-speaking nations, the US is really the only one where the majority of churches are still open. Nevertheless, the Lord is still sovereign and He still has good plans for us all. There are even more challenges rising against us in the world and in our society. I am afraid that the 21st century is going to bring us even more challenges than there were in the 20th century. And from my faith background, I really believe that it is really more that spiritual principalities and powers behind everything that is evil and denigrating to people, both as individuals and in society.

Sorry again . . . that is much more than was necessary because of you just mentioning all you are doing with your kids at school . . . and of course the most important thing is that we all respect and honor one another and whatever people believe as long as they do not hurt people or enforce their beliefs.

(And of course we have gone off the deep end to our detriment because of how the right to bear arms has been used as an excuse to have the ability to be violent anywhere, any time. . . . another example of the way that on a spiritual level principalities and powers affect people as individuals and collectively in very bad ways.)

All the violence and bigotry has just grown so much since we were kids . . . and the drugs . . . so many kids with divorced parents . . . so much fundamentalism and nastiness. It just makes me sad. Since I was first called to ministry when I was six, it has been interesting how different the focus of ministry has become compared to what I thought it was all about when I was little . . . or even when I first answered my call to ministry in the mid-80s. But of course the Lord knew all along and always had good plans for me.

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GENERATION AFTER GENERATION

Today's Upper Room devotional (printed below) touched me very deeply because I grew up seeing my mother reading the Upper Room, and when I asked her about it, she told me that she read it because her mother, our Grandma Donna, had always read it. It was part of our father's upbringing, too, because his father was a Methodist minister ordained in England and he grew up in a household of faith-filled, devout parents and older siblings.

So we were surrounded by people of faith and when our little sister almost died when she was four and the doctors had no logical explanation for why she survived, it was said in our family that it was because our grandmothers had prayed for her.

The example that our parents modeled for us by taking us to church and through the witness of their love for us and for everyone in our family and through the example of our grandparents and other family members--and the love of all of our friends--still under girds my faith and my life. No matter what has happened, is happening, or will happen, God loves us and is faithful to us.

We know His love and faithfulness through the people who love us and because when we come to trust Him, His Holy Spirit reveals to us that our blessings come from the Lord Who Is Love, not because we have worked for them . . . not because we are lucky . . . not because we deserve them, but because we are loved by the Creator of the Universe in Whom we live and move and have our being. The Divine is a mystery, but He has given us a way to know Him in the midst of the mysteriousness. Only the eyes of faith and the knowledge of our hearts can see and know, however. Who we are n spirit is the most important part of us.

So many people deny who they are in spirit, preferring only to take notice of what they can touch and understand logically. Sometimes it is because they have been hurt. Sometimes it is because they have been taught to doubt. Sometimes it is because they would rather keep control of their lives and not open their hearts to trust what they cannot see and understand logically.

But God IS. And when we are able to be still and know that God IS, opening our hearts and spirits to Him, then we begin to truly live and not just exist. As ever, Beloved, my prayer for you is that you will be able to do that. No matter how long it takes for you to do that and no matter what circumstances have to come into your life for you to be able to be ready to do that, the Lord Who IS Love knows and understands. And He is waiting, hoping and completely loving you whether you are ever able to believe that or not.

GENERATION AFTER GENERATION -- The Upper Room Devotional

"Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us. We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might, and the wonders that he has done. [Psalm 78:1-4(NRSV)]

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"Paul wrote, “' am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.'” [2 Timothy 1:5 (NIV)]

* * *

I asked my sister if she knew how long our mother had read

no Cenáculo

(the Portuguese edition of The Upper Room).

Her answer was, “Always.” She remembered that when we were children we always had home worship right before going to bed. One family member read the scripture; the prayer and thought for the day were read by someone else and repeated by all of us together. Then one of us led our prayer time. I miss that time and remember it with joy. Proverbs 22:6 was taken seriously by my parents: “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”

My mother worked as a distributor for this magazine for many decades. With the struggles of aging, she passed the responsibility to a niece, who was honored to take over the task. My family has delivered this devotional guide one generation after another. I have a habit of cutting out some pages and handing them out to people: gas station attendants, toll collectors, and cooks at my school. When I don't take any pages with me, people ask, “Where is that little paper?”

I enjoy sharing my faith and spreading the joy that

no Cenáculo

has brought my family for many generations.

Joeli Grimbos Marques Souza (Paraná, Brazil)

Thought for the Day:

With whom will I share my faith story today?

