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Love is Not Love Which Alters

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Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

—-Sonnet 116, Shakespeare

You Are My God

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I will respond to the skies,
and they will respond to the earth;
and the earth will respond to the grain,
the new wine and the olive oil,
and they will respond to Jezreel.
I will plant her for myself in the land;
I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one.’
I will say to those called ‘Not my people,’ ‘You are my people’;
and they will say, ‘You are my God.’
–Hosea

S.O.S.

I don’t believe it.
That’s the problem.
I believe in the pursuit of happiness on my terms.
I believe my broken cisterns will satisfy.

The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.
    to believe that his living water really does satisfy
    to believe that his word is really more sustaining than food
    to believe that his Word is really to be feasted–even gorged–upon
And that my broken cisterns will never satisfy
    worse–that he will give me over to them
    worse–that they end in death

That’s the Problem.
I want to believe it.
Or do I?
The struggle is real
    truly this struggle is not against flesh and blood

God, help my unbelief…

As I feast at the table of your Word,
install your wisdom within my heart.

Thank you.

Am I Basically a Good Person?

No, you have chosen a perverted violence against all creation, whether you sense/realize it or not. Furthermore, you have betrayed your Maker. Despite being given the marvelous, patterned displays of His creation (natural revelation), His Gospel (special revelation; a chance for redemption), a conscience, etc., we have rejected reality in favor of our own interests–these “interests” are not even our own, but a perversion handed down from Satan as the “natural inclinations” we experience! You have not understood the full ramifications, yet are culpable enough, of joining Satan’s universal mutiny. Having sided with his zombie army, you’re continually driven to lunge at God, choosing your own deity as you chew, destroy, pervert, twist, gnaw, feed on, and do violence toward God and His creation. You’ve broken His law of love, and instead chosen complaints, gossip, lies, worry, fear of people’s opinions, frustration, anger, exclusion of others, selfishness, pride of life, emotional fits, filthy language, sexual perversion in all its forms from eye/mind/body, money enslavement, prejudicial humor, concealment of truth, manipulation, passive-aggression, self-promotion, etc.. We’ve raped relationships and the earth in our quest for self-deity. For this, all creation cries out for your condemnation.

My Precious…

We build and worship at the temples of e-commerce and retail. We bow down before the altars of product galleries. We attend the sermons of advertising and entertainment. We praise and worship with our hymnals of reviews and star rating systems. We give our tithes and offerings at checkout. We memorize the scriptures of sitcom and film dialogue. We participate with the shrine prostitutes of websites, movies, and HD/3D TV. We spread the gospel of hobbies and sports and food. We make disciples of product lines and baptize each other with name brand clothing and accessories. All the while, we claim things like, “there is no God” or “I love Jesus.” False and false: we’ve got gods, and they’re not Jesus. And the heart of it all? Self-glorification. We are gods. We need. We want. We deserve. Amen.

Ptolerance

Ptolerance: ˈtäl(ə)rəns/
(noun)
1. pretend tolerance (phony tolerance, pirate tolerance, pseudo tolerance); tricky because it sounds the same as “tolerance” but there’s a silent “p” making the word indistinguishable from its homophone, even in identical contexts
2.  a supposed ability to allow a practice, belief, existence, or occurrence without actual implementation of such
3. accepting or enduring progressive and/or appealing elements while rejecting others
4. the capacity to tolerate everything except for intolerance

Question Mark?

Consider:

When a tongue poses a question,
does it really want an answer?
Does that piece of punctuation
merely mask an accusation?
Is the presence of a question
meant to mourn perceived helplessness?
Is the mark really a remark
passively meant to salt a wound?
Does the query posed attempt to
maneuver to manipulate?

No.

The use of interrogative
Is meant to make a person think.

It ought to be life-giving,
allows consideration,
invites critique,
promotes curiosity;
encourages the mind to realize.
 
And while a question might
prick a conscience,
leave lips speechless,
or even offend a mindset,
it should always be
moralizing,
humanizing;
seeking to understand
or to promote an understanding.

It is these kinds of questions which
do much to avoid many ills…

Why do you question?

A Temptation to Thwart the Master Plan

…the vision of a universal kingdom was integral to the plan of Jesus from the very beginning of his ministry. The fact that one of the wilderness temptations involved “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” (Matt 4:8) is conclusive. Jesus did aspire to world dominion. His ambition to rule over the nations was not wrong. The temptation was to take a short cut to that noble goal: to adopt the methods of the devil. In rejecting Satan’s methods, Jesus did not give up his aim of worldwide authority. Rather, he chose the path of suffering and redemption which he found outlined in the Scriptures.

– H. Cornell Goerner

You Are More Important than the United Nations

Let Matthew 24:14 burn in our hearts. [And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.] … This good news of the Kingdom of God must be preached, if you please, by the Church in all the world for a witness to all nations. This is God’s program. This means that for the ultimate meaning of modern civilization and the destiny of human history, you and I are more important than the United Nations. From the perspective of eternity, the mission of the Church is more important than the march of armies. It is more important than the actions of the world’s capitals. As we fulfill this mission, the divine purpose for human history will be accomplished.

