Psalm 14 and Psalm 53

Guest blogger for this post will be my beloved hubby, Luke:



Psalm 14

For the director of music. Of David.

1 The fool [a] says in his heart,
"There is no God."
They are corrupt, their deeds are vile;
there is no one who does good.
I've been thinking lately about doubt, and examples of same;Thomas, of course, and John the Baptist, when he was imprisoned and sent some faithfuls out to Jesus to ask Him if he was a poser or the real deal. They had no doubt about God, of course, just Jesus. How could they not? This guy with the beard who sweats and stinks like the rest of us, is the Messiah? These are some of the most human moments in the history of God and man. The psalmist, like Thomas and John, does not doubt God. He's no fool! The way to read this is: The fool says there is no god of the Israelites. The fool says Baal is the way, Zeus is the truth, this god, that god, is real, your god is not. These post-enlightenment days bring new meaning to the words. People want proof!
2 The LORD looks down from heaven
on the sons of men
to see if there are any who understand,
any who seek God.

3 All have turned aside,
they have together become corrupt;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.

4 Will evildoers never learn—
those who devour my people as men eat bread
and who do not call on the LORD ?

5 There they are, overwhelmed with dread,
for God is present in the company of the righteous.

6 You evildoers frustrate the plans of the poor,
but the LORD is their refuge.

7 Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!
When the LORD restores the fortunes of his people,
let Jacob rejoice and Israel be glad!

Footnotes:

Psalm 14:1 The Hebrew words rendered fool in Psalms denote one who is morally deficient.


Psalm 53

For the director of music. According to mahalath. A maskil of David. [a][b]

1 The fool says in his heart,
"There is no God."
They are corrupt, and their ways are vile;
there is no one who does good.
2 God looks down from heaven
on the sons of men
to see if there are any who understand,
any who seek God.

3 Everyone has turned away,
they have together become corrupt;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.

4 Will the evildoers never learn—
those who devour my people as men eat bread
and who do not call on God?

5 There they were, overwhelmed with dread,
where there was nothing to dread.
God scattered the bones of those who attacked you;
you put them to shame, for God despised them.

6 Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!
When God restores the fortunes of his people,
let Jacob rejoice and Israel be glad!

Footnotes:

Psalm 53:1 mahalath: Probably a musical term
Psalm 53:1 maskil: Probably a literary or musical term

not letting the sun go down on my wrath

Okay, there are all these stereotypes about angry black women. When I was growing up I was so aware of these stereotypes. Hey, I wonder if that was a way the white culture used to silence us. Or maybe it's an observance of some of the women in our countries who are indeed pretty angry because of cultural racism and family emotional issues. Maybe it's both. Society silences us --because we want to seem all non-ghetto and all...and our emotional upbringing messes us up.

Anyway, I'm on all this because lately I've been having dreams in which I meet someone who hurt me very badly and which I tell them what they did. I don't argue with them, mind you. I simply talk to them and tell them what they did to upset me.
And honestly, these dreams are way pushy and way often. So I feel they're hinting that I get my honesty act together.

First, I generally do not tell folks when they bother me. I just don't. Then I sit around seething or I simply stop talking to them. Then they think they have been hurt BY me when they are really the ones who started it.

For instance, evil mother-in-law. Oh my gosh!!!! I suffered at the hand of this woman! And creepy self-centered ministers. Like the one who stole my books. Like the one who gossiped about me and told my business to the entire church. And what do I do when crappy stuff happens to me? I say nothing. I simply cannot confront. I remember a friend who was having money problems. Granted, she had about nine family members living with her and five of them were working...and the only person bringing money into my family is my hubby. But this girl was in trouble cause all her family members were wasting their money elsewhere. One of them actually took their part of the mortgage and went to Atlantic city and lost it. So, I stepped in and gave them some money. About $1000. Yeah, although we didn't have anything and that money was part of an inheritance I inherited. So what happens after I give the money? Her young ten year old son gives me a look and says our house is poor. It was the kinda look that a kid gives you when he's heard his family talking about you behind your back. You know that look. I was so hurt. From then on I simply stopped talking to the woman. Never said anything mean mind you. Wasn't cruel to her when I saw her but always had somewhere else to go. And when she dropped by to visit my house, I would nod then go inside. And there'd she be at the gate wondering why I simply left.

