If you need to find me

If you need to find me over the next couple of days, look here.  I should have a "little drury" with me too.  Funny thing that I would be in the park of Jubilee just off thousand dollar road.

Looking to find the "big one", and that's not a deer.

 

Living with an OUCH

Be gracious to me, O Lord
for I am in distress
My eye is wasted away from grief
my soul and body also
For my life is spent with sorrow
and my years with sighing
My strength has failed because of my iniquity
and my body has wasted away
(PS 31)
Satan seeks to take my life
All my enemies side with him
They plan ways to bring me down
lies are released to set the snare
My body staggers under the attack
stress and anxiety wear me down
except for the Lord, I would have no hope
I am weary with the thought of living another day
false friends come and preach ease
religious ones say. "be comforted" but no power is in their words
The house of the Spirit cracks
It shivers in pain
life has slipped from living to enduring

Now
In the moment of greater darkness
the smaller light outshines
to be so close to hell and yet to look at God
the thoughts and lessons of Job rush upon
though He slay me, I will love Him
I belong to Him
Un-modern faith must now take the helm
reason is de-throned, illumination must rule
though He slay me, yet I will Praise Him
the resolve beyond reflection

Friends

You are a very rich person if you have friends who help you stay in love with God. We may have very friendly people in our live s that love us and care for us, but if they fail to help us stay in love with God, they can end up hurting us more than helping us. This may seem a little strong, but the main thing in all of life is loving God wholeheartedly. To do that we need friends around us who help.

Friends who help you love God (hylg) are usually not the friends you emotionally connect to. You emotional friends are usually people who support YOU, make YOU feel important and give to YOU some type of reward. There are other friends who don’t give YOU as much support, but in the long run supply to your spirit and life what you actually need, the challenge to love God more. Can these be the same person? Only if we allow from them both their kindness and severity!

HYLG friends come in all packages. Some of those who are the best, are not the people we would choose to be friends with. I am learning to enjoy the Lord more as He brings people into my life, not for my enjoyment or “YOU”ness, but for the development of loving God more. Thank you God for hylg friends.

Friendship with God

God is hard on His friends. Have you ever noticed how someone who is “halfheartedly” seeking God gets just about everything the pray for. Then you look at a guy like Moses, the humblest man who ever lived (God said that) and He can’t get away with slapping a rock with a stick. It wasn’t like he beat someone’s child. Moses had to deal with his friendship with God.

The more you truly know God, the more sever His love for you is. Sever love, that would be a good book title. This is so that you can keep on sharing in His holiness. Holiness is something that is not a part of this earth. All holiness is from another place, like the Kingdom of God, Heaven, the uncreated realm. If you want to eat the best ice-cream (holiness) you need to be able to handle God’s severity – not just His blessings.

I like it that God is complex. I mean if I have lived with my loving wife for almost 30 years and don’t have her figured out, I want God to be more complicated than that. I don’t want God to be reduced down to “God is love”. I like it that God has multiple names and that many of them are in competition. The Prince of Peace and the Lord of Host (ARMIES) is just one example. I like a God who can make a rock so big that He Himself could not pick it up, to wise to make such a rock and so loving that He spends hours of His time talking to people who accuse His of smashing them with that rock that was to big for Him to pick up, let alone throw.

Well, I’m gonna try to be God’s friend. I know it will cost me my life – I just as well spend it on Him as on me. I want to take the friendship with God thing to new levels. I want to find out just how far someone who started in the pit of life can go. I guess I might be motivated by boredom, nothing much here on earth that thrills any more. Of the stuff that I think will thrill, it just leaves you feeling guilty and isolated from the one who loves me the most.