Prayer: Loving God, I thank you for the opportunity to know you. Bless all those who contribute to The Upper Room and those who will read it. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Prayer Focus: DISTRIBUTORS OF THE UPPER ROOM

HIS WORD IS TRUTH

"Make them holy in the truth; your word is truth." [John 17:17 (CEB)]

In Chapter 17 of St John's Gospel Jesus is in the Upper Room with His disciples praying for them and for all the believers to come. How did you come to know the Lord? In order to truly know Him, we must be willing to be open to the Holy Spirit, who Jesus also calls the Spirit of Truth. The Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to us and helps us to believe the truth about who God is and what He hopes for us and expects from us as written in the Holy Bible.

We can only be made holy by the Holy Spirit in Christ Jesus when we abide in Him and He abides in us. We cannot be righteous on our own. Only God is holy and righteous. The Spirit of Truth helps us to know that God exists and that He is all that the Bible says He is. The more we open our hearts to the Lord, the more we come to truly know Him in Jesus Christ.

God does not want people just to believe in Him. The Lord created each one of us for His own sake -- in order to enjoy a relationship based in love with Him. The only way for us to have this relationship with God is to get to know Him day by day as the Holy Spirit reveals Jesus Christ to us and helps us to gain new insight into His character through what is written in the Bible and through how He interacts with us in our lives.

People who truly know the Lord come to believe in no uncertain terms because of personal experiences with Him mediated by the Holy Spirit. The faith that comes from being in this loving relationship is not just faith because of believing tenets and doctrine. True faith is a gift that we receive from God. It does not come just from reading and studying the Bible, but truly getting to know the Lord cannot come without knowing the Bible and the truth of it revealed to us by the Holy Spirit.

If you already know the Lord, my prayer for you is that you will continue to open your heart to Him because there are deeper and deeper levels of faith and the Lord has many more gifts and blessings for you than you have already experienced.

If you don't know the Lord, my prayer for you, as ever, is that you will give Him a chance to show you that He is God and that He loves you. There are many expressions of spirituality in the world. We can live our lives working hard to ignore God and who we are in spirit or we can seek a variety of spiritual realities. But when you truly seek God, you will find Him in Jesus Christ.

The Bible exists as a whole. Its purpose is to be the record of the witness of those who know God the Creator, and who know that the Creator became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah or Anointed One -- the Savior. Even if we come to believe the Bible through willful decision of our minds, true faith in God in Christ Jesus comes only into our hearts through the revelation of the Holy Spirit. This is the truth that sets us free in Christ Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit.

As ever, my prayer for you, Beloved, is that you are free as only the Lord in Christ can make you free from slavery to sin and death -- free to be who you were created to be . . . free in the holiness and righteousness of God in Christ.

May the Lord continue to bless and keep you and yours, today and always.

RUMINATIONS ON THE TRINITY -- FIRST DRAFT

The Trinity is one of the most important aspects of God. It is a mystery, and we are less likely to be able to describe than to experience the Trinity in relationship. One of my favorite prayers is St Patrick of Ireland's Lorica that models the concept of the armor of God from Ephesians 6:10-16 in active intercession. It begins, "I bind unto my self today the strong Name of the Trinity, the Three in One and One in Three by whom all nature hath creation . . . Eternal Father, Spirit, Word." One way to think about the Trinity is to first of all realize that words that describe concepts in the material cannot that often help us depict the spiritual. Whatever the Divine is cannot ever be completely be captured by words.

Nevertheless, God relates to human beings specifically and gives us many ways to grasp what we need to understand and share. When we come to believe that there is a Creator the next question is how Creation comes into being. Action must be initiated. The initiator and the tool of initiation are part of one another and we use the metaphysical term "logos" to name that tool which is differentiated from the Creator -- Bering in action. In the beautiful first chapter of St John's Gospel the Creation Narration from the first chapter of Genesis is explained and completed in order to identify who Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah is on a cosmic level. This cannot be understood only from a material perspective.

First there is the Creator, the Prime Mover. But within and intrinsically a part of the Livng God is the implement of creative activity, the Word/logos which was spirit and which was made to become incarnate as the human being Jesus of Nazareth. And the Spirit of God is intrinsically part of the Divine and the Incarnate Word. Jesus identifies the connection but separation mystery when he states, "I am in the Father and the Father is in me."