Yeah, i know. Not the most sane of behaviors but when one is brought up in the 60's by a very abusive minister grandfather and in the 70's by a very class-conscious mother who doesn't want you to behave like a ghetto black angry woman (yet who nevertheless was a very litigious woman) this is how one turns out.

I promised God that if I see this friend today -- since I dreamed of her this morning-- I will definitely tell her why I'm not talking to her. IF she asks me. Only IF. May I actually do that. This life of silence is obviously something God wants me to handle.

I also think that this is one of the reasons why I have forgiveness issues with my mother-in-law. I sat there and let her blast me. Christians folks say to go over and forgive her and to ask her to let us be friends and pretend nothing happened. They say Jesus wants us to forgive. I can forgive but Jesus tells us that if our brother offends us we should go and tell our brother our heart. I have actually tried that with my mother-in-law (one of those rare times I actually tried to let someone who wounded me see my side) and (like all those rare times I actually tried to let others see my side) she refused to see it. And isn't that one of the worst parts of confrontation, the actual battling through to make someone see one's side?

So befriending her --under the scheme of forgiveness-- would be another case of me swallowing the grief and cruelty she sent me. Aargh

Committing to Conform

More and more I find myself wondering about the church at large. We conform ourselves to the world and not to the Bible. Why does this happen?

When one sees folks who consider themselves Christians gossiping, indulging in sexual sin, speaking negatively, living unholy lives, being judgmental of other Christians, trusting in their own righteousness... it just worries a person.

Many Christians are very easygoing toward their sins. That's understandable; we're told that God is loving and accepts us. We are told to seek righteousness...yet to beware of trusting in that righteousness because our righteousness is as filthy rags. We are told to not judge and yet to judge enough so we don't get contaminated by the world or cast our pearls before swine. We are told to live in the world but not let the world live in us. But what has happened?

We don't read our Bibles enough. Or we read just what the minister tells us to read that weak. If we read our Bibles we don't force ourselves to conform to the Bible but we try to make the Bible conform to us.

I don't think we realize that the One whom we talk to is holy, holy, holy. Hey, when God gave Isaiah the vision of the cherubim around the throne, the angels weren't saying "Kind, kind, kind!" They weren't saying "love, love, love." They were saying "Holy, holy, holy!" This is what God wanted his people to know...that He is holy. The one we serve accepts us in Christ but He is holy, holy, holy.

So then, let us read the Bible and when it comes to salvation we must strive for the fullness of Christ's salvation in our lives. Full physical healing, full emotional healing, full attitudinal healing. Let us not only accept what the world tells us to accept. Let us reach for the high calling. Let us not live the way the world does and bring the Bible down to what we "want" to do but to what God has told us in His word that He wants to do. No lying, no sexual immorality, no judgmentality, no gossip (especially under the guise of so-called intercession), no accepting of human prognoses of illnesses, no backsliding. It may be we may attain.
-C

Unused Childhood

Well, today, I'm feeling somewhat healthy. So am gonna use the time wisely. I've decided to gather up all younger son's unused stuff. That means all the cartoon VHS tapes he was supposed to use to learn, all the chapter books he was supposed to have read, all the plastic legos and games he was supposed to have learned to play with.

The way I see it is this: Let's say we get a miracle and younger son is miraculously healed, then I want him totally healed to the point where he can actually read the New York Times. Hey, if God is able to do a miracle to help heal a child diagnosed with non-verbal autism and allergies, he might as well go the whole yard and heal the kid. He's 18 now, will be 19 on the 17th. Why keep these toys and stuff around? Might as well empty the house of those old dreams and old wishes and prepare for new ones.

-C

Psalm 13

Those of us who truly are leaning and relying daily on our Lord can well understand David's cry of "How Long?" We wait for a day when our change comes, as Job says. We wait, we wait. We know God loves us, we know His word is true and powerful, we know He has heard our prayer...and yet, the long long daily wait. A wait of patience, a wait of thanksgiving. A waiting filled with trust and yet such yearning and worries.

