I guess I've lived just long enough.

I've tried grace without works.  I've tested the "but God loves me unconditionally, regardless of my actions", and I've lived long enough to see that fail.  That we are, without a personal quest for holiness, lost.  Even if we got into heaven on a technicality, it would be a place so foreign to us as to seem like hell.  And yet holiness is never fully attained, it is always a struggle, part of our curse.  To till the ground of our souls, to strive with demons by the sweat of our brow.  Only God's grace will rescue us, only He can sound the bell and end each round.

People are uncomfortable with dichotomies.  We think that to be one thing, we cannot be another.  And yet we ourselves, the great hypocrites are.  We are the person we want to be and the person we actually are.  Who we desire to be controls our actions, who we are controls our destiny.

I have never gotten far from the need for forgiveness.  I am traveling further up and further in, yet always within sight of a skull shaped hill.  Always some what desperate and in need of a Savior.  And always, He returns to carry me.

I wish I wish I wish that I were a more desirable beloved to Him.  That I could be faithful to Him as He is to me.  But the flesh is selfish and weak, and prone to ignore grace in times of anger.  Peaks and valleys in a bipolar life, ups and downs, surges and regression.  Only He is steady.  And I am rambling.

Thankfullness as an extreme sport

Just sitting around thinking about the time I had bounced the account by one dollar (when I bought a soda) and was looking at 50 dollars in fees for because of that act coming out on a rent payday on a day and my credit card had already been declined over a snickers bar when my blood sugar had dropped enough to give me the shakes and as I was sitting on my office floors in quiet despair I smiled to the Lord and told Him how much I liked the green shirt that I was wearing, and for that I was thankful.

And she became chaos...

I was reading the Hebrew Old Testament this morning, starting at the first, the verse in Genesis that we read as "the earth was with out form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the waters". In the Hebrew a more literal translation could be "and the earth, she became chaos, and the Lord He hovered (fluttered?) over the face of the water".

It is the eternal debate, between the Lord and the chaos.  In the ancient (and some modern) cultures a recurring theme was the "earth mother".  There was a sense and a belief that the earth she nurtures us, she protects us, we nurse at her bosom.  But she also possess us, we cannot break free of her, she demands servitude, and in the end, we return to her, dust to dust.

Standing at the other end was the belief of the sky father.  The sense of the "other", the feeling of being watched.  I was amazed when people took such offense over George W saying he heard from God (all of his other issues aside). We all hear from God, He speaks to us constantly.  He is our companion or our judge.  He's the reason why complete silence is never complete.  He pulls us from the earth, He insists there is more than what we now see.  He lights our soul ablaze with hidden passion to transcend our mortal coil, to cheat death at all turns and find a way back to life.

And so out of the chaos that had become the earth, God planted a garden, and from the earth He made a pair of gardeners.  But He made them out of more than just the earth, He breathed into them, the Hebrew for breath and soul have forever been linked.  And so we are born with two (dare I say, three) parts, the part that comes from the soil, our flesh, and the breath within us, our spirit.

And in between the two, some times watching, some times deciding, is our soul.  It is the authority within us.  When God said He would create us in His image He gave us something that He withheld from all other things created.  He said we could change things, even we ourselves can be changed by nothing more than a decision.  A simple thought carrying authority, a decision to move, or to stay, to cling to or to let go.

Of course one of man's first decisions was spectacularly awful.  The kind that sends ripples throughout the rest of our time here on earth.  And yet God did not stop him from making it.

When I was a child, learning to ride a bike, my dad would ride behind me, holding the bike.  He would let go at roughly the same point, and I would crash a few feet later at roughly the same point.  Was it cruel of him to let me go?  Much of the "angry atheism" I have found in my life has come from those who understood the constant presence of an other, but could not crest the hill between His watching and His changing.  If this God, this other, were all powerful, then why did I loose something so dear to me?  A mother, a son, our faith, all these things taken back into the bowels of the earth, with no great miracle, no last second save.  They just died, and left us here, with our sense of God, but our ultimate spiritual blindness as to His purpose.

There's something an atheist friend had told me last week, that we can't know whether it's real or just in our heads.  Can we know?  Can we deny truth that is so completely pervasive.  There is a voice calling to us from every quiet moment, every time the TV is off and the kids are asleep and there we are, talking to the air, the sky, the sky father.

Prayer...

is not a ransom note

it is not a command

it is not always quiet

it is not without feeling

it is beyond what we know

it is available to all

The bar is low, we must stoop to enter...