 The Trinity can be seen as different aspects of the divine, and it can also be seen as a description of how the divine relates to creation and specifically to human beings. The Holy Spirit of God abides in the fullness of creation, generating all that is created using the instrument of the Word or logos. One of the problems we have is that in western thought there are separations between body, mind, soul, spirit, and  psyche; and between the material and the physical. We are complex creatures, and our creator is even more complex. Even though there is no way to completely describe the creator in words, the tools of the identifications of the Trinity help us to be late to the divine in the ways that Jesus described his relationship with the Creator. By calling the Creator “Father,” Jesus identifies himself as the Son of God. Then, during the last night before his Passion, Jesus assures his disciples that he will send the Holy Spirit to them. This does not mean that the Holy Spirit is not present within Jesus while he is on Earth.

Indeed, the Holy Spirit is part of Jesus and part of God the Father as well. Just as human beings are body, mind, soul, and spirit; created in the image of God, the Oneness and singularity of God is made up of component parts that work together and are part of the whole. One of the activities of the Holy Spirit is to reveal Jesus Christ to us. When we respond to God’s invitation to be in relationship with Him and Jesus Christ, is the Holy Spirit that mediates this communication and interconnectivity.

 In the material realm, one way to think about how there can be a differentiation between two and one, we can look at a woman who is pregnant with the child. While in utero, the child is part of the child’s mother, but also a separate entity. After birth, the child is separated from the mother but is still connected to the mother because of the genes that are part of the child’s heritage and make up. The fascinating and complicated way that all parts of the human body work to make manifest the encoded messages and initiators in the human genome are still being discovered.  The amazing miracle of life is a cause of wonder. The child will always be part of the child’s parents because the tile could not come into existence without the genetic template from both parents.

 We can use this physical reality as a window on the spiritual reality of the Trinity. Jesus is the son of the living God, and the spirit of the living God lives in Jesus in the physical and abides in the fullness of creation with the Divine. By using the creative word, the living God brings about whatever God desires and God’s Holy Spirit takes part in manifesting the physical creation.  The Trinity is intrinsically connected but operates separately in certain situations. We can relate to the Creator/God the Father, to the Savior, and to the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, all at work together and there is no separation between them. All that is known to one of them is known to all of them.            

Even in the first chapter of Genesis we see the Trinity in action. The creator who is uncreated and always existent speaks creation into existence through the instrument of the logos/Word, and sends forth the Holy Spirit as part of the act of creation and continuation of the life of all that is created. Each element is intrinsically different in activity, but the source of each component is one in the same.

In the traditions of Orthodoxy, beyond the descriptions of the creative activity in  first chapter of Genesis, another depiction of the Trinity is in the narration of the encounters with the three angels who come to speak with Abraham and Sarah at the oaks of Mamre. In what is arguably the most precious and seminal icon of Russian Orthodoxy, the “Troitsa” (“Trinity”), the icon painter depicts the angels in relation to one another. The connectedness and oneness of the three angels is first of all made obvious because they all look alike. Secondly, the angel on the left and the angel on the right are both looking at the angel in the middle. In Orthodox tradition the angel in the center is the pre-incarnate logo/Word. In temporal  and material terms, at the time of the encounters between the three angels and Abraham and Sarah, the logos/Word is not yet Jesus of Nazareth, of course. But the promise of his incarnation is foretold through the narration of the encounters and interaction with the human beings Abraham and Sarah. The pre-incarnate Messiah through his life; the revelation of God through his teaching, healing and deliverance ministry as well as through his relationships with individuals and collected groups of human beings, with angels; and with human spirits no longer alive on Earth (notably with Elijah Moses and at the Transfiguration) is already foreshadowed through the depiction of the angels in the “Troitsa”icon.

There are three aspects to how the Trinity acts and is in relationship. The primary aspect is how each element of the Trinity relates to each other element and to the complete whole. The second or aspect is how the activity of the Trinity and each member of the Trinity relates to all of creation, and especially to human beings. The third aspect is how each member of the Trudy and the Trinity as a whole relates to individuals. There are specific activities and specific manners of encounter and relationship for each one of these aspects.