-C




Psalm 13

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

1 How long, O LORD ? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

3 Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;

4 my enemy will say, "I have overcome him,"
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

5 But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.

6 I will sing to the LORD,
for he has been good to me.

I knew I liked Jet Li for a reason

I knew I liked him for a reason. Okay, okay, I know some folks are gonna say this is just the one-world system disguising itself as brotherly love but honestly, non-Christians seek brotherhood too. So, yeah, I'll give it a shout-out. It isn't perfect, definitely...but it has a noble aim.

Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Psalm 12

Every once in a while one has one of those days where one seems to see only the ugly in people or only ugly sinful people. Those are often the days when good people seem to be odd or touchy or selfish. It doesn't happen all the time but it happens often enough to make us realize how imperfect humans are. As a Black Christian I have had white Christian folks dislike me because I questioned President Bush putting us into war. I have had black Christian folks turn all nasty on me because I didn't get all wild about President Obama. I've had atheist sneer at me as if they knew everything I was going to say because they had "analyzed" religious people. What does one do with folks like this? Unfortunately, human hearts are always capable of hurting other human hearts. But God is always faithful. God is always perfect in the way He loves us.

Psalm 12 is yet another psalm which shows a character in deep despair about the typical human cruelty that comes as we walk through life. People tend to flatter, boast, speak deceitfully. Such faults generally bother the good and honest person. It definitely bothered a lot of the prophets. Jonah, for instance, is typical of the prophets. He loved God's creatures and God's creations. But he had had it up to here with humans...and with God's tendency to be forgiving of such people.

We folks in Christendom tend to think God will forgive anything WE DO..and so we generally don't get too hard on ourselves. But if we read Psalm 12, can we truly say that we are free from any of the sin David speaks about? Are our lips pure? O Lord Jesus, help me to speak flawless words?

Psalm 12

For the director of music. According to sheminith . A psalm of David. [a]

1 Help, LORD, for the godly are no more;
the faithful have vanished from among men.
2 Everyone lies to his neighbor;
their flattering lips speak with deception.

3 May the LORD cut off all flattering lips
and every boastful tongue

4 that says, "We will triumph with our tongues;
we own our lips [b] —who is our master?"

5 "Because of the oppression of the weak
and the groaning of the needy,
I will now arise," says the LORD.
"I will protect them from those who malign them."

6 And the words of the LORD are flawless,
like silver refined in a furnace of clay,
purified seven times.

7 O LORD, you will keep us safe
and protect us from such people forever.

8 The wicked freely strut about
when what is vile is honored among men.

Footnotes:

Psalm 12:1 Title: Probably a musical term
Psalm 12:4 Or / our lips are our plowshares

Hallelujah He Reigns!

W H Auden Musee des Beaux Arts

Auden's poem about how tragedy in one life occurs while usual life is occurring in the life of others.

God's word is a living dagger

I dreamed a bad spirit had been awakened somehow from some old clothes I received as a gift from a friend. IT had previously haunted those who wore it and since I inherited the clothes I ended up with the spirit. I tried to escape it and was thinking of the word of God but when I managed to say it, the power of God really showed. But I was so tired from fighting. When I woke up I heard the Bible phrase, "Not as though beating against the air."

1 Corinthians 9:26 I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: 1 Corinthians 9:25-27

This reminded me of two verses that have really been helping me.
One is "Are not my words like a hammer that beat the stone to pieces?" And the other is "The word of God is sharp, living, a two-edged sword." I heard a sermon where someone said when Paul describes the sword of the spirit which is the word of God he uses the word which means a dagger, a kind of small knife which one jabs one's opponents with. So lately, I've been thinking that everytime I use the word of god or any of God's promises, I imagine myself stabbing stabbing stabbing at the autism and the fibromyalgia. I imagine the word of God like a hammer, knocking out the congestion in my son's head and chipping away at the foundations of sickness and the place Satan had found to attack us.

