Saturday, November 12, 2011

Glow

So you know
Where you go
When you glow
In the dark,
But you can't glow in the dark alone.

So your tears come down
Your cries come out,
Letting them see
The living doubt,
That you must be and own.

"Help my unbelief"
You tearfully call,
Make me see
That you can do it all,
That you wipe away my fall.

So I know
That I glow
Wherever I go
In this dark,
'Cause I'm reminded I'm never alone.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Short Update!

Nanowrimo is in full swing! That is, National Novel Writing Month. It's that time of year when every serious novelist (and amateurs too) sit down and crank out fifty-thousand words of a novel! Hopefully, that's about the length of the novel, but it's a decent start if nothing else.

This is my first Nanowrimo, folks, and it has been thrilling! Well, more like draining. And fantastic. I'm at 14,259 words so far, below par because I burned out yesterday. But I'm not giving up! Actually, I've already succeeded beyond my wildest imaginations! As a working college student, I didn't think I'd get this far at all.

But here I am! With half an outline, the start of an amazing map, and 14,259 words of my second novel, folks! And boy is it a dozy. And you know why? God gave it to me. I love the stories he grants me. ^__^ They're always so amazing!

This one is about a city; about the people there. The little boy, the stranger, the young woman, the police chief, the mayor and his wife, the reporter, the doctor, and the inn keeper. It's a story about a night-time in all their lives, and it's so exciting to be the writer of it!

And that's all I'm gonna say for now. See ya all next time! =D

Saturday, October 15, 2011

A Theme

The notes strike like hammers in my heart. A song of gaiety, but I only feel sad… Pools of clear black reflect back the world that dares peek into them. Is it true what we see? Is everything really embroiled in a flat mire of the glossiest black? Oh, God, save us from this pit!

Why do these emotions rest on me? Why does my chest think it's been split open like a chunk of wood split in two? A grayish mist fills the vale and I suppose I've said too much. But who really does? Speaking out of turn maybe; speaking the wrong things, all the time. But truly too many people say too little too late…

On Judgment Day, every word that was ever spoken will echo forth again. Then more words will be spoken for every word that was spoken, to give some account of them. If only one word is spoken for every word that was, then that's twice as many words as ever were. …Will there even then be enough?

Words can sooth the human heart. Words can assuage the wounds of the soul. But is anyone intent on this art? Does anyone care about what they say? Does anyone take care what they say? "I don't know how," is not good enough. Not by a long shot if you're a living, breathing, speaking human being. You must learn how or you must die trying, it's as straight forward as that.

Pray! Pray, for God will hear you. Not one of his words will fall to the ground, and he will lift you up on the wings of eagles! To soar among the clouds… What a difference from being stuck in a mire.

That song is back. With it, some of the gaiety has returned. There is an understanding in it, like the understanding between leaves and wind. Two hands, one holding another. Two voices, laughing and talking; saying words that matter, from the heart. Supporting, building, holding one another aloft. Through it all there's the song, like a third someone. He it is that holds the two together.

Ecclesiastes 4:12 "…a threefold cord is not quickly broken."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05eArjS92oM&feature=related

Monday, October 10, 2011

Forgive them, forgive them, forgive… them.

When the whistle's blowing,
And the bells are tolling,
And the captain 's nodding farewell.
When the ships arriving,
And the harbours thriving,
Will the Judgement gavel fell?

…Are you afraid of going to hell?

I'm not sure of much of what to say. In fact, I think I can't say much of anything anyway right now, because of my mind. My mind is fine except I can't find it, but that's a fine line of mine to walk. You see, a migraine is a pain until it'll wane and to think is in vain, unless you think along a vein that isn't particularly sane. But I think the vein that my mind would walk along isn't vain because it is sane, thanks to God's good grace that is mine. He gave it to me and set me free, which makes me giddy, and jittery to boot. I know what I say can't win the day, by itself anyway, but God has a way of making it okay, cause it's Jesus' Day, and that makes me say, "Yay!" I don't fear the reaper or the Judgement gavel, cause this is God's day and this is his battle.

I'll say this though, and it says it all. Forgive cause he forgave you. Forgive for that is your call. Love because he loved you. Love and forgive them all.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Jesus is God. Period.