In the first chapter of Genesis, it states that the Divine Creator is already in relationship with more than just itself. This is emphasized is in the language of a conversation that involves more than one, and even potentially more then two other entities. God says "LET US make human beings according to our own image.” But who is “us”? Is God speaking of and to the other elements of the Trinity, or is God speaking to what is called the heavenly host, or is God possibly speaking to both of these groups?  Throughout the Bible beginning with Genesis, at times the divine moniker is the plural Biblical Hebrew noun “Elohim.” It has been argued  by biblical  scholars that this is just a term similar to the way an earthly monarch does not use the first person singular pronoun, “I,” but uses the First person plural or ceremonial pronoun, “we”. However there is a case for explaining the use of "Elohim" by maintaining that is the proper pronoun for a Trinity  to use. No realization, understanding, or activity can be separately apprehended, comprehended, or actualized by one aspect alone. Each element of the Trinity has full knowledge and unanimous agreement with each other element individually and collectively concerning every creative and interactional impetus and exchange. There are both similarities and differences between the way the Trinity interacts with itself and how it is in relationship with humanity.

In the narrative describing creation in the early chapters of Genesis, it seems that even though that was created was called “good” by the living God, on the sixth, or last, day the crowning achievement of the Divine Creator was to create human beings. The Living God wanted to share, and continues to want to share knowledge of the glories of Creation, and indeed the creative activity itself with the creatures made in God’s image.  It is made clear in the narration that God does not need anything, but desires a relationship with human beings for God’s own sake. So human beings are not only able to understand and appreciate the intricacies and beauty of creation, God has given them the free will to interact with God. Therefore, the omniscient Creator who later becomes the Father of the incarnate logos/Word completely and absolutely knows that human beings have the same chance of doing good for doing evil because of the gift of free will. Therefore the plan salvation is made on the spiritual level even before human beings are created. So the Trinity’s interaction with all of you many includes creation, relationship, punishment, salvation, punishment, death, resurrection, and eternal life. These gifts are offered to all of humanity collectively, but must be received individually.  Therefore  it is important to understand the interaction between the two Trinity and each individual.          

 Included between the covers of the Holy Bible are pages where can be found narrations of how the Divine Creator;  the Savior Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah (Anointed One); and the Holy Spirit (Paraclete; Spirit of Truth) interact with individuals and groups of people as subsets of collective humanity. In Genesis God walks in the Garden of Eden; talks with Adam and Eve; and exacts punishment for transgressions. At the same time, God makes clear to Adam and Eve that even beyond the garden of Eden God will be present in their lives and in the lives of their human  descendants as well as with all of creation and it's separate elements. Narrations concerning God's direct conversations and interactions with Adams and Eve's first sons Cain and Abel are followed by descriptions of God’s relationships with individual and collective groups of  human beings including the Creator’s dispersal of human beings because of their intention when building the Tower of Babel; and among many others, God’s talks and dealings with with Noah; with Abram and his wife Sarai,  whom God renamed Abraham and Sarah, respectively; with Hagar and her son Ishamael; and with many others including Moses, prophets, kings and ordinary people.                  

DESTROYING SPIRITUAL STRONGHOLDS

The promise below is amazing promise and very important for the Body of Christ in the world today. Jesus said that by the power of the Holy Spirit we would be able to do even more than He did when He was on Earth. In the revival that began around the late fifties more and more people have learned about and practiced healing prayer and deliverance prayer in Christ Jesus. These are the signs that God's Reign has truly been established on Earth. 

We are living in the "already, but not yet" time -- so that as many people will choose to answer God's invitation in Jesus Christ to be part of the Reign of God and the Children of God -- and so that we can take part in sharing God's love in Jesus Christ in tangible ways with everyone we meet.

It is so wonderful to be led by the Holy Spirit and to know God and Jesus . . . to love and serve the Lord by loving and serving the people who are in our lives.
When we begin by recognizing hat God is the Creator, the only true God and that Jesus is His only begotten Son -- the Messiah, God Incarnate -- Emmanuel: God With Us . . . And we accept God's invitation to receive the salvation offered to each and every human being, we begin a life of wholeness that will never end.

And what joy we have to be able to share that love with everyone in our lives! 

There is so much pain in the world. People have so many needs, and there are so many ways we can help. If we just help out of our human strength we will be worn out. But if we allow the Holy Spirit to work in us and through us, the Lord will do so much more than we can on our own.

May the Lord continue to bless and keep you and yours, Beloved, now and always.

From 365 Daily Promises by Barry Adams --

"I will give you my power to destroy spiritual strongholds." 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 

"For though we walk in the flesh, we don’t wage war according to the flesh; for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the throwing down of strongholds,  throwing down imaginations and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ;"

Promise #291: I will give you My power to destroy spiritual strongholds.
 