I think this dream came to encourage me. I don't really know what the clothes means...although I did get some inherited clothes from someone. But it reminds me that Faith isn't faith if it isn't spoken. The word of God must be spoken in order to be an effective weapon. And when I speak I mustn't think, "Ah, it's not working!" I must think, "I am not beating against the air."

Sometimes we think nothing is happening because we're carnal and we walk by sight, but God has told us to walk by faith in his character, in his word, in the fact that something is happeninn in the spiritual realm.

Mindfulness

Okay, I've got to be aware when God is leading me to think about something. Sometimes I sense that I'm being told something and kinda dismiss the thought, sometimes I sense that I'm being told something and actually (YAY!!!) do what I'm supposed to do, and sometimes I don't sense that God is speaking to me at all.

Sometimes I'm good. Let's say, I suddenly start thinking of someone out of the blue. I say to myself, "Uhm...maybe you should be praying for this person, or maybe this person will call you, or maybe you should call this person." Or sometimes I suddenly get this idea of doing something....And I actually do the thing. For instance, two weeks ago I dreamed of an old friend. I said to my husband, "uhm....<-- all the above!" Upshot? Old friend contacted me yesterday...after not seeing each other 8 years!

But sometimes I am totally clueless although the clue is given to me. I have this measuring cup, quart sized. I've had it for about four years. I use it to drink tons of water. I mean tons!!! It's very important in my life because it's pyrex and that means I can drink cold or hot water...and water is very important to my well-being and health. So if anything happens to this cup well, I'm in deep-sh*t because I just can't bring myself to actually drink 8 little cups of water at 8 times rather than ..well, you get the picture. So I'm on my bed about a week ago when out of the blue I start thinking about buying another one of these...maybe even buying a pint measuring cup. It seemed like such an odd thought and such a lavish luxury to actually buy "another" of these cups. But there I lay pondering and pondering where I could buy it.

Now, did it occur to me to say to myself, "uhm, Carole, you're thinking about buying a new measuring cup again after all these years! Could it be Holy Spirit is telling you something?" Oh, no!!! yours truly just thought it was all very odd of her to be suddenly thinking of buying two measuring cups of different sizes when she already had one. So what happens, younger son picked up my measuring cup a coupla days ago and threw it to the ground where it smashed. Yeah, I had been warned. Holy Spirit had seen the thing coming. And now that I am two days without this cup I realize it wasn't a small thing at all. Water is such a part of battling this illness that it wasn't that Holy Spirit was merely being sillily prophetic and playing little games. He knew I needed the cup. I have been totally unable to drink water the past two days. And I haven't drunk enough. It has to be warm water, or hot tea in the middle of the winter. So, gotta get this measuring cup.

Anyway, I'm trying to be as obedient to these nudges as I am to be obedient to other weird odd spiritual nudges. I remember my friend Joan. A sweet woman, a good Christian woman, living with a man for about seven years who had left his wife to live with her. (Man had never loved his wife btw, but ..whatever.) So I kept getting this nudge, "Call Joan and tell her to read her Bible." I thought, "Well, this is weird." I finally gave in and called her, wondering how the heck I would start a conversation with a woman about reading her Bible. When she picked up the phone she said, "I'm so glad you called. I've been in a lot of pain lately. But the doctors operated and didn't find anything. Know what? It's good you called. Remember that book 'Lost Books of the Bible' you let me read once?" (okay, this was back in the day when I was into all that extra-biblical stuff and was easily deceived.) So I said, "I was wrong about those books. Right now you have to read the Bible and only the Bible." Now, I didn't know if God wanted her to read the Bible because the living words of the living God would heal her, or if he wanted her to read her the Bible to spare her from hell so she could repent. Upshot? She died very soon after this phone call. Of cancer. Yeah, doctors weren't honest with her.

Satan had been trying to get her to focus on spiritual things that weren't of the Bible but God had wanted her to read the Bible. In my life I've found that whenever someone is dying God gets very insistent on it being the Bible and only the Bible. More and more I see that the Bible is very very very oddly important to him and very special in that way. I could tell you tons of examples but it's weird how he honors the Bible like that.

I leave you with my poem that I wrote for my friend Jestine. As they say, "true story." Follow those nudges, my friends! On the day Jestine died, all her friends and family simultaneously, out of the blue, with no one calling to them traveled to see her at her hospital room. All except me.


