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From my friends email:

I long for a “feeling” of God.
…the hope that somehow I would “feel” God’s presence or I would experience some existential ecstasy in God that would knock my socks off in a way that (my sin) doesn’t.

Unfortunately I too echo in this desire. But don’t we all? Don’t we all desire to have God as real to us as the tree outside my window. But alas that is not how it is, or how God intended it to be. For this is where we are called to rely on faith. But oh, how it pains me to realize just how little of that I truly have. And what is the barrier to my faith? Is it my heady knowledge of scientific things that makes my mind demand for empirical evidence of Gods existence? Those who know me are now rolling on the floor in fits of laughter for “heady knowledge” is the least of my problems. No I read what my friend wrote and then I read what Wayne wrote in his article and I realize that the largest stumbling block to my faith is my desire for my own personal pleasure.

My friend added in his email:

the goal is to glorify God and my own existential experience of that be damned…it’s time for me to give up the hope of worldly, fleshly, even internal pleasure and pursue Christ for His glory and allow that pursuit to take me where it will.

And here is a part from Wayne’s post that caught my eye and brought me back to thinking of my friends email.

All of that seems so, well, so un-American. We pursue pleasure, and for every pain there should be an instant remedy… We shun any notion that we live in a veil of tears… We think that anyone who is in physical or spiritual pain must be sick and in need of therapy that will make him happy again—and soon!

And there it is, my stumbling block, the boulder that blocks not only my path but my view of what true pleasure can and is in Christ. I want to be happy. I want to feel good. I want what I want and I want it now! I’m no better than that brat Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka

The problem with that is that what I want isn’t what I should want. And if I knew what I could have I’d never be asking for it in the first place.

CS Lewis put it most succinctly when he said,

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too more weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with

drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

I’m a 3 year old who’s been offered an everlasting trip to Disney World but I’m much happier playing in my cardboard box. So what am I to do?

From Wayne’s post:

At the same time, the Bible tells us that in the midst of suffering and under the cross, we should rejoice. Yes, it tells us to rejoice constantly and precisely because we are suffering under the weight of the cross that crushes and threatens to destroy us. It assures us again and again that those who rejoice without the cross and those who suffer without joy understand neither true joy nor the value of the cross that God has sent.

What my friend ended his email with:

To be given the grace to “deny myself and take up my cross daily” is my current request.

And it’s with that last comment that I see between the Jollybloggers post and my friends email God’s providential timing in all things. For it is back to the Cross of Christ that I must go and go I must, with joyful abandon of all earthly pleasures knowing that Heaven awaits me if I’ll just get out of my mud puddle.

Friend: I feel like I’m waiting for the ship to come and it never does. I want the ship to come and take me away from this sin. I pray to God to take this one sin from my life. To let me be free and never think or dwell on it again. Why won’t He do that? You and I have both heard of others who are instantaneously, miraculously released from a particular sin, why can’t I be healed of this one?

Me: I can give you the pat answers. God is teaching us something. There is something that He wants us to still learn. Maybe there is something that we aren’t doing in our lives. Of course I can type up a laundry list of all the things that I know I should be doing. Maybe it’s some cumulative act of doing these things that you’re / I’m missing out on.

Friend: I feel like I’m out in the middle of the ocean and if that ship doesn’t come along soon I’m just going to drown. I’m going to die out here.

Me: What if you’re already on the ship and you just refuse to recognize that? We’re already saved – I believe we’re both saved. If that’s the case then we’re already on the ship heading to our destination.

Friend: I know what you’re saying but I don’t feel like I’m on the ship.

Me: That’s because we’re down in the engine room.

Friend: I’m in a stinky, dark hold and I want to get up on deck and breath clean air!

Me: (Thought bubble) I want to be invited to the formal dining room.  (Hmm, thinking about food again….)

Me: You know I used to smoke all the time, I mean I still like a cigar now and then, but I used to smoke a pack a day. You know the thing that made me really quit wasn’t for health concerns. At the end of the day I want to be able to go home and kiss my wife and not have to try and hide the fact that I smoked earlier.

I want to be able to do that with my Savior too. I don’t want to have to try and hide the sin from earlier in my day. I can’t hide it from Him anymore than I can hide the smoking from my wife.

Friend: Yeah, I want to be able to kiss my Bride.

Me: So, what’s more important to us, being able to kiss our Bride our living in our sin?

From what a friend said last night. We’ve got the foundation already laid, now we have to build the rest of the house. I want to start laying down the logs and that’s done one at a time. I just want to know this year that none of the logs are going to be taken back down. I also want to know that the construction project isn’t going to get put on hold. I’d like to at least get it under roof before Winter. I’d be really happy with that.

Just some thoughts to ponder.