In yesterday's promise from Exodus 14:14, I talked about the importance of us learning to be still and watch the Lord fight on our behalf. In today's promise from 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, we are seeing a different facet to the same diamond. In this passage of Scripture, the Apostle Paul is exhorting us to learn how to partner with the Omniscient, Omnipresent and Omnipotent power that resides in us that will empower us to demolish every spiritual stronghold in our lives.

Paul clearly reminds us that we do not wage warfare like the world does.  We have the power of the living God in us that is mighty to save. Our part in this battle is to bring into captivity every thought that opposes the knowledge of God. But just like I said yesterday, we need to understand that we cannot do this in our own strength, for the battle is the Lord's.

We are called in Romans 12:2 to not be conformed to this world, but rather transformed by the renewing of the mind. Our unredeemed thought life will never be in agreement with the mind of Christ. The only way to deal with an unredeemed thought is to take it captive to the obedience of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit that lives within us.

So the next time that a negative, condemning, self-centered, unredeemed thought comes into your mind, be encouraged to know that God has given you power by His Spirit to take that thought and make it come into submission to the Lordship of Christ.  It is Christ in you that is the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27) and it is His plan that we all be transformed into His image with ever increasing glory, as we behold His face one day at a time.  (2 Corinthians 3:18)
 
Photo by Jeff Epp 

365promises.com 

BETWIXT AND BETWEEN ERAS

Even though it has been nearly four days since I flew home from Illinois to Georgia, I find myself still enthralled with the enchantment of spending time with people so dear to me in places so familiar and beloved to me. The echoes of exquisite memories of childhood triggered by the time spent in our home town are now over-laid and interwoven with new images of the loving looks in the eyes of friends I have known since I was eight years old; since I was twelve years old; since I was thirteen to seventeen years old and beyond. Rituals such as the Homecoming Parade; a tour of our high school; a walk in our lakeside village from bridge to island; to bridge to a second island; to bridge back to the parking lot near the park deliver the framework for reminiscences and accentuate the joy of walking again where my feet, eyes and heart need no prompting.

Finding my younger self in memory, and then losing my contemporary self from time to time, giving my mind and heart over to the consciousness that allows me to be eight again walking to the beach with my brother and sister on a summer afternoon; to be eleven again riding on our 4-H float in our town's Bicentenniel Parade with our beloved Lady Bird, the springer spaniel kind enough to humor me into believing I had trained her to perform obedience tasks; to be fifteen again getting ready for the Dame's Dance in the spring of our Junior year in high school; to be eighteen again, coming home from Freshman year at the University of Illinois . . . all those musings and time-machine-like-hopping yield precedence to the necessity of regaining a grip on the present; to work with stalwart precious friends on tasks that are necessary to prepare for each reunion event.

For some time now I have been feeling that I am on the threshold of a distinct new era in my life, one that I can't quite conceive of as yet. That concept of walking by faith, not by sight has transitioned from the abstract into a very real moment by moment manifestation. Slipping in and out of dissociation, time has been capricious and contradictory. What seems at times to be linear and unremarkable turns out to be elusively cyclical; no . . . disjointed and un-connected . . . fantastically surprising.

Passing by our old house, I see the building as it is now, but overlaid on the way it looked the first time we saw it; after the siding had been put on it; after the garage was built in front of it and to the west; as it looked the first time I saw it again after eight years as a young adult; and then back to the way it looks today, but remembering that early fall morphs into late fall with trees and bushes now naked of leaves; the almost constant motion of the water of the lake with its play of light . . . sun sparkling on gentle waves in evening transforming into delicately surface with thin shiny unreliable clean mirror-like ice; giving way as the winter draws onto thick ice;snow-covered ice; ice surfaces shoveled into hockey rinks; into figure skating rinks; into follow-the leader pathways.

Then the remembrances of the times of late winter, yearning for the solid motionless coldness to disappear so that the water would become alive again; reflecting the sky; devouring the ice floes as they came to be -- sun, rain, whipped up small waves, gentle evening stillness reflecting the roses; the oranges; the fuschias; the scarlets of the skies from sunset through dusk and into darkness.

Then the joys of spring in fits and starts; blossoms and flowering bulbs in a push-me/pull you tug of war with snow storms and ices storms until the heat of the sun and the torrents of rain or gentle showers conspire to renovate and rehabilitate the earth; the lawns; the streets; the paths that had all been inundated by the inches and feet of the white stuff -- recognizing the reality of the shapes of row boats, sail boats, paddle boats, canoes rising gradually out of their shrouds and recovering their true colors; warming up; drying out . . . waiting for children to bring oars, put on life vests, turn them over, launch them and be propelled out onto the living lakes.