–George Eldon Ladd

Approaching Death to the Kingdom

Everywhere one goes he finds the gaping grave swallowing up the dying. Tears of loss, of separation, of final departure stain every face. Every table sooner or later has an empty chair, every fireside its vacant place. Death is the great leveller. Wealth or poverty, fame or oblivion, power or futility, success or failure, race, creed or culture–all our human distinctions mean nothing before the ultimate irresistible sweep of the scythe of death which cuts us all down. The gravesite may be a fabulous Taj Mahal, or a massive pyramid or an unmarked forgotten spot of ragged grass, or the unplotted depths of the sea. Still one fact stands: death reigns.

Apart from the gospel of the Kingdom, death is the mighty conqueror before whom we are all helpless. We can only beat our fists against the tomb without effect. It does not yield; it does not respond. But the Good News is this: death has been defeated; our conqueror has been conquered. God displayed His Kingdom’s power through Christ’s victory over the cross. In the face of God’s Kingdom, death was helpless. It could not hold Him; death has been defeated; life and immortality have been brought to light. An empty tomb in Jerusalem is proof of it. This is the gospel of the Kingdom.

–George Eldon Ladd

Quantifying Humanity

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Our definitions of people…are increasingly determined by their ethnic origin or their economic standing; increasingly the “human” sciences reduce the human being to a creature trapped in a stimulus/response relation to his environment; and statistics are increasingly confused with truth…our institutions of higher education continue to be haunted by the It [materialistic outlook]. The It is steeped in numbers, and nowhere are we more enthralled by numbers than in our colleges and universities. We make our students into numbers, into test scores and credit hours. Beyond that, the knowledge we offer them is largely quantitative, materialistic, and strictly pragmatic. Conscientiously handing out questionnaires covered with numerical scales, we use numbers to measure the success of our endeavors. Very often the most meaningful measure of our success is the number of dollars our graduates are raking in, just as it has become the most meaningful measure of the success of our college presidents. Thus has the influence of the It-world progressively increased…

All too often curricular concerns are shaped solely by an interest in science, technology, and business, so that various states, as well as the nation itself, may boost their economic and political influence. According to the prevailing viewpoint today, this is how state universities should serve their states. To attain such an end, we begin by trying to convince the young that the aim of higher education is to acquire the capacity and the skills to surround themselves with things. We want them to be consumers. Whenever the rationale for a given course is called into question, the most convincing justification for it is that students can use the information provided in that course, where “use” means to get a job, to make money, to manipulate people, and generally to prosper in the marketplace…

Our institutions of higher education have themselves become high-dollar brothels, where we buy and sell ourselves and the young souls placed in our care. A good school costs $10,000 per year and requires an ACT score of 21; a better one costs $20,000 and demands a score of 23. Engaging in this numbers racket, we succumb to the illusion that only that which can be quantified can be true…

The numbers numb us into the sleeping sickness of complacency, camouflaging and veiling the human face that cries out for our response.

– David Patterson, When Learned Men Murder

Learned Men Who Murder

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My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and killed by high school graduates. So I’m suspicious of education. My request is: help your students to be human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns. Reading and writing and spelling and history and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our students human – Haim Ginott

Lust: A Working Definition

Lust is the heart-hunger in me that denies and disavows those made in the image of God, whether it’s another man or another woman, and reduces them to what I can get out of them to feed (and fill) my hungry heart right now. This means that by nature, our lusts twist, devour, consume, and use others for our own benefit. This is true whether we’re viewing a computer screen or watching an illicit DVD, whether we are in real time, in cyber time, in a chat room–or just in our hearts and heads in our own fantasies.

– John Freeman, “Hide or Seek”

This Sargasso Sea

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In this Sargasso Sea of fantasy and fraud, how can I or anyone else hope to swim unencumbered? How can I learn to see with, and not just through, the eye? How can I take off my own motley, wash away the makeup, raise the iron shutter, put out the studio lights, silence the sound effects, and put the cameras to sleep? Can I ever watch the sun rise on Sunset Boulevard, and the sun set over Forest Lawn?

Will I ever find real furniture among the studio props, silence in a discotheque, love in a strip tease? Read truth off an auto cue, catch it on a screen, chase it on the wings of muzak? View it in living color with the news, hear it in living sound along the motorways? No, not in the wind that rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks; not in the earthquake that followed, nor in the fire that followed the earthquake. I think I could probably hear it in that still, small voice. Not in the screeching of tires, either, or in the grinding of brakes; nor in the roar of jets or the whistle of sirens, or the howl of trombones, or the rattle of drums, or the chanting of demo voices. Again and again and again. I long for that still, small voice – if one could only catch it.

Malcolm Muggeridge, The Voice of Truth