For Jestine
by Carole Stewart McDonnell

I did not visit you on the day you died
although my mind was on you
all that day

because

when I mentioned visiting you
my driver said
the hospital parking fee was high
and I said
I might call him anyway at 3:00
but then at 3:00
another friend called
and invited me over
and although you'd been on my mind all day
I immediately forgot you

because

the afternoon sun was so bright
oh so very bright
and the afternoon air was so sultry
and a certain sweet someone I loved
would be there
and for five months
I=d been forgetting you anyway
so it was easy enough
to forget this time
although the thought of you
on that particular day was so pressing

and never once
all that day
and all that night
as I worked that party
did it occur to me

that this hospitalization was your last
And that you were dying
And that God was telling me
to visit you to say goodbye.

God's sheep DO hear His voice. We just kinda don't think he's talking to us, or that what He is saying is that important.

Weekend Movie Viewing

Well, some of my weekends seem to be dedicated to romance -- like those days when all those holiday christmas romances flooded the tube with ne'er a Jesus movie in site. Or when Scifi Channel has some good flicks. But they seem to be stuck in reptile mood because I'm pretty sure it was not more than five weeks ago that they had another reptile week. And here were were again!

So I kinda ended up watching some crime flicks. Through whatever fate I ended up watching crime flicks. Saw Heat again with DeNiro, Kilmer, and Pacino. Had totally forgotten the plot. Found myself, yet again -- as i do in all crime flicks-- on the side of the bad guys and hoping they would all get away. Was delightfully surprised when Kilmer's character did. Nowadays if the bad theives don't kill anyone, then they tend to get away. Stealing isn't so bad. IT was okay and it had "gravitas." I heard a casting director talking about gravitas once and about how for certain shows actors needed said gravitas. I kinda got an idea of what this gravitas thing was when I saw Tokyo Drift a second time..last week sometime. The story felt like it needed to be heavier; the pain of the main characters needed to be heavier. They talked about their pain, the film was kinda darkly lit at sometimes. There was all this angsty stuff..and yet it just was not Rebel without a cause. No gravitas.

Then there was Family. Found this on Lifetime or Lifetime Movie Channel. A cop with serious psycho problems and his son pick up a woman hitch-hiker-criminal. She wants to protect the boy from his father. You could see from the beginning that this was once a small movie. It had that feel to it. None of the formulas. I liked it. Definitely try to see it. Nicely written, nicely directed, nicely acted. But there was that shoot-out moment when cop had his near meltdown and spoke his heart. Why, oh why, do they go on like that? As if we don't already know their "i need a perfect family and why don't you trust me and why did my wife leave me when i was good and why did she take my child?" issues. But a good flick.

Then saw Miami Heat. Liked this one too. First time I saw it. Not particularly about Miami. There was the ubiquitous cold hearted inscrutable Asian girl whom everyone loves and who is finally saved by the love of a good white man so I kinda had to deal with that. A couple of moments, however, did make me want to scream. For instance, when the big shoot down goes down, she gets upset when she realizes bad guy is possibly a cop. So what does she do in the MIDDLE of the shoot-out? (This is a woman, mind you, who has been calm and collected all along. But I guess they wanted to say taht when she gets mad she loses it because he was the only one she had allowed yadda yadda) anyway, she gets up in the middle of the shootout -- the MIDDLE!!!!-- and starts bitch-alapping him for betraying her. Okay, AK47's are shooting at them! Cop Snipers and bad guy snipers and guys with semi-automatics are all around shooting at each other and at Colin Farrell's character...and yeah, she's having a hissy fit! She also has another one in the car when they're escaping and starts hitting him while he's driving at a mega-pace. Then after that, when they're at peace and waiting for the florida cops to take her away to her home in havana (yeah, i know...they did a whole lot to give the role to a chinese actress.) she gets all sad and wistful, having presumably got all that hidden temptress rage all expelled. Yes, she got away too because she didn't kill anyone. She was just a female too... We know how that goes.