Never Ending Rain and Pain

There are times in life when it seems like the “bad” will never end. This perception in its self is the cause of a great deal of discouragement. How many of us turn to drugs, alcohol, food, entertainment, recreation or whatever, just to get a break from the perception of unending “badness”?
It is hard to turn to the Lord in times of “badness”. This is not my opinion but the testimony of the whole of Scripture. In time you will be better off if you admit how hard it is to turn to the Lord when you are hurting or bailing the flood waters out of your basement. If you pretend that it is not, you are training yourself in deception. No matter how hard the turning to the Lord is, we must also come to see and understand the treasure of that moment. It is when life is the hardest for us that we can offer to God the sacrifice of turning to Him, away from our self love and self life, and into His Lordship (Master).
The simple reality of turning away from our never ending problems and pain to the Lord is acts of intercession as each of us transcends the moments of suffering and with our hearts, cry out for things eternal. This is not a theory for me, it is a practiced reality. It may be an under practiced reality, but one that I have used, none the less. As I write this I am hoping to beat the Devil over the head with my difficulties by using them to glorify God. (Do Devils have heads?) I want to take the very things that would cause me to run from the Lord and use them to draw closer to God.
In the realm of the Spirit there is a veil. This veil is often, if not always, emotional. If you can go through your emotions, the driving emotions of the moment, you can enter the place of the Lord’s rest. Once there you will find that almost immediately your emotions change. The struggle is the love we have for our own emotions, the love we have to be hurt, to be angry, and to be stressed. On the hurting side of life these emotions seem so much more comforting that the thought of losing them and becoming at peace. The un-transformed human nature loves darkness more than light. But we can be transformed by the continuation of beholding Him and drawing near to God. It is not so much about our ability to perform self righteousness as it is about His power as Author and Finisher of the FAITH.
In just a little while, maybe a few more decades, all evil will end.

Home

Home is a good place to live. We have just return from a great time on a lake provided by some wonderful people. I had a time with the two young kids as the two older kids performed in theater in FL and football in MO. My interest are now spread out from the mountains of CAL. to the beaches of FL and from the lakes of MN to the prairies of IO and IL.

Have you ever wondered what it is like for God to always be home. He is never away, never is a strange town or trying to sleep in a new bed. Not that such things would be to difficult for an all powerful one. But God lives in people, and once He is at home in them, He is forever at home in them.

So in some ways I am like an RV for God. I get to take the God who is already there and carry Him with me to a new location. What an assignment, to do what cannot be done. By that I mean I get to move the immovable one. Just like God to make things impossible and necessary both at the same time.

But the best part is that I am a home for God. My holiness is the ongoing cleaning and maintenance that allows God not only the grace to come, but the welcome to stay. I get to be dwelling place of the limitless one. I guess that I can me home in any place just be being a home for Him.

THE Elections

Most of us think we are right. I guess it is natural, a part of mental health to believe we are right, that our ideas are good ideas. If we did not have this we would be full of fear and anxiety. Most of us don’t argue or hold a point of views just to be stupid, but some of us hold a point of view more out of pride, than out of truth.
Since I am a man I know of the “Manness” that causes my types to insist on being right even when they know they are wrong. In “Manness” we hold our course because it would be weak, dependent and humbling to change.
I had an idea of a vertical windmill in the prayer room one time. I was seeking God about an idea that would change the world. I might have been seeking the Lord about a personal idea of free energy for Rod. What I drew in my journal and later talked to a scientist about was a new creation of a vertical windmill. I know this was a creative new expression that would change humanity. You can understand how bummed out I was when I discovered that some engineers in France had built my design. I saw a picture on the internet. It is 50% more efficient than the horizontal based blade design. I was wrong about what I thought was new. It was already created. I thought I was right, but I was wrong. I thought I would build this invention and profit from it. Now I got to purchase it and help someone profit! Bummer!
In regard to the elections I find a great many people who call themselves Christians (followers of Christ) who do not seek the heat of God as to whom He wants to be our leader. Instead I find a great many people who reason from their personal perspective why they should support a leader. It is the foolishness of the human heart to think that we can know who should lead apart from God’s direction. By this I mean if you are not a follower of Christ Jesus, they please be free from the burden of asking God about His heart. But if you call yourself a Christian then you are quite obligated to know the will of God and do it.
If the leadership of America will affect millions of people, will have an impact on the world for a decade, will determine life and death in war, terrorism, violence, abortion, crime, famine and disaster; should we not gladly take a month or more to seek His will on the earth. There is a natural pride and arrogance in human nature that says “I know” what to do, how to vote. Yet God give more grace to the humble and if ever we are in need of more grace, this is that day and hour.