Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

      We live in a youth-obsessed culture here in the United States.  It wasn't always this way.  In the 1950's, advertisers realized that if they targeted the young, they could possibly have life-long customers.  The younger the consumer, the longer the company would be able to sell their product.  Television, which had just arrived in everyone's homes, was the perfect platform for this new marketing strategy.  But showing young, beautiful people buying their products they could influence the entire tv-watching public.  It is a strategy that has been ubiquitous ever since.  Now as television is slowly dying to subscription services and the Internet, advertising corporations haven't missed a beat targeting young consumers, especially the millennial generation.  They are actually having a bit of trouble doing this, I have heard, because millennials see right through shallow attempts to convince them of the need for products so they have switched to marketing through humo

     I wrote a post the other day based on some statistics I had read recently that said that 99% of products purchased by Americans were discarded within 6 months.  And the average American consumer buys 53 times as many products as the average buyer in China.  That it would take 3 Earths to supply all the natural resources consumed if everyone in the world consumed as much as Americans.  And we are busy exporting this "free market" to the rest of the planet.  I think it is not a stretch to say that our lifestyle of consumption and waste, along with military intervention to protect our investment interests overseas, is fueling the radical anti-American sentiment around the world.  Capitalism is too closely tied to our democracy.  In fact the dollar owns our democracy.              I am arguing for Evolved Capitalism.  And it is something we can bring about right now, something that growing unarticulated in the hearts of the Millennial generation. Something that has bee

   I read an article recently that said that 99% of products purchased by Americans were discarded within 6 months.  And the average American consumer buys 53 times as many products as the average buyer in China.  It would take 3 Earths to supply all the natural resources consumed if everyone in the world consumed as much as Americans.  It is a cycle inherint in our culture.  Without the cycle of consumption and waste, our economy would crumble.  Advertisers take every opportunity to exploit the glut of consumerism in America, as we are fed hourly with the lie that we need the newest, latest and greatest thing.  And conversely, our old things are worthless.  If you are looking for the contemporary "Great Harlot" of Revelation 17, the "new Babylon," I think we need not go any further than our front yards. Perhaps an often missed point of Revelation is not to look for the evil in the world and pine away for the ultimate relief of external tyranny, but rather to look

     One of my favorite movies is "Forrest Gump" from 1994, starring Tom Hanks.  You may think that is a strange movie to have as a favorite, but it is full of wisdom. Stranger still. Because Forrest is a man born in the 1950's who by society's standards, would be considered "simple," a dullard.  Though they don't specifically say it in the movie, he has a low IQ.  Hardly the hero we would hold up in our Western Society, so concerned are we with achievement and being the best and the brightest.  But buried in the movie is a wonderful message.  Forrest, though born with this deficit, is encouraged by his mother who focuses on the good in him and teaches him not to dwell on his limitations.  Only to accept life as "a box of chocolates - you never know what you're gonna get," as he famously repeats over and over.  So our dull hero, not knowing his limitations, perhaps too dull to comprehend that he has any, goes from one amazing success to a

     "I don't really understand myself, for l I want to do what is right, but I don't do it. Instead, I do what I hate," Paul famously says in Romans.  He goes on to talk about how his sin is uncovered by the Law (the regulations in the Jewish scriptures), but all the Law can do is show us our sin.  We cannot, by force of will, always do what is right on our own.  But if we live in the Kingdom of God our hearts are changed and we begin to seek out what is right in the freedom that it provides.  It is a gentle process, and it takes a long time - a lifetime. We are not used to this sort of slow change in our society, where all gratification must increasingly be instant. It goes against the grain. I really liken it to the theology of the Kingdom that is popular in my church - that the Kingdom is at once already here and not yet.  It is substantively present, but its realization is a process.      This discrepancy is not a problem in the view of eternity.  Where tim

      A still, small voice in the quiet of your soul says, "I love you all.  Out of all, each one of you, I love you the most.  There is nothing that stands between me and you but your own defenses.  When you drop your defenses, you will find me as I have always been - waiting for you to see.  Each individual one of you will see a different part of me. See with the eyes I gave you when you were born.  Eyes that don't see possible or impossible.  The eyes that only see love. Pure and true love, better than the love of your friends or your family or parents or your pet.  More complete. More life-changing, more life-reinventing."  You will be raised from the death that you do not know because you have only known it.      Death, why?  That sounds so final.  The soul is like a seed, plucked from its home in eternity, it dies and knows no life. Sure, it can seem like life to exist.  But it is not living as it was intended: to be a great strong tree with green leaves that

     Today we celebrate the fact that God sent us an ambulance in the parking lot of life.  A lifeline in place of despair.  A love that was so pure, it brought us into the light and set us right with God and the world.  So we would be set free. Free to love God and other people with the same pure love that he showed us first.       He sent us back to the garden, the perfect original Eden, and brought Eden into the world again.  Eden here already and not yet.  Eden here already and "not yet" because we, now set free, could go about the business of bringing it to pass in this world.  He reconciled us with Him and all of creation.  So now we "wait and groan with all of creation for the Sons of God to be revealed" as they, as we, come to life.  Coming from lives of lost seeking, and spiritual confusion - spiritual death to spiritual life.  Spiritual bondage to spiritual freedom.  He came to set the captives free!      Jesus at the start of his ministry read the