Monday, April 1, 2013

 April Fools Day, 2013

Writing about the unspeakable, the unbearable, about that which cannot be contemplated.
Circles.
Our innermost circle, I suppose, consists of just one person, and that is ourseves.
Them I think, if we want to go on a path of truth, the next person we add to our circle consists of God.
In fact, that may be a sign as to whether we are really looking to find truth in the circle. Get this: if what we really want is for people to know,and to make us feel better, and be on our SIDE!!!, then we will likely pick someone we know is going to fit in with what we already believe.
On the other hand, if we are seeking truth. maybe the next person we include in the circle is God. This is a tough one, because there is ALL KINDS of noise we can generate to block what God wants to say to us, even if we do include Him in as the next member of the circle. See, I think that LAW (grinding sound) is a good way of inviting God into the conversation without really having to listen to anything He has to say.
Now, I don't want to toss out Law either; I can recall at least two occasions when the Law kept me from doing something bad.Both incidents were when I was a 19 year old Christian, didn't have a really great grounding of soil. And I was sitting in my barracks room, and I get this thought: Hey, if you really believed, you could walk out the window and not get hurt. So if you don't,that means you don't have the faith. And yer supposed to have faith. But you don't. And then I reached way back in some unremembered part of the Bible,and said: I'm not supposed to put the Lord to the test." I didn't know where  that was, but it was some Law, and it did me good.
And then there was the time, shortly after that, when I was horribly convicted about masturbation; and I came across the scripture that says if yer eye offend you, pluck it out. So, I'm thinking, well maybe I should castrate myself so I wouldn't think about sex all the time. No, this was some really, really heavy duty struggle going on here! On the one hand, I hated the fantasy imagery that went into the act of masturbation. I wanted to be clean and pure. I wanted to look at women, and not have my immediate thoughts be about what kind of sexual fun I could have with those women.So, maybe I needed to castrate myself. Boy, I really, really didn't want to castrate myself! I finally flashed back to some old Testament law that said a priest had to be complete in body, and I held onto that for a LONG time, carefully not looking it up, so that I couldn't find that the verse mentioned something different.
I think there was SOME God I admitted into those early circles, even though I was really just looking for law. Wasn't until much later that I got the entire context of the temptation in the wilderness, and not putting the Lord God to the test; and much, MUCH later before I realized that my lust didn't live in my penis and testicles; it was a pattern of thought, and that most DEFINITELY was something that needed to get dumped.
And as to the unspeakable, unbearable: things get resolved. And until they do, hold on to what you have.

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