Then I saw Crank. Kinda like DOA on crack...and reminded me of Torque. Wonder if the same screenwriter/director did both flicks. Jonathan Statham --who truly is not my type but has a kind of violent sexuality cause he's so dang competent. (Is competence a new kind of sexuality?) -- plays a guy who wakes to find he's been injecfed with an evil Beijing cocktail that will kill him in an hour. Well, you know the plot already: how to get revenge etc? Just like Torque it is a total ride. And very witty and silly at parts as he has to crank himself up to live longer...and ah the stuff he does to crank himself up. There's something odd with me ...someone dies and I immediately wonder if they go to God or to hell. So if I found out I had an hour to live, I'd be kneeling and praying to God to forgive me for my sins, especially if I was a hitman. But again this guy is kinda safe. I always look at what they do at the end of a bad guy's life to make his salvation sure. In A prayer for the dying, Mickey Rourke's character lippened (clung for dear life) to the cross of Jesus. In Angel with dirty faces, Cagney's character turned rat and died to self to save the souls of future might-have-been juvies. A bad guy needs repentance. So this guy was on the road to repentance -- as usual, love had saved his soul-- and hadn't killed the guy he was supposed to kill. In the end he dies though. After a big shoot-out and from falling from the sky. And we're shown his body, like a car that can no longer be cranked. So am not sure if his soul was saved. Please, Lord, let there be no crank2.

Ooh, reminds me...saw the end of another flick... Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan in a shoot-out...cowboys in the desert. Forgot the name. Just saw the end. Must've been my weekend to catch shoot-outs.

When I have fears that I might seem to be

The false foundations of the American Dream

Okay, if there is one thing that is totally apparent to me, it's this: The American Way of Life -- the vacations, the "stuff" we have in our house, the two or more cars per family, the eating out once a week, little mandatory luxuries and great expenses-- are built on credit...which is a lie. We have all been trained to live beyond our means by doing so on credit.

What would American life be like if we didn't have credit on so many things? What would our life be like if we only bought what we could pay for...and all we had was really ours and not really on lease to us through a credit card company?

Can you imagine kids working their way through college without taking out college loans? Can you imagine most folks saving up for their houses or folks living in houses inherited through their families? Can you imagine most folks living in apartments? Can you imagine having most families having only one car? Can you imagine young folks age 20-30 still living with their family and folks not thinking a guy is "immature cause he still lives at home with his folks"?

We have been so trained to believe in financial independence. But has it really been independence? Not really? It's been dependence on credit. I don't think we will be able to return to the days when family was wealth and where family was where one got one's wealth and where living close as a family was a way of gaining and keeping wealth. Our trust has been put in credit card systems who trained us to believe in the American Dream.

Will it be hard to return? Yes! Because the media owns our minds for the most part. We believe what they tell us to believe. And the American Dream has become such a "tradition" that few folks will be able to free their minds from it...and from the brainwashing of the "need" for credit.

Career Planning

Well, Juno Books became an imprint of Pocket Books. Juno published Wind Follower. Now, this may be good news but it might not be. Juno's been going toward urban fantasy. I like folkloric fantasy. Exploring tribal culture and what makes tribes. Current novel is Constant Tower which needs an agent cause it's neither urban fantasy nor does it have a female protag which is what Juno wants. But it's such a great book! What to do!

I have another novel, Daughters of Men, which many folks loved and which was a near miss with an agent at Maass and with Dorchester and the editor at Juno said it needed a lotta work. Now, it would fit into the urban fantasy genre perfectly. So I could try working on it. Aaargh, to revisit a book I haven't worked on in about four years! But I suppose those characters are part of me because I love them very much.

But I'm also working on my serial killer-succubus novel. Can I juggle all three? Will see. Might have to send a note to the Juno editor telling her my issues and wondering.

Now, the weird thing about the Pocket alliance is that many of us Juno authors don't fit into the new Juno. What will Pocket do with us if we don't write urban fantasy? I'd like to think that being black and a Christian, Pocket might have a place for me because they have a Christian line and they might have a black line or a fantasy line. Not sure what's going on. Who knows? I'll only give that to God. This is one of those moments when the talk must become the walk and the rubber hits the road. I say that I trust God, right? I say that the word of God is powerful to change every situation, right? So will I walk around the house thanking God for this opportunity and for what he is going to do with me now that I'm ostensibly at Pocket Juno? Or will I look at the pathological truth and go about repeating that, especially since Juno might be putting some books out of print or remaindering them? Lord knows, how much money Wind Follower made for them!

