8/1/12
Not too
long ago I asked Jesus why we don’t have a
I can’t remember the exact phrasing but he told me that they,
meaning heaven, don’t think grand events work, that small miracles work better.
This gave me pause and much to think about. I don’t
think Jesus meant that they would never do such things again, only that they
weren’t very productive for turning people towards God, which is what it is all
about. I think of the appearance in
I feel sad for the people who have yet to learn about the help Jesus gives. He means it when he says that he will save everyone. So we do what we can, but also have patience knowing that Jesus is constantly working towards his goal of saving everyone.
8/12/12
I’ve been thinking of eternity. What an amazing adventure Jesus has in store for us. What would a person do if they had time after time after time to live? I suspect a person would sample life in a million kinds of worlds, and even then they wouldn’t be done. If we think about it, this life we are living, is but a blip in forever time.
Sometimes I think we get the idea of heaven as static, as if we were robots put in stasis, or people repeating a happy life filled with gold or milk and honey or some other happiness, over and over. But the truth may be much different because even happiness gets old and boring after a while. This may be part of the story that Jesus is showing us today. I know on one world Jesus showed me, everyone was in industry because that is what they wanted to do. They wanted to keep a challenge in their life. I get the impression that on many worlds in the universe humans are not chained to their world like we are. They are free to leave or stay. As Spock would say, Fascinating, and don’t knock Star Trek, the angels influenced that too.
8/16/12
God created humans to live in dignity. The opponent or human enemy tries to turn us in the opposite direction. The opponent would drive us back into savagery, selfishness, and crime. This is most easily done when people are desperate or in great need for substance. Some people turn to crime, but it is amazing how many don’t, even though they are destitute.
I listened to a young girl cry the other day because DTE had shut off her lights. A different lady with small children said she was about to bring a new born into her home and how could she without electricity.
Yes, how? I don’t know. I didn’t have anything to tell her except that maybe in a few months the government would give grants out to agencies so they could help with utilities. Many people tell me they always paid their bills and worked all their life, but now need to ask for help. The funds that DTE was taking from everyone to help these people is now outlawed by the courts. Some rich company didn’t want to continue donating. What is a few dollars a month when it might keep a family from drowning? Or hold a person back from despair and suicide. The leaders up there making these decisions about the safety net already have what they need. Can they even imagine what a family goes through without lights or heat? Can’t this prosperous nation insure its own people have the necessities of life?
The evil on our world has a purpose and that purpose is to deny dignity and well-being to as many people as it can. Driving people down is exactly the opposite from what Jesus told us to do. He would lift us up. Jesus knew all about what evil tries to do to people. This is why he warned us and gave us examples that we should take care of each other. He was speaking to us in our modern world and the cold hearts that would prevail.
These cold hearts would take money
from the lower segments of society and give it to the wealthy. Why? I can see no honor in this or even a rational reason.
Is it that they want kings and queens in
I’ve begun
to feel disgust for politicians and many leaders in
8/17/12
Today’s news article said the courts stopped the pay cut for Detroit Police. I shout hurrah. As a Detroiter, making a list of what we in the city need, police come in at the top. It goes like this: Police, firemen, trash pick-up, courts, records, parks. What else do we need? We have learned by experience we don’t need street cleaners. Do we need 2 mayors for a city of 700,000 people? Do we even need 7 counsel members? Who else we don’t need I am not sure of but I know we could get rid of a lot of high paid people and leave the rest of the needed workers alone.
8/12/12
I am proud of myself. I just completed a fiction book that I worked on for a number of years, Driving Sunlight into Soul. I kept putting it down for a while and then getting back to it. It is a major work, and I am determined, my last novel. From now on I am going to write short stories and poems. I won’t explain what the book is about here except to say that the angels gave me a few pointers, which made sense because it was the angels who encouraged me to keep at it.
8/24/12
This morning I looked up at the huge, rocky hill that Jesus asked me to climb, gritted my teeth and began inching my way towards the top. It was too steep to walk so I had to resort to grabbing on to the gray, smooth rocks that stuck out from the surface. At times, I needed to grab onto tough weeds and grass that grew between the rocks. My foot kept slipping on loose stones but I progressed up the steep slope. As my head lifted over the top, I saw my friends waiting for me to join them so gave an extra effort and dug my hands into the hard soil to climb over the edge.
When I joined them, they smiled at my effort and I knew that they had been through similar trials, probably long before my own. They understood how I felt, wore down but triumphant.
At the top, I looked at the deep blue sky and fluffy clouds and wanted to suck the beauty into myself. The flat ground was covered with fluffy grass and the green leaves on every bush and stem seemed to call out to me with love. I was in such a high sense of attention I felt the intake of breath and exhalation of every living thing around me. I sent some of this joy to Jesus and my friends who understood my feeling of being absorbed into and becoming a vital part of every living thing.
The feeling wore off quickly and then we stood together, about nine of us and asked Jesus, who stood in our midst, what we should do today.
He said, “Call others to join us.”
So we did. We turned and looked over the world and began to call all the people we knew, all the people who were praying, and even those who were not buy who were good people and even those who were uncertain of God.
They came, all the people, like birds gathering out of the sky to nest, like butterflies flittering to land. More and more, the people came to stand upon the mountain with God. I was astounded to see so many arrive at our call.
