Thursday, September 14, 2017

Of Hand in Hand

‘Hand in Hand; benefit for hurricane relief’

This is what it is all about—this is what God is about!  People rising to meet a need: the first responders, folks powering up their boats, or paddling a canoe to rescue someone they don’t know simply because that’s what is needed.

           There is something calling, I hear it  . . . but only 'almost'.

The media helped, during the tragedy showing stories of love and compassion.  Then, CBS with its telethon Hand in Hand, at its hour-long closing raised 14 million dollars for victims of Harvey and Irma.

Mystery God is the God who set the world in order, then brought forth creatures with reflective awareness, giving them the freedom to manage life and the world according to their choice.  Over time that choosing has not been well thought out, but we learn form our mistakes (which have been monstrous).  Now is the time we are given to assess and reorder.  The massive calamities of Harvey and Irma are awakening us to realize the need to work together to overcome disorder and disaster.  Hard lessons, but the outpouring of concern and help says we are beginning to learn.  The lesson is ‘We are One World’ and helping each other is what this life is all about.

We’ll return to grumbling and fault finding, but the lessons of showing compassion, helping and giving aid will enter our consciousness as the ‘Yes’ we are called to.  That discovery is what Mystery God awaits.  Selfishness will return, but take courage; consciousness change is a slow process.


Friday, September 8, 2017

Nature Unbalanced


Hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, earthquakes and tornados, mountains sides ablaze, wars and terrorism—it is not God’s wrath but man’s refusal to heed God’s precepts that creates this chaos
. . . nature exists in a delicate balance, human actions have unbalanced that balance and God mourns the destruction.  The saving words are “Thy will be done” and they have been ignored.

The voice of the Lord is in nature and nature howls from the pain man has inflicted upon her.  Nature is warning us, calling us to awaken.  In the earliest pages of the Bible God says, “I lay before you life and death, choose life”.  We make the ‘for life choice’ by following The Way of Jesus which is love and forgiveness—but instead we have ignored that imperative and chosen greed and selfishness . . . and the earth groans as man’s choices unbalance the balance, bringing destruction.
We need God in our life, our world and our consciousness.


Once again I invoke the contemporary version of  Psalm 29:

We have not kept your precepts, Lord.
We have not shepherded the earth by your formulation,
We have plundered for private gain
            and trampled the lowly to amass profits.

Ascribe to the Lord, O world leaders,
            ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the reverence due his name
            and take heed of the splendor of his holiness.

The voice of the LORD is heard in Nature,
            the God of glory thunders.
The Lord gives us warning as we despoil the earth;
            the voice of the Lord breaks the cedars
            and howls the winds.
The voice of the Lord shakes the mountains
            and strikes with flashes of lightening.
The voice of the Lord twists the oaks
            and strips forests bare.
Look, listen and know!

The Lord sits enthroned over the waters and land,
The Lord reigns King forever.
The Lord gives warning to his people!

Heed his precepts and principles
            lest man’s choices bring destruction
            to this wondrous earth and all its inhabitants!

        

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

A Little Yellow Pencil

From my book The Stations, I’ve chosen an excerpt that is about seeing with ‘new eyes’.


(Peter is speaking)  “One day I heard a lecturer talk about a yellow pencil.  She held up the pencil and said people have a tendency to take everything for granted.  The race of man is still slumbering in awareness!  We buy a pencil for a dime and think we have paid for it—yet there is no way to pay for what it took to bring it into being so it could be purchased for our dime.  It was there for us not only because of the merchants who sold it, the shippers that transported it, and the factories that turned wood and graphite, rubber and metal into pencils; not only because of forests that produced the wood and rubber, the mines that gave up the metals; but also because of the centuries of human ingenuity that discovered the use and invented the process and refined it over the years.  No person could ever pay enough for the pencil’s existence . . . yet there it was and we could buy it for a dime!  We all owe a debt to life simply for providing us with what we take for granted.  We pay for the richness in our lives in becoming aware of how interconnected all of life actually is.  She never said ‘God’, but I understood infinite goodness for the first time when she said we can only begin to repay in striving to give back something for all we have been given.”