The Word on words

So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most. Hebrews

I like that word, boldly.  That is what I want to have as the adverb of my doings.  To do them boldly.  Bold is kind of like zealous except bold is with accent and highlight and zealous is with a passionate emotion.  I was thinking about how God is Word and how words are much more definitive than pictures.  Pictures are thousands of words but subject to interpretation.  Wonder if God was Picture and not Word.  Think about that.  We would have pictures and even though pictures “convey a thousand words”...how much more of anyone’s self-centered experiential interpretation would distort God’s Will?  I mean seriously, we have enough trouble with interpreting words.

Words are devine and human, just like Jesus.....Jesus is the Word.

God is soooooooo amazing!

Have a word-filled day.

What of aliens....

Let me clarify...Of course God looks like us in that Jesus is God: fully man, fully devine.  That is the Trinity.  God the Father is spirit as is Holy Spirit. God is our Creator. He is a personal supremely intelligent Creator.  It is Holy Spirit that is within us when we accept Him and believe.  Holy Spirit is a God-form, but Jesus had to ascend first, remember Jesus told the disciples that he must first leave before Holy Spirit could come and work within us.  We must ask and receive Holy Spirit through baptism: not water baptism, that is the cleansing and repentance part; but through acknowledgement.  That is the acceptance part.

There are those who do not know or believe in the truth of God which includes His one and only Son, Jesus and those will not inherit the kingdom.  God tells us this quite plainly in His Word.  We are not God and God is not us.  God is not in everything, this is pantheism.  God is apart from us, He is Holy.  God is to be worshipped and glorified.  It is therefore the greatest possibility and it is most likely that we are special creatures to God and no others exist anywhere else in the universe. 

The enormousness of the universe has nothing to do with God being powerful and creative as God has no limit as to time or dimension, and therefore, I do not see it as narrow or self-serving to believe that we are the only planet with human beings created in the image of God, after all almost 108 billion people have lived on this earth. The Bible does not in any manner suggest that there is life outside of this planet and I for one am not going to add to the Bible by suggesting there is.  It would not change by either deterring or adding to my belief in God and specifically it would detract from many peoples belief in the saving grace of Jesus.  To suggest that other self-willed creatures in God’s image live elsewhere is to know that they sinned as well, for self-will requires choice and choice by definition requires at least two sides and that means disagreement and disobedience.  Therefore if sin is part of all self-will creatures created in the image of God then they too would need the atoning grace of Jesus.  Since Jesus was born of the virgin Mary, there would have to be another Jesus, not just the one, because there is only one Mary, mother of Jesus.  So you see what a tangled mess our beliefs can lead to if we are not very careful in being truth seekers.  The Mormons, an entire cult, began with the false truths of one man as did the Muslims.  The Mormons believe that a man dies and goes to his own planet kingdom and that each man becomes a god of his own planet and he can then have spirit children who can come to earth and repeat the cycle.  An earthlike planet is a far cry from Earth.

Time To Take Flight

The right home, the right environment, the right genetics:  all are outside of our control.

We only have choice over the right belief, which will sustain us through the narrow gate to our prize.

To those who are given much, much will be required. 

Edify, love, support, care for, serve…others.  This is what we are called to do.

LISTENING

          

Hearing is the perception of sound.

Listening is a conscious choice.

Listening requires concentration.

Listening leads to learning.

Learning leads to knowledge

Knowledge leads to wisdom

The Pearl of Imagination

It was 10:30 last night and Matthew said, “Mom, tell me a story…just a super short story.”  So I finally succumbed and having been exploring how to share the parable of the pearl, I said,  “Heaven is like a beautiful pearl.”  He replied, “Is that it, is that the whole story?  It needs to have at least a ‘Once upon a time’.” So I, realizing, the nothingness of my first “story”, said, “Ok, then… Once upon a time there was a merchant who had many things: clothes and jewelry and a big house and all kinds of wonderful possessions like…….” Matthew interjected, “video games”,   “yes, and video games”.

“and, this merchant sold all of that for a single pearl.”  The pearl represents heaven or the kingdom of God.”

Matthew said, “ So the kingdom of God is worth less than all those things.”  I said, “no, the kingdom of God is worth…..well…. more that all those things.”

And he said, “No, Mom, because you said he sold his things for a pearl so they were of the same value.”

And I left his room frustrated and thought, I told the story wrong…how should I correct it?  And I thought, “ah-ha" and went back to his room and said,

“Actually there were two merchants, one selling pearls and one with many things and the one with many things recognized the specialness and value of the pearl and the one who had the pearl did not.  Matthew, what can you think of that is more valuable than all the things you have?  And you know what he said?  He said, “Imagination”.

And I said, “Wow, that is so true!”  And I thought to myself, imagination is how we connect to God.  And we feel and sense God and “imagine” what the Kingdom is like and try to compare it to our known reality which God did so amazingly well through His creative stories which connect our reality with God’s enormous and unmeasurable spirit.

And those people who find imagination to be a weakness have great difficulty finding God, who is unseeable and immeasurable.  And children, as Jesus points out, know God, because they still have the connection between their brain and their spirit and it comes out in creative wonder and imagination.

And I recalled in “Godly Play” by Jerome Berrymore, the concept of imagination as part of our human nature which enables us to meld the rational world with the spiritual world and to create a new framework for our meaning and purpose.

Symbols, such as the pearl, connect our world to an existential meaning found in our mind.  We access our imagination when we connect the two in such as metaphors and parables and sacred stories and liturgical actions.

Jerome Berrymore points out that Christ stimulates our imagination.  He brings out the image of God through relationships.  There is a critical ‘distance’ between the image created in our imagination and reality of our senses and without balance we are either to factual and scientific or to wondering and psychotic.

Wow!  I love that. 

Pagan and Christian worldviews

The Old Testament reflects the cognitive views of the ancient Near Eastern cultures. The New Testament reflects similarly, though a broader area.  God inspired his Word through human authors.  This does not mean that Israel borrowed pagan ideas to create a new faith but rather, that all cultures within a common time and location use common imagery, symbols and motifs to express their attempt at  understanding reality.  The Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai reflects the same structure as the treaties of the ancient Near East and even the laws of our nation.  These laws transcend time and culture.  Additionally, the creation story of Genesis 1 contains the same motifs that were seen in Egyptian creation stories.

These examples are just two of many which share the common environment of Israel with their pagan neighbors.  What is more difficult to see and what requires knowledge leading to wisdom, is to see how the Old Testament and New Testament authors, inspired by God, used literary techniques to reinterpret the pagan worldview to that of a monotheistic worldview.

The Bible is full of references to mythology and imagery.  This does not validate those sources as completely true.  What we can see in the Bible is the retelling of pagan stories within a monotheistic and Christian worldview.  Check out Acts 17:22 and see how Paul uses subversion by taking common terms and motifs and reworking them, eventually undermining the entire Stoic worldview but only to those who were open to understanding.

Unfortunately, literacy spreads civilization but within that evil and hopelessness as well.

As quoted from Brian Godawa in his book, Word Pictures,  “God is bigger than rationality, bigger than imagination and He is Lord of both.” Isaiah 1:18..”Come now, let us reason together,: says the LORD.  “Though you sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”

Now that is some amazing imagery/reason statement!