Promotion comes neither from the east nor from the west. Let me trust in God.

Gerard Manley Hopkins my favorite poet

Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of my favorite poets. And these are my favorite of his poems. The first poem is God's grandeur.



The second is "I wake and feel the fell of dark not day."



The third is "Spring and Fall to a Young Child."

Psalm 10

One of the hardest thing for those who believe in a loving God is to understand why he seems to delay helping good people?

Is it because he is powerless and not entirely all-powerful? Well, two possible answers to this: God is all-powerful, he has set the world up in such a way that we are collaborers with Christ. Most things that are done on earth are done through God working in his people and through faith. The second thing is that good though we may think we are, we have our own issues that might prevent the answer from coming and spiritual laws we the good people have broken (unforgiveness, wrongful eating, sowing the wrong seeds into our lives). In addition, there are demonic workings in the world fighting against good people.

The righteous understand this, but the evil wicked use God's delay as an excuse to continue doing evil.

1Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?
2The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor: let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined.
3For the wicked boasteth of his heart's desire, and blesseth the covetous, whom the LORD abhorreth.
4The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.
5His ways are always grievous; thy judgments are far above out of his sight: as for all his enemies, he puffeth at them.
6He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved: for I shall never be in adversity.
7His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud: under his tongue is mischief and vanity.
8He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages: in the secret places doth he murder the innocent: his eyes are privily set against the poor.
9He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den: he lieth in wait to catch the poor: he doth catch the poor, when he draweth him into his net.
10He croucheth, and humbleth himself, that the poor may fall by his strong ones.
11He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it.
12Arise, O LORD; O God, lift up thine hand: forget not the humble.
13Wherefore doth the wicked contemn God? he hath said in his heart, Thou wilt not require it.
14Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand: the poor committeth himself unto thee; thou art the helper of the fatherless.
15Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man: seek out his wickedness till thou find none.
16The LORD is King for ever and ever: the heathen are perished out of his land.
17LORD, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear:
18To judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress.

First Nations Reconciliation

Why did the disciples follow Jesus?

Was reading Oswald Chambers' "The Love of God" this morning with my beloved. Oswald mentions something to this effect: The first disciples weren't drawn to Jesus because they felt like they were sinners. They didn't rush to him looking for deliverance. They didn't think they were perfect but neither did they think they were in crappy shape.

Very true. Only Peter seemed aware of his sinfulness when he said, "Depart from me, Lord, because I am a sinful man." But for the most part, it was only later in Jesus ministry when the disciples got a vague idea of how sinful they were.

Well, reading this made me think about another of the reasons why so many Christian books are lacking. They seek to pull people to God by making people aware of their sins. Consider that we are to be like Jesus. What does that mean? Should people look at us and suddenly be convicted about how sinful they are? No, Jesus said, "Let men see your good works and glorify your father."

What is it about Jesus that drew the first disciples? Oswald says Jesus had a purity, a sincerity, a holiness, etc.

True. Jesus draws all...in his own way. We don't know what it is he's doing as he draws them. We don't know what about him is drawing folks to him. But it may not at all be some conviction of sin. When I wrote Wind Follower, I didn't set out to make Loic realize his sinfulness. For one thing, sin is not imputed where there is no law. So although the whole world lay in sin, my characters didn't have the book of God's law so sin was not imputed to them. God would judge them by some other way. But what would draw them to the Creator? The Creator's love. The Creator's holiness. And --in the case of my novel-- the Creator's generosity. That was the lens through which my character (living in a world where hospitality was important) saw the Creator.

So, while it is good for people to recognize that they miss the mark with God, we Christians shouldn't go about trying to make them know their sin. We care called to make them know God. And pushing sins down their throats might have the opposite effect of making them avoid Christ (as we represent him).