I am sorry

There is something fundamentally wrong here.

The people on TV are awakened by the morning sun streaming strongly through their windows. It seems to me that that is how we were made to awaken.

I want to find out how to do that and still pay my bills.

Father God, you said you have plans for your children. Help us to live the lives you desire, that we would bring glory and honor to you and you alone.

Money

The poverty spirit is still an old friend. Or is that an enemy.

Easy to blame problems and trials on an evil spirit. Better to say that pride and doubt still have their places in my heart. Any excuse in a storm. The simple fact is that Christ is ready and well able to keep me. And He is able to receive the Glory that is His as a consequence.

Father, it is my desire that the Glory that is yours be rendered to you in spite of my habits of self trust and self rescue. Forgive my rising up. Edify me when and how you will, that will bring You the Honor. Help me to see Your Kingdom advancing and pressing back what can not exist in Your presence.

Each day brings its opportunities to honor God with decisions or to dishonor Him.
He is worthy of honorable decisions, choices, actions and words. In disregarding God, the service of self is left at the forefront.

The hallmark of life in the Holy Wild is the knowledge of God. There is no gap between living, and knowing the value of the last lived moment. Feedback is immediate, unmistakable and personal. If I have been leaning on the arm of my Beloved, and I begin to pull away as I am distracted from Him by a dead thing and its matching dead place in me, I know NOW that I have sinned. Imagine having your nose filled with the finest perfume, a smell that reminds you that you are home...and then having your nose stuffed full of the scent of death and decay. God did not decide to smell bad. I decided to put my nose where it no longer belongs.

Father, thank You for the indefinable intimacy. Thank you for prayer, the abiding ebb and flow of communication.

Back to Work

Been hangin' with my growing son this week. Back in the saddle tomorrow, wrapping up an old work year and kickstarting a new one. Always an interesting transition time. This transition will be different, because I am different. Just these last three months of writing like this every night has made a huge difference in how this life is able to find places in my soul that can still be pushed around.

It is like everything ahead is adventure. Just being still enough to find out what God is up to, still enough to be hearing what He wants done or not done. So far to go in learning to be still.

Father, help me to bring Glory and Honor to Your name as I earn my living.

Happy New Year

Read something in the last day or so. Something about Ms. Winfrey and a new year meaning that we had another chance to get it right. If there was ever a failed humanist approach to life, that is it. The idea that man has what it takes, if he only gets enough opportunities to prove it to himself and the world. The idea that one day we will witness the life of a man who gets it right.

This is very attractive. We all also know that it would make him a god. We spend a lot of social energy looking for the human who will transcend his humanity and behave like a god worth proving that men have divinity in them. Society tracks the beautiful, because we know that beauty is a trait of the gods. We track the extraordinarily intelligent, the extraordinarily physically gifted, the ones born into generations of wealth and power.

They all fall. They all fail. They all fail to be worthy of worship. But so much hope was invested in them, that when the investment tanks, they become the objects of revulsion, derision. Ms. Winfrey has had to find a way to stay slim, because she becomes the failed god of her worshipers when she puts on weight.

Godhood for mortal men is very hard, and then you die.

But no matter how awful it is to be a human god, it is harder to abandon the illusion that it is possible. That is what it takes to be free, however. Just say, "I am not worthy of any measure of worship. The One who established the need to find One who is worthy of worship already revealed Himself to the whole world. I will only worship the One Who Is Worthy."

I worship You, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. You alone are worthy of all praise, honor, wisdom, authority, love, and grace. May the Name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob receive all the Glory.

Shake Up The Happiness

Santa God. The two ancillary characters look heavenward in supplication. And hopeful grins.

They trust Santa God to do the right thing. They all drink the Kool Aid, and everything turns out wondrously.

All. All praise, honor, glory, power, wisdom and authority belong to God. All worship belongs to Him.

They do not have to understand what it is they are portraying. Something to worship is hard wired for a reason. Worship happens. Worship the wrong god begets a lack of satisfaction begets worship of another wrong god begets a lack of satisfaction. This continues.

Thank you, Father, that you never fail to satisfy, and that you never give up on the worshipers.