When all of us stood upon the mountain, not each person in their own place, but together, each of our spirits mingled and joined together, we expanded. Suddenly with God in the center, we stretched and rose upward and outward into a beautiful flower, a vivid wave of being and becoming, a giant multi-rainbow upon the top of the mountain that enclosed all of it in loving arm-petals to expand every surface towards the sun in a quiver of delight. Then we grew even more, reaching out and down the mountain over the land. Finally as a huge flower, we sent out buds and small branches to take root in diverse places on earth. The whole of the flower gasped at its own soft, encompassing, fragrant beauty.
Then Jesus spoke. He said, “This is what the future may hold for humanity on earth.”
It was suddenly done. The flower dispersed and its parts scattered. I felt sort of empty, but held on to the promise. I think Jesus means that one day our minds will hold together in unity and love, separate and together or maybe he means that we are already there, but don’t know it. Jesus can play with time in ways beyond our imagining making now and the future one.
8/26/12
Jesus helped me understand something in the gospel this morning about the subject of his assent into heaven. The actual phrase is: “If then you shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?” John 6:62
So where was Jesus before? What kind of land did he live in? Jesus told us very little about the place except that he is a king where he came from, (and went back to)? My own opinion is that in one aspect of his being, Jesus is king of an Armanda of worlds that travel the universe. We probably aren’t capable of understanding the many other various aspects of Jesus being.
As I thought and puzzled over this, Jesus suddenly said to me: “This isn’t the right age.”
Almost at once, I understood his answer. All of us read the bible in a certain manner that inputs our own ideas into what it says. Every age highlights the phrases they like and then teach those phrases that work for them. This is how the bible has stayed current and vital over its many thousands of years. It fits every age, past, present and future.
Yet, maybe we are already groping towards that other age. Maybe this is what Jesus intends, that people begin to read the bible in a new, modern way. Once Jesus told me to read the bible as if it were meant for this age. I noticed odd phrases that we tend to gloss over just as was done in the past. There is nothing wrong in this. Every age has its own vision of what it should be and become. In different ages we’ve understood Jesus as harsh and demanding, as a liberal, a pacifist, or even as a revolutionary. This isn’t my idea. The Jesuit who gave the excellent lecture I listened to from The Great Courses “Jesus and the Gospels” talked about how different ages see Jesus. Personally, I see Jesus as the Cosmic Christ, the one who travels in time, the one who has one spiritual foot in heaven and one foot here on earth.
Jesus
and I (done with a computer mouse)
8/27/12
It took me a long while, but I finally figured out that warnings don’t work. Yet, the angels have told me that, “This is your last chance,” meaning that humanity will not get another turn, whatever that means. I finally think I understand. I will always remember a scene Jesus showed me. I felt so strongly about it I drew the scene on the computer. It was of large blocks of ice flowing down a river, probably a glacier, and it was pulling bent steel rods and other stuff along with it. It wasn’t until we were ready to leave that Jesus told me that I was looking at earth, but he didn’t say earth when.
He didn’t say when this scene took place, only that it did, and I always assumed it was our future. Now remembering what the Angels told me about this as our last chance, I begin to wonder if the scene he showed me was actually the past. It could have been another high civilization from millions of years ago, slowly grounded down into powder by the heavy ice sheets, a leveler of all things, turning even rocks to dust. I also think that one of those chances occurred on Mars a very long time ago and we messed that up too and maybe Mars itself.
All this is speculation, but I can’t help but wonder how many times have we humans been given life as a species and failed? I wasn’t given that information and don’t think it matters. What matters is what we do with this last chance we have been given. So what will we do with it? It might be that in those other trials we didn’t have Jesus as our guide.
I know that Jesus has great hope for us this time around, and seems to believe that at least a few people will persevere. Of course, we haven’t seen everything Jesus can do yet. If he said he will save everyone, he will do so. He may work through tragedy, disasters, science or magic, we don’t know. So if this is our last chance, we had all better get the ball rolling and help Jesus save us in a nice, feel good way. Else, I am not sure what might happen.
8/29/12
I was
sitting and letting my thoughts drift and thought about us,
God’s people, our desperation and struggles. I thought about a father in
“What do you think of us?” I asked Jesus. Has it always been this way? Why does it go on? What is our purpose? And then with Jesus smiling at me, I thought about that inner something that pushes us, that tough knot that refuses to unravel, that spark that throws caution to the wind and keeps driving the soul. There is something here that is more than what we see. There is something of great value. What is it? I ask Jesus. “What is it?”
It is something so valuable you gave your own life up on the cross to preserve it. I feel like bowing down in honor of this gift, what ever it is.
Even I have it. I began this morning thinking of my failures. Yet, I push on. I keep writing and painting and, dare I say it, enjoying life. The idea of quitting feels like a horror story to this self I call me. So what am I. What is it in all of us?
“You are me.” Jesus suddenly said to me. “All of you. Every drop of action and experience is mine.”
I thought about Jesus words. Are we like his children? But I think of my own children. I am hardly a part of them any longer. They have grown up and went their own way. That wasn’t the case when they were younger. Then I directed and lived their lives with them. I was a vital part of them. Is this something like what Jesus means? Maybe. To be a responsible parent living the small triumphs and failures of your young children. Children who think every knot in the road is a crushing blow, every win of great importance.
Yes, we can only see our own moment, but Jesus sees it all and has plans for us, lives within and watches us grow. One day, we will be angels who lift other beings to new heights. We recognize that there is also some thing that would halt our progress, some thing that tries to drive us backwards. No matter. Jesus has already won.