Peace,
Rong

Oh well, what ever.  I get on my bike and work my way over to 270 heading up to Frederick for a quick ride. I haven’t gone but a few miles up the road when I realize something odd is coming up in the left lane. Here goes mr. pocket rocket, standing up on his rear pegs with the front wheel of his bike a good 4 feet off the ground. Yup the show off was going down the highway at 70-75 mph doing a wheelie. So he goes on past me and I’m riding my ride, shaking my head at his little show, when he decides to bring everything back to earth – and that’s when it all goes bad.

Something happened when the front wheel touched the road surface, maybe the tire wasn’t lined up perfect, I don’t know, but what I saw was the front end violently wobbling and then the whole bike shaking. In an instant the bike flipped itself onto it’s far side creating what’s termed a “high side” fall for the rider. The rider was tossed to the ground in front of the bike with the bike then running back over him. Needless to say there was general pandemonium on 270 as everyone locked up their brakes trying to avoid hitting the downed biker.

So what if you were me in this story? What would be your initial reaction? Are you thinking, “what an idiot – that’s what you deserved”, or….? Do you have compassion and care how badly he’s injured or if he’s even still alive?

If you reminisce about your more youthful endeavors, how many hair brained, lame things did you do? How many of them can you look back on now shaking your head in wonder that you’re still around to tell a “story”?

BTW – this is just partially a true story (right up the last paragraph). When the guy really did bring the bike back down he proceeded to rocket across all 4 lanes of traffic and shot up an off ramp doing about 80 mph. And yes my thoughts were more along the lines of,  “what a jack a$$”, “where’s a cop when you need one”, and even “I’d have laughed if you’d laid it down.”

Yeah, Mercy is one of the spiritual gifts that needs improvement.

1. If God is the originating author and creator of time…
2. And as such if he, like many past theologians have believed remains (*in his fully godly state) outside of time.
3. Then how does he perceive time?

Without trying to argue this point for I believe far greater minds than mine have done all the wrestling that man is able too; reference Augustine, Edwards, Ockham and the list goes on and on.

My question to myself was and remains, how does Jesus Christ my Lord, the Second God Head of the Trinity view the Cross? We (Christians) love to use phrases like, “returning to the cross”, “throwing myself before the cross”, “holding on to the cross”, etc. All of these are present tense. We understand the Cross of Christ as something that happened 2 millennium ago and yet at the same time we see it in it’s on going power to forgive not only my present sins but those yet committed. In that sense as Christians we see that one incident (the Cross) in time spanning not only our own past but the past before it occurred and then forward thru all eternity.

So if we see that incident, that act, flowing thru time past, present and future; how does God see it, He who resides outside of the flow of time?

My thought as well as what leads to my question is that God “sees” all time as now. If God sees all time as now, then God sees the Cross eternally. It has always been before him and always will be.

Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “OK, so what?” Isn’t the “so what” then the fact that God is not only seeing it but is in that sense reliving it eternally? We see Christ’s act upon the cross, past tense. God has seen Christ’s act upon the Cross and will see it thru all eternity. Christ’s atoning sacrifice was only a one time action to the man Christ. To Christ of the God Head it’s an on ongoing act.

Now I’m not trying to bring up some heresy that’s already been discounted and which I know nothing about, no what I’m trying to point out in all of this is that when I sin. When I fall short and grieve the Lord my God. I am responsible for putting him back on that cross again. Over and over and over until he comes once again in final glory.

And maybe that’s the way it is until the end of time. Until that day when time itself ceases to exist and eternity is all that remains. Perhaps at that point the Cross will also cease to exist for there will no longer be a need for it.

Until then.

*I believe that as the “man” Christ, God fully experienced linear time in the same manner that we do.

Now Ed is an older gentleman (I’d guess pushing close to 70), balding, a little short and a bit on the portly side. Given that he works at a Burger King I’ve sometimes wondered if this is his semi-retired gig. I mean you just can’t live around here on the kind of change a teller is going to make at a quick food palace. So the other day when he mentions to me that he won’t be here next week because he’ll be in Hawaii I was a bit taken back. So I bluntly asked him, “What did you do in your former life that you’re able to afford to go to Hawaii?”

His answer is the kind that always blows my mind, because it just shreds what ever assumption you may have developed based on someone’s looks or current financial situation. Apparently when Ed was a younger man in the early 60’s he was a French translator with the military stationed in Hawaii. He was there as a translator during some atomic bomb testing. While stationed there he picked up surfing. Now we didn’t have time to really chat long but the little he did say made it sound like Ed really turned into a bit of a surfing bum.

Now as to how that leads to going back to Hawaii. According to Ed once you hit retirement age in surfing circles you become a judge. So Ed is heading to Hawaii all expenses paid to judge a surfing contest.

Go figure.

I love talking to older people and hearing some of their stories. They never fail to dispel what ever notions I’ve concocted of them.