Today I Met God

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1 NIV)

The Lord says...:
They worship me in vain; / their teachings are merely human rules
Therefore once more I will astound these people
with wonder upon wonder;
the wisdom of the wise will perish,
the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.”
Woe to those who go to great depths
to hide their plans from the Lord,
who do their work in darkness and think,
“Who sees us? Who will know?”
You turn things upside down,
as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,
“You did not make me”?
Can the pot say to the potter,
“You know nothing”?

Isaiah 29:13-16
(Septuagint, NIV)

Today around noon I stopped by Burger King to get a drink from one of the new Coke machines that has a rainbow of flavors. I sat at a table and a gentleman dressed like a hobo (maybe a shower would be helpful too) came from the bathroom and stood at the table next to mine. Soon he said a few words to me and then we shortly became intently engaged in conversation. I left about 3 PM having to put vacation time on my time sheet when I returned to the office. But the time during our conversation flew by as if in a fleeting time warp. I am convinced I had a conversation with God today. The hobo, like God, was in the redeeming business. He salvaged discards from refuse (such as scratch paper) and recycled them for his own use. He had a creative mind the like of which I have never seen before and completely leveled man's penchant for fine distinctions. At first I was concerned that he might be gloriously intelligent but, as we sometimes sadly see, that intelligence undercut by the flaw of mental instability. But joyfully such was not the case. His knowledge about anything and everything (from physics and engineering to historical regulatory phenomena) was broad, deep, and exhaustive. He was of sound mind and I soon realized that his spirit was as equally reliable as his creative intelligence. He had a wonderful sense of humor—the type based on wit with an exponentially sane lunacy—of which he was throughly and judiciously aware. I know we could be great friends, but don't expect to see him again even though I gave him my personal cards. It was tremendously encouraging to know the resilient spirit, kindness and love of an exceptional—perhaps even the ultimate—creative mind.
  

The “Little Poem” he gave me written on the back of a Publix receipt:


Out of synch
with the band
You aren't sent
down below ------
when you blow-it.
Clashing bashing
puts the player
in the
Arrythmiattic!


[or arrhythmia – the vibration of the heart.]

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The Way Christians Talk

• Jimmy Carter The Playboy Interview - Excerpt
• November 1976
• 
  
• Because I'm just human and I'm tempted and Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. The Bible says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Christ said, I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery. I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times.... This is something that God recognizes, that I will do and have done, and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock. Christ says, don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife. The guy who's loyal to his wife ought not to be condescending or proud because of the relative degree of sinfulness. (http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/history/faculty/TROYWEB/Courseweb/JimmyCarterThePlayboyInterview.htm)

Those unused to church attendance and Sunday school can have a very limited view regarding the frankness of Christians. This is principally because non-Christians can have a totally unrealistic notion about Christianity and consider it an addiction to weakness, dishonesty, and self-righteousness expressed habitually in hypocrisy. Such people simply have not attended a Sunday school class made in heaven in which joy and honesty commingle weekly to buttress spiritual strength without pandering to self-indulgence. Humility is often associated with truth, while pride with concealed vulnerabilities. Condescension, dishonesty and defensiveness are strongly correlated. A major objective of Christianity is to cultivate humility through sharing failures and vulnerabilities in a forthright manner. It is difficult to be full of grace and truth and concurrently deceitful, uptight, and defensive. Grace does not come cheap…it bears the price of truth and the responsibility of freedom.

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Our Journey's End

God’s wrath has its flipside – restoration. What one quality above all others do you think God wants restored in the nation, church, or individual who worships him? How could you and your group model that quality? (Serendipity Bible 10th Anniversary Edition, page 1311).

As God is love, He would most want to see the disciplines of love come to actively anchor our lives individually and as a community of nations. If we did so it would have pervasive profound positive effects starting with the family unit and extending to all other institutions. If we could only see with heaven’s eyes, our world would change dramatically and progress exponentially in wide spectrum’s of abundance leading to man’s will on earth becoming increasingly resonate with that of God’s in heaven. The flipside of this abundance is self-inflicted scarcity brought on by arrogance and blindness passionately pursued though idolatry and self-worship. By actually doing God’s will there would be significant structural and atmospheric changes in the way we live our lives individually and socially.

