Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

 When I was a young child, my parents poured endless love into me.  I soaked it up and asked for more and more.  I was an empty vessel asking to be filled. As I grew older, slights from circumstances in my life caused cracks, so that love poured into me would run out.  I looked for love anywhere I could find it, and could never get enough because all that was poured into me, more or less, ran right out. Personally, I looked for approval from my peers.  I had a particular affinity for finding people who would constantly build me up.  This is not a bad thing in itself.  But I began rejecting positive praise - writing it off.  This progressed in my life and I came to a point in my late teens and twenties when I would actually counter positive affirmation with negative thoughts about myself.      This progressed. It wasn't until I found myself heavily addicted to nicotine by the time I was 40 that I began looking for a way out. ...

The empty tomb cannot be proven.  It must be believed.  For me, the experience I have of God is the inherent proof. God exists for me because I experience Him. But I have to get the ball rolling.  I must choose to believe for the belief to prove itself in the relationship with God.  The relationship becomes available to me when I believe. If I believe Jesus' tomb was empty, then for me, it was empty.  No one can refute that. The disciples believed it was, and so their experience led them out into the world with a fierce belief in love.  And that belief then spread because it was true for them and, because of their experience, their transformation was proof for others.  Others then had their own experience of the living Christ because of their relationship with Him (that transcends time and space).  The proof comes for me in my personal experience of relationship with God. And so personal experience confirmed my, and the disciples' belief...

I think everyone has some addiction, more or less. Something they value to the detriment of all else. Addiction runs the gamut: food, TV, drama, caffeine, sex, love, nicotine, attention, money, technology, entertainment, acquisition, pot, alcohol, hard drugs, control.  I believe that the seriousness of it - how much it impacts peoples' daily functioning - varies in direct proportion to the level of self-loathing the person has.      I have a very strong addiction to nicotine.  It impacts my family, my wife, my friends, even my dog.  It impacts my health and my career.  What is the salvation for a socially acceptable, but no less contemptible, junkie?  It is only in the 12 steps and God that I personally have any hope of being free...  Whatever I (or you) believe "God" is, and however well I (or you) knows the 12 steps, though we may have no formal knowledge of either actual thing.      What can I do to earn my freedom? ...

Why do we pray for people who are experiencing pain?  And why do people experience pain in this world if God is such a wonderful God?  Isn't it better for God to save people from pain without the experience of it?  Here is my attempt to answer those questions from the Christian perspective.  We will start, "in the beginning..." In Genesis, scripture says that God did originally design existence without pain and evil, but like the Matrix, man would not "accept the program" as the agent says in the movie.  The story of Adam and Eve is that story. Man  eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  "Whole batches," they say in the matrix, "were LOST."  Lost to an existence that was unaware of spiritual life.   The "revised" rules of the universe were set up in collaboration with man. Man did not want utopia. So God set the rules up that way, out of respect for man's wishes and with the input of man's relationsh...

I wanted to say a little about the God I know - my God as I know him.  I know him from personal experience, reading scripture and studying at seminary.  I know him, at least in part, because I believe I have been communing with him for 20 years and from following Jesus, the great revealer of God, for many of those years. I had my first encounter with God reading Native American literature.  And now that I know God better, I see a lot of him in the accounts of the Native Americans deep respectful relationship with the Great Father Spirit.  Their love for nature and life culminated in a love for the creator and protector of it all. He was the creator of all the beauty and bounty available for us small humans living in a world of wonders.  I am sure this ruffles some feathers, but I think God meets people where they are. The boundaries of religion are man made - I don't think God need respect human constructs.  But if you are wondering, I identify as a Jesu...

I want to vent some personal revelations: You see, I have realized that my relationship with God is a lie. I only worship him when I am not worshiping cigarettes. He is a secondary God. He is a god that I am only aware of when I am not praying to the god of nicotine. I have realized that I don't trust God because I didn' t  trust my father.  This is because I thought that he was never there to warrant that trust. But no human father is capable of absolute trust.  Inevitably, they will all let us down.. our expectations of them can be anywhere from low to superhuman, and no man can live up to them. And I haven't spent time trusting God, allowing him to work - to come through, like the "just in time" God that he is. It's hard when you've been a Christian for 20 years and you figure out you have been worshiping another god: a drug.      I pray to this God upon waking in the morning, several times during the day, at meals, and to put me to bed ...

No longer a worm, I stretch out incandescent wings And take to the breeze. Undulating on the currents Of life and loss, Love and labor. In a sky So deep and blue and vast  It stretches to the heavens - In and around and inbetween Their glowing gates. So those great, strong doors come One soul closer To present on this earth - Here In the muck and the mire With the wandering and tender Lost in the fields of bright wild wonder.