St. Michael's Healing Prayer Services on Thursdays long ago

We hurt each other when we project our way of seeing God onto all of His reality. As if we speak for Him. We never speak for Him; He speaks for Himself. Through His Word, and into the spirits of those that He made, especially those who love and know Him.
We err, I think, when we take words received from Him, meant for us alone, and project them onto everyone.
The Lord may have told one in the body not to eat meat, one not to miss church, one to only pray in their prayer language. We hurt each other when we impose these words spoken to us on our brothers, as these things may not be part of the reality that God made for them.
We are not allowed to pick and choose which parts of His Word we are to follow, but "words" from the Lord are, I believe, given to us alone. They are for our edification, for our obedience, for our worship and focus. Please God, do not let us beat our brothers over the head with them.

The gift of grace, which Jesus Christ died to offer to us, also allows us, I believe, the opportunity to enter into a place that transcends what we can see with our eyes and hear with our ears. The Spirit of God is not encumbered, as we are, by time or space.

A priest, who I really loved because the first time I saw him he glowed, gave a wonderful sermon on believing God for the impossible. It was the last sermon that he gave at that church, and I saw a vision that night of both Jesus, and someone who I love , standing at the alter. It made me so happy to see them, both of them. So---what was happening here?

Was God speaking to me? Or was I engaged in wish fulfillment with hallucinatory tendencies?

I heard some one say recently that the Word of God fits reality. Basically, that it works in the real world, and I believe that this is true.

But what do we do with all of the things in the Bible that do not fit the reality that we normally experience? The miracles of Jesus, the flood, the whale, the Red Sea parting, the taking up of Enoch and Elijah, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, the tongues at Pentecost?  I believe that the Gospels, and all the “stories” in the Bible, are true; and this is due in large part to the fact that almost everything in the Scriptures point to things that transcend the “real world”.

I see visions, and I dream dreams.

I love the Word of God.

I have come to understand that many of the things that look like they may be bad things, may be good things, in disguise. Things our eyes can’t see.

Bad dreams are not portents but warnings, signposts. They are kindnesses; a still, small voice.

There is no need to fear, because God is not angry with me.

These are some of the things that I believe God has given to me to explore, and these are the things that my writings here will be about. Hopefully I will be educated by those who read these musings and care to comment, and in the end I hope to see Christ more clearly. This is what I want for both myself and everyone else.

 EVERYBODY needs an editor.

                                                      

It changed my life when I heard a preacher say “God is not angry anymore”. I had a vision at that moment of the Father sitting across a desk from Jesus, and the Lord Jesus said, “I’ve got this”.

If we are in Christ Jesus, God is not angry with us. Jesus picked up the check.

                                                

Sin is an issue, for all people at all times. I know that I still sin, and will until I am like Christ. (1 John 3:2)  But I have made the decision not to call myself a sinner anymore.

I know that this sounds almost heretical. “I’m just a sinner saved by grace” is a phrase that you hear from a lot of Christians and from a lot of pulpits, but I am coming to believe that God is not really honored by such speech, and that He is much more pleased when we really know what His Word says about who we are as believers, and set about learning to walk as if we are all that He says we are. 

I was a sinner, cut off from God, dead in trespasses and disobedience. But God, in His great mercy, made me alive in Christ (Ephesians 2). Somehow, even now, I am seated with the Lord in heaven (!!!). 

I must remain on the alert, because sin is crouching at the door (Genesis 4:7), and the devil roams about seeking to devour me (1 Peter 5:8), and the enemy seeks to ensnare me. To deny that I am still capable of grievous sin is delusion, but I have come to believe that the Spirit of God, who lives inside of me, will protect me if I am sensitive to His voice. 

Jesus bore my sins in His body on the cross, so that I might die to sin and live to righteousness. By His wounds I am healed from the power of sin and death (1Peter 2).

I read in the second chapter of Colossians that Jesus makes me alive with Him by forgiving me of my sins. This is my only real glory, that I am alive with Him, in Him.

Jesus, alone, will save me from this body of death.

When I do sin, He is my advocate, and will forgive me if I ask for forgiveness.

                                                             

Do any of the Epistles tell us that we remain sinners after we accept Christ’s death for us? Did Jesus ever tell us this?

Instead we are called a new creation, born of the Spirit of God who comes and lives inside of us (II Corinthians: 5). This same Spirit is sealed in our hearts as a “pledge” from God, Who “manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place” (Chapter 2), Who “makes us adequate as servants of a new covenant”, Who “transforms us” so that we, who are in Christ, reflect the Lord’s glory (Chapter 3).

We are “sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling” (I Corinthians 1), by God’s grace through Christ Jesus enriched in “everything”, in all speech and knowledge, the “testimony concerning Christ confirmed in you (us)”. By God’s will we “are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (v.30). We have the mind of Christ, (2:16) and all things belong to us as we “belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God” (3:22, 23).

This is who we are now; this is who I choose to be.

I read somewhere that the only way to write is to bleed on the page. So here goes…

The girl remembers the time that she knew that she was different and maybe alone.  She just does not remember how old she was. It was fall, and cold .She didn’t like the cold. It was so cold at the bus stop, waiting for Mr.Gant the bus driver to pick them up, all the kids in the neighborhood, the boys older than the girls. The boys seemed so old, mysterious and mostly nice (except for the one who was later to be diagnosed as mentally disturbed, which the girl knew even then, because normal people are not cruel, correct?)

Who am I trying to kid. I am no writer. Although the crazy boy and Mr. Gant did exist (and he was wonderful, Mr. Gant-I always felt safe in the bus), they are completely incidental to this girl’s story. (Although I feel safe in buses to this day, and I instantly tune out people in whom I detect the least hint of cruelty)

I hope that cruelty is something I will not be accused of when I die. We won’t really know ourselves completely until we stand before the King, will we? I know that we get glimpses into ourselves and into the souls of others, (there would be no hope of repentance or redemption without it), but to really know moment by moment who we are or what we are capable of?

Does God leave us mostly in the dark for this reason? To spare us that view, the ugliness inside ourselves?

 There was a time when I considered my life so uneventful and uninteresting that I lied all the time. I became quite proficient at it, actually. Lying is something that is scarily easy to perfect. One or two verifiable facts (I was there at the farmhouse, I was 17), woven together by half truths and outright fabrications. I never did it to hurt anyone; just to save myself some grief usually, or to make my life seem more appealing.

Once or twice I did it to hide things that I knew I couldn’t bear (he did rape me in that farmhouse, in the barn, actually, even though he said I was beautiful-did that make it alright?), or to spare my parents’ feelings, but mostly I lied because it was easier than seeing the look in peoples faces that said that I wasn’t enough. I lied to ward off rejection.

Not that this is an excuse, of course. And to be fair, I am sure now that most of the rejection I felt was probably imagined, but it became self fulfilling, and I became a loner, or alone, or whatever you want to call it.

People became “out of sight, out of mind”, and sometimes it worked.

I remember in detail the biggest bully of my childhood, Larry M, who later became a political consultant (Truth!) and tried to derail the career of our states first female governor, but I can only fleetingly see most of the people who probably loved me. I hate that.

I was a fat kid, and Larry was merciless.

I don’t lie anymore, at least not to other people. I’m probably still self-delusional, though. At times, the grandiosity of my wishes astounds me. When Paul tells us that the Lord is able to do exceedingly, abundantly beyond all that we can ask or think, I believe that this is true. I just have not seen it yet.