I mean no disrespect to those who disagree with my subject, but I would encourage you not to shy away from this because of it. Follow my train of thought, see if it doesn't make any sense. See if doesn't move you. Then you can be turned off. ;)

Simply put, my argument is that Jesus is God - must be God - because that is the only way that he could, can, and will accomplish his role as Savior of mankind. Sin, by definition, is the factor that separates us from God, and that separation is the state that we are all born into; that we all live in, by God's good grace, until the day that we die. Jesus' role as savior is to void that separation and to bring us into communion with God; to bridge the gap between us and God by wiping away our sins.

For Jesus to accomplish this goal implies two fundamental things about his nature. First and foremost he must have lived a perfect, sinless human life to measure up to the task of paying for our sins. Because, since all sin - even the smallest little disobedience (like eating fruit God told you not to eat) - leads to a debt to death - set forward by God in Genesis, Jesus could only have paid for all of it, or any of it, if he had not acquired any of this debt to death himself. He had to be clean and undeserving of death to pay the price for our sins; to pay our debt to death.

Secondly, but more importantly (yet sadly it gets overlooked more often), Jesus must be fully God and fully man to reconcile us to God. Because, as I said, sin separates us from God - separates the created from the creator - Jesus, to bring us - God and man - back together, must have an intimate knowledge of both us and God. To be the bridge that reunites us and God he must have come from, must always be, fully God and fully man. He cannot be just and angel or a prophet, because - as history shows us - both of these classes of being have been tainted by sin and are therefore imperfect. Satan was an angel and fell, becoming the father of lies. Moses was a prophet and fell, dying without reaching the promised land. Angels and prophets by themselves cannot be perfect (because, by definition, to be by themselves would be a state of separation from God, their creator, which, as I already established, is sin), and we only see them in the right when they are following the will of God. For Jesus to be the perfect, unity bringing being that his role necessitates he be, he has to be fully God. He cannot just be following the will of God, although that is part of his role, he must be the Will of God. He must be the physical manifestation of God's Will and want to wipe away our sins or else he would be inadequate to the task. More than that, he would have no place in wiping our slates clean, because it is against God and God alone that we have all sinned and fallen short of his Glory. He must be fully God to pay the price and fully man to be the right vessel that was broken and poured out for our sins. Not only is it the best way for Jesus to be our savior, it is the only way for him to take on that role.

I feel I could delve into this all day, because I haven't even touched the part about Jesus' role on earth being an illustration for us has to how we should live our earthly lives in communion with God. For him to be that physical illustration, he had to be the physical manifestation of both God and man; the physical manifestation of the spiritual life we are to live through his perfect, God strength. I must leave off, however. It's a topic for another day, maybe.

John 1:1-5 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." (emphasis, or bold, added by me)

Friday, September 30, 2011

Infinitesimally Perfect Construction of the Versimilitude-Esque Facade of the Educational Elite and Why It Is Utterly Translucent (or, Why I Don't Buy the Lie)

I stood on a salmon pink cloud. Well, that's not really true. It was more like; I stood on a plateau of red brick, covered in a foot-deep, salmon pink cloud. The entrance yawned at me - gray, cavernous, all the usuals - but I had already turned my back on it. You see, the promise had been whispered out to me as well. But I wasn't buying it.

Not that I'm abnormally clever, or even that I had heard something sinister in that airy whisper that no one else had. It's just that I had been warned, that's all. Someone I knew and trusted, loved and was loved by, had cautioned me diligently and intelligently about the lies of the whisper. All they had to say was, "look a little further. Question its intentions, and test its fruit. See if its making good, then you'll know for certain."

This had seemed reasonable to me. So, I set out. Over the Clear Calling River, by the Hillock Road of an ashen brown. I traversed the Adapt, Rolling Hills, and carved my way through the Forest of a Long Time. With care I skirted Immoral Death Canyon, and finally arrived at the foot of Impossibly Possible Mountain. The Stream of Common Sense passed me, flowing the other way, as I made my way up the rocky face.

Soon, I was within sight of Pastoral Summit. The perfectly shaded, pink salmon cloud hid the brick of the causeway, but I was not fooled. I could feel it underfoot, for I am still aware of my feet. I had come upon the cave suddenly, it seemed to irrupt out of the mist.