 

What exactly would this look like? Let us refer to Micah 6:8 (NIV): ”He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly (prudently) with your God.” Or by the statement of Jesus that encompasses the Golden Rule: Matthew 22:36-40 (NIV): “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” So the restored world will be more loving, merciful, and just. It will be characterized by empathy and the Golden Rule. It will be enriched by the Fruit of the Spirit, Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV): “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” In short, the world will be a lot less mean and embody kindness markedly more—not only in human affairs, but as man relates to all aspects of the natural and material worlds. To get there will be a journey—a road traveled and sustained by countless millions in spiritual and intellectual accord and filled with commitment and faith.

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Where Is Macro Political/Economic Creativity?

When we survey our lives today, it is fairly easy to identify areas of great achievement and creativity. Technology and many of the arts are replete with it. Businesses and local government come up with new ideas constantly. The primary area where creativity seems to be void is on the macro political/economic level. Here we find inhibition, conformity, and defensiveness.

I would love to hear a major national politician say “Now I’m going to brainstorm the issue of economic disparity and throw ideas out right and left. I know my opposition will delight in pulling one of these ideas out and swear that I advocate it. Let them go at it to their hearts content. I trust the American people (my boss, after all) to know the spirit in which I brainstorm and my purpose in doing it. I am going to loosen things up a bit and get some new ideas flowing. I wish to shower the place with ideas so that more knowledgeable persons than I can separate the wheat from the chaff. I want to change the image of a politician from one of a calculating and repressed automaton to one of a free spirit, positively generating fresh ideas and perspectives. For starters, I will wear a dress shirt and tie—but a monkey suite I will never wear.”

I think something this earth-shattering is what we need. Presently when venting is done it is always on occasions where the gloves (rather than blinders) come off and personal hatred and tired old animosities are substituted for creative thinking and new perspectives. Sometimes I really think the edifices of Washington serve to inhibit ideation and laid back discussions and relationships. We will never move on with insightful clarity while people cravenly walk on eggs or rant entirely predictable cant that hollowly echoes down marble corridors vapid and empty of fecund thought.

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Imprisoning the Mind

Harlow Research

The Impact of Harry Harlow’s Research:

While many experts derided the importance of parental love and affection, Harlow’s experiments offered irrefutable proof that love is vital for normal childhood development. Additional experiments by Harlow revealed the long-term devastation caused by deprivation, leading to profound psychological and emotional distress and even death. Harlow’s work, as well as important research by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, helped influence key changes in how orphanages, adoption agencies, social services groups and child care providers approached the care of children.

(http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/p/harlow_love.htm)

Obviously, by using above quotation I'm not suggesting that adult prisoners are in a childhood development state. I'm just not convinced that prison environments that ignore psychological needs are sanguine for adults. (WES).

In a blog some years ago and I set out the equal/special paradox that lies at the heart of human motivation.** We all need the sense of essential human equality with others. At the same time, we all want to feel and be special in some way. This is another way of saying that we all want to feel significant, needed, and worthy. This drive results in the equality/special paradox.

Tonight I attended a support group for those with family in prison. It meets at Saint Paul’s Catholic Church from 7 PM-8:30 PM. The facilitator is a Catholic Deacon and he is perfect in the role of group leader. It is a small group, usually around 12 or less.

Tonight the irony of incarceration was mentioned. In my view, the object of incarceration is primarily punishment and a type of retribution and controlled public revenge. The prisons do a very good job at this. It is interesting to look at incarceration head to head with the fundamental drives to feel equal and special and define how these needs are addressed. If there is to be any hope of reducing recidivism, these needs and motivations must be met extensively. If these fundamentals are spurned, there can be little hope that compassion and the cultivation of a heightened social conscience—to be helpful (at least not harmful) to self and others—will be propagated.