Then, oh! The summer beginning gradually fully dressed; emerging from the delicate greens of mid-spring followed by the forceful conquering dark oak leaves; elm leaves; sycamore leaves; lilac bush leaves; willow sprays; shoots of tiger lilies; blooms in their time, looking back and remembering the first purple and white crocuses poking their heads out of the tired old remnants of smooth shiny white blankets of snow -- a steady white layer decorated with a kind of variable crumbling crystal covering . . . then daffodils while cherry tree blossoms make their appearance . . . then hyacinths . . . then tulips -- and do you remember the azaleas, the snowball bushes, the pear tree blossoms? The lilac hedges twenty to twenty-five feet high . . . then gladioli and irises and the rich, thick dark green carpets of northern tier lawns.

But also the parks, the woods, the forest preserves; the joy of picnics and hikes, bike riding and horseback riding . . . all with parents and family, or with friends, or even alone sometimes. . . remembering the thrills of launching down steep hills on bikes -- races, and hide and seek games, or just riding together by twos, by threes, by fives, by sevens, even. . . calling out challenges; trying to speak when the sounds of words have been left far behind; caught or not caught -- repeated or not repeated.

So even though I flew home to Georgia, sections of my heart, my mind, my soul, my spirit, my psyche, my intellect, my memory, my hope and my dreams are still held captive miles away, years away, eons away, furlongs away.

It's a good thing this kind of super-conscious and/or semi-conscious time travel in my mind still allows me to realize that I am home in the here and now.

But it still may take a few days to let go of the way it is possible to haunt the glorified past. I'll let you know.

Thanks, beloved, for "listening" . . .

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO CONVINCE YOU?

Jesus Christ did not stop teaching and relating to people after His Ascension to Heaven 50 days after His Resurrection. God sent His Holy Spirit in Christ Jesus to keep in touch with people, to reveal Jesus to individuals, to gently convict us of our sins so that we will turn toward the Lord and receive the gift of salvation so that while we were still on Earth and throughout eternity we could live in God's love and grace in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The most surprising revelation about what people were seeking was that many of them thought that our framers' references to freedom of religion and separation of church and state meant that faith was garnered in a similar way to the way they got food from a smorgasbord. In the course of the classes for World Religions I tried to teach from the perspective of sociology of religion and anthropology of religion. That meant that the most important tenet I wanted to get across is that human beings are physical incarnations of spiritual entities. Our spirits were spoken into being by the Creator and we were given the gift of life on Earth for God's sake. The Creator wanted to share the beauty and wonder of Creation with sentient beings made in the image of the God's self.

We were created for God's sake. All that is the Fullness of Love in which we live and move and have our being gave human beings free will and yearns for each person to answer His invitation to be in relationship with Him. Nevertheless, spiritual reality is difficult to describe. Jesus taught through action and through parable. He demonstrated the Love of the Creator, God the Father every moment of His life on Earth.

But He did not stop teaching and relating to people after the Ascension of Jesus Christ to Heaven 50 days after His Resurrection. God sent His Holy Spirit in Christ Jesus to keep in touch with people, to reveal Jesus to individuals, to gently convict us of our sins so that we will turn toward the Lord and receive the gift of salvation so that while we were still on Earth and throughout eternity we could live in God's love and grace in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus said, "No one can come to the Father except through me." For many people who have not opened their hearts to the Lord, this one sentence is the biggest stumbling block to their ability to believe that God loves them and to receive the gift of Faith from the Lord through Jesus Christ by the power of His Holy Spirit. However, God's desire to be in relationship with each human being on Earth has led Him, continues to lead Him, and will -- up until the time when there is no more human life on Earth -- lead Him to try to help each human being to respond to His offer of salvation in Jesus Christ.

If you do not believe in God the Creator and Father of Jesus Christ, do you know why you don't? What would it take to convince you?

I promise you that God will answer any questions you have; help you give up your doubts, and joyfully welcome you into His heart, NO STRINGS ATTACHED. If you want to know more, please just ask me. I will do my best with God's help to answer you and/or to point you in the right direction.

If you already know the Lord and love Him, the most wonderful part of that loving relationship is that there is always a deeper level of love and trust available.

 Beloved of God, whether you believe or don't believe, the Lord understands and will help you when the time is right. Please give Him a chance.