It was Education Gate, and the whisper of the gatekeepers came to me; as it comes to all that happen before the Gate: "We can give you success and riches. Happiness is just a stone throw away, and we can show you how to throw stones. Let us be your guides for exploring the world and we'll make you a king in it. We'll open your mind - it won't hurt a bit - and fill it with what is right and true. Come to us, and we'll show you your true potential goes far beyond anything you've ever imagined."

I listened hard to their words, matching it to everything I saw, heard, and knew. I witnessed man after man, woman after woman enter through the Gate, and endeavored to see their end. One man fell to his death. Another seemed to go insane. Almost all of them were buried and burdened under sacks handed out at the Gate by a short, rotund man. He had beady eyes behind beady glasses and looked to me rather like a spider. "Everyone needs these to get through," he would assure the latest newcomer, packing them down. "You'll pay them off in time. Don't worry about it. It's normal. Everything is fine."

I asked the Gate keepers to show me those that had succeeded, and they pointed me to the edge of the plateau. There, I looked out on the world and saw them. They were men and women, who dressed well and walked well. They had nice cars and nice homes. They ate nice things and tried to have nice children.

But as I stared they seemed to disappear. I could hardly make them out. Their clothes turned shabby and gray, their stride ineffectual and meaningless. Their cars heaped more sacks upon them, then died away suddenly; becoming heaps themselves. Their nice homes were hollow, quiet, empty. They were cold and thin as glass, as welcoming as the frigid tundra, and they also threw more sacks upon the backs of these people. The food they ate turned to ashes in their stomachs and their children become monstrous and ran away.

I looked back to the Gate. The whisper came again. Nausea swept me, and I was forced to turn away. They will all die. Not one of them will remain. They will never know what true happiness is...

Matthew 23:15 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice a much a child of hell as yourself."

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Unjustified Love

This topic has been floating around in my mind recently, so I thought I'd put it into words. Really it's a very broad topic because it's about God, and when you think of him you invariably must think about it. It is the topic of the character of God - specifically two characteristics - as revealed in both the Old Testament and in the New. These characteristics are: God is perfectly Just, and God is perfectly Loving.

Sometimes people separate these two, because they see a Just God in the Old Testament and a Loving God in the New and they just cannot reconcile the two in their minds. This irks me greatly because this is a great flaw. By the very nature of these two characteristics you cannot have one without the other, and you cannot diminish one or the other. They must both be equally perfect, equally unfathomable for God to be God. Because it is Just for God's attributes to be unsearchable by us, his creation. For will the pottery call into question the potter? Will the clay formed judge the one who forms it? Isaiah 29:16 Puts this into perspective.

Yet, at the same time, God's perfect Love shines through by the fact that he allows us a great deal more leeway in fathoming his attributes than we should be able. Ephesians 3:16-19 spells this out, saying, "…that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God."

Taking the concept that these two characteristics only work perfectly in tandem a little further, we see that without the support of one another the basis for both fall away. For, perfect, unsearchable Love cannot be perfect and unsearchable without the backdrop of perfect Justice. Because perfect Love must be, by its very nature, unconditional Love, and perfect Justice must be meted out based on a perfect, unchanging set of conditions. If there were no conditions, or if the conditions weren't perfect and unchanging, how then could Love be unconditional? It couldn't be and wouldn't be, making perfect Love completely dependent on perfect Justice.

In turn, perfect Justice is nothing without perfect Love. Oh, yes it can exist; unlike perfect Love without perfect Justice. But what would be the point? Where would the hope be? For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; and without God, without Jesus, without perfect Love nothing you do will come to anything and everything you do will come to not. "I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind." Ecclesiastes 1:14

One can chose to live a life under prefect Justice alone, but that is not how God will mete it out. For he will divide the wheat from the chaff and the lambs from the goats on the same day, and those who chose not to believe in the perfect Love of God will discover the deepest point of their despair when they find out it was real and within their reach all along.

Romans 3:3-4 "What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God be true though everyone were a liar, as it is written, 'That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged.'"

Matthew 12:36-37 "I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give an account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned."

Romans 10:9-10 "because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved."

1 John 4:15-17 "Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world."