Imprisonment begins with a strip search and issuance of uniform prison garb. A person is thus stripped of individuality and all positive sense of specialness. Rather than a recognition of equality, all are subject 24/7 to a sense of subjugation and subordination. The family and loved ones offer an outlet of significance—at least to those not effectively alone in the world. However, this outlet is rigidly regulated in regards to visitation and correspondence. To a significant degree, the human drive for equality and specialness are not only unattended to, but deliberately made problematic or impossible. We intentionally have designed a system to subjugate people (for the most part not from choice environments to begin with and in many ways already subjugated) and expect good things to come from it—as if yet another punishment will surely do the trick at last. It is time to remove retribution and dehumanization from justice and see what the disciplines of love can do.

 

**Blog treating the equal/special paradox:

http://www.wayneblogs.com/2010/07/another-conversation-with-teico.html

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The Will of God Conundrum

Katrina Aftermath

The Will of God Conundrum can be the source of much human meanness. For example, after hurricane Katrina we heard that the killer storm was the Will of God…or we hear that persons are stricken with HIV because of the Will of God…or that some wallow in surplus while others struggle in abject poverty because of the Will of God. In other words, WHATEVER is is right; the status quo must be the Will of God. Thus “Que Sera Sera” must be the ruling attitude of mankind.

The first objection to this view must be based upon common sense—it flies in the face of rational behavior. Say, you own a sports franchise. Would you really tolerate a coach for one minute whose pre-game locker room address to his players was something like this? “Well, men in today’s game what will be will be. There is no need to strive hard in today’s game, men, for God is in control and has already determined the winner or loser. So don’t exert yourselves unnecessarily or earnestly strive to win. If we make a sorry showing in today’s game, well as Believers we know that pleases God and fulfills his will. Anyone who disagrees with me on this is not a true Christian.”

The practical difficulty we face if we say that everything that occurs is in God’s will is that we must attribute to him injustice, cruelty, and unchristian hatred of the innocent. We remember that Jesus in Matthew 23 denounced a long list of practices by religious leaders of the time. He says, for example, “What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law—justice, mercy, and faith. You should tithe, yes, but do not neglect the more important things. Blind guides! You strain your water so you won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel” (NLT). Clearly Jesus is calling on the leaders to act differently, to change their ways, to act righteously; to be, in short, earnest players for God rather than cesspools of selfishness—in other words, cesspools of selfishness are out of God's will.

It is absolutely true that the crucifixion of Christ was God’s will—given the state of human ungodliness. And Jesus, as an earnest player, put God’s will above his own. But of necessity this means that human ungodliness was not in God’s will, as Jesus himself repeatedly made clear. So we must conclude that we are to be on God’s team and be the very best players we can be—being earnest in all our endeavors. Surely it is a perversion of truth to say that evil is good and good is evil.

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The Burdens of History and Purposes of Salvation

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:2 NIV).

Many of us can have the splendor of a monarch butterfly, yet cannot shake the shame of once being a worm. We want to deny our past experiences and hide them from ourselves and others. The past looms so large and is such a burden that it distorts our present life and burdens and enslaves us. It’s as if the monarch butterfly shriveled its wings and sought to stay hidden in the underbrush—being shamefully defeated not by what it is, but by what it once was.

This tendency in human behavior is what makes salvation so important. Reformation isn’t enough for our psyche; we also need forgiveness for what may in fact have been to some extent developmental and contextual necessities. This is especially true in regards to sexual behavior during the dawning years of one’s life. I have known, for example, a beautiful young woman in body, mind, and soul who allows the past to prevent her full commitment to a man she now loves.

Whether our past is indeed fault-worthy or not, it is essential for happiness and growth to come to terms with the past and not let our present and future be held hostage by it. We must move forward in the knowledge that the Creator knows all things and forgives all things in a desire to see His creation flourish. It must be excruciating for him to see His creation cowering over the past rather than fulfilling the promise of the future and the purposes for which He instilled life in the first place. God brought to man salvation, not only for man’s sake, but for His own fulfillment and happiness.

(My thanks to Angelo Lundy for metamorphosis metaphor.)

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