Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

     I was talking with my wife's father, a retired pastor, and he told me about an image he used in many of his sermons throughout the years.  It is a thing that every kid learns on the monkey bars on the playground at school.  It is simply this: when you are on the monkey bars, you can't move forward until you let the hand behind you let go of the last bar.      In this way, I am kind of stuck in my life.  The trailing monkey bar is my smoking cigarettes.  I just haven't been able to let go of that bar no matter how hard I try.  I believe that this bar gives me a lift.  You see, I suffer from a chronic depression.  When I go outside and have a smoke and a caffeinated beverage, I get a little boost to my mood.  Often this gets me back on track and I start doing things besides laying in bed.  I might do the dishes and I feel better about what I have accomplished.  I might, being awake ...

     It is two days before Christmas.  The first Christmas with my three month old daughter and my beautiful wife of three years.  I am sitting outside in the cold New Hampshire evening in a red metal chair.  It is one of those old chairs from decades ago with peeling red paint and a scallop on the back.  I am smoking my e-cigarette and drinking a giant glass of Pepsi.  The chair belonged to Mr. Smith, who I never knew.  He was a kind old man that lived until he was in his early nineties who lived next door to my wife and her family when she was not even a teenager.  I am sitting outside my wife's mom and dad's house in the cold New Hampshire dusk, watching the Christmas lights slowly turn on, one house at a time, down the suburban New Hampshire street.  And I am thinking about Mr. Smith.  He sat in this chair 8-12 times a day just like I do, and smoked his pipe.      Art was his first name....

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     I have a theory about the afterlife.  When your body begins shutting down, certain systems in the brain start going offline.  There are circuits that allow us to perceive the passage of time.  I believe that these circuits start going off line before major life-sustaining functions do.  If you think of it, our perception of time is a fragile system at best when we're conscious. We need clocks to tell us how much time has passed. Even "reality" has a fragile relationship with time.  If you take two clocks and put one on the earth and another on a plane travelling twice the speed of sound, the two clocks will show different times. Astronauts on the International Space station age slightly slower than people on Earth.  This fragile system falls apart when we are in the process of dying. So we, at the instant of death (or rather the very fast progression of the shutting down of systems in our body) lose t...

     If Heaven and Hell are eternal, what makes you think they would skip the present moment?  Where are you right now? I just came from Heaven a few minutes ago.  I was in my 7 week old daughter's new nursery.  My wife of 3 years was sitting in the rocker.  We put Delia in her little portable crib.  My wife had the Lullaby album she made a few years ago playing in the background.  Listening to my wife's beautiful voice singing lullabies, Delia drifted off to sleep.  I left and went up to the gas station and had a smoke.  While I was there, I thought this thought: Heaven and Hell are all around us at every moment.  I just left Heaven by choice.      When I was a younger Christian I was inundated by the view that Heaven was just somewhere you go when you die. After 20 years of reading scripture and attending church, I am less convinced.  Sure, I believe there is some sort of afterlife.  I really don'...

     I am going to delve into some metaphysics to make a point.  "I exist" and "nobody cares" are two opposite poles on a filament that determines human "being." If someone proclaims "I exist!" and they come believe nobody cares, then they will in fact, cease to exist.  I am not speaking metaphorically.  They will literally die either by their own hand or by through a painful and sometimes slow process of self neglect.  Every human being is at some point on this continuum at this very moment.  Every human being that has ever lived, too, falls on this continuum.  If one person remembers in some way that a person lived at some point in history, then that person existed.  If no one remembers, it is as if they never did. If nobody cares, it doesn't matter that a person existed (past tense) - because they have ceased to be.      Reach out to other people.  You may be the only reason someone is h...

     I have often thought that I am a bit like Frodo Baggins at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. Young Frodo has lived his whole life in the Shire.  It is an idyllic place full of bright green grass, cozy houses, families and friends.  He is comfortable there, and does not have any desire to leave for the greater world beyond the Shire.  But still he dreams of adventure.  It does not occur to him that this adventure is to be found beyond the boundaries of his comfort.  The comfort of home trumps his wanderlust.  The world outside the Shire is the scary unknown. One day, he is visited by an old friend, Gandalf the Grey, who has something of a gift for him.  It small, unassuming ring.  This small ring is a powerful and ancient object that will change his life forever.  It will, in fact, change the entire world as he follows it into a great battle between good and evil for the fate of all of Middl...