The Dream Factory

Glimpses and Hints

"When the desire is too much to bear, we often bury it beneath frenzied thoughts and activities or escape it by dulling our immediate consciousness of living. It is possible to run away from the desire for years, even decades, at a time, but we cannot eradicate it entirely. It keeps touching us in little glimpses and hints in our dreams, our hopes, our unguarded moments."

GERALD G. MAY, The Awakened Heart 

 

To Label Is to Negate

"Once you label me you negate me." -  Soren Kiergegaard

That one simple observation, that we know intuitively, provides the best argument against hard and fast labels that I know.

It may also be the reason why people are so prone to use them ... on others.

When our arguments against issues or for our own positions are weak, we feel we can score an easy "win" by putting our adversaries into boxes of someone else's making.

Once we have categorized the person, we can dismiss him or her and that person's words as party lines from some villainous sect or persuasion.

It works except for one annoying reality. It is wrong.

And it counts us out of one of those groups that Jesus commended – truth seekers.

If we cannot seek truth in every situation, we cannot seek it anywhere.

Negate nothing but negativity and negate no one … ever.

 

 

"Willfulness must give way to willingness and surrender. Mastery must yield to mystery." - Gerald G. May

"The life that intends to be wholly obedient, wholly submissive, wholly listening, is astonishing in its completeness. Its joys are ravishing, its peace profound, its humility the deepest, its power world-shaking, its love enveloping, its simplicity that of a trusting child." - Thomas Kelly

We Are Dying

It looks as if my life expectancy, given my lifestyle and general health, is about 89.

I assume I will need to work most of those years -- so that may extend things a bit ... or shorten them.

But I will die some time in the next 30-45 years give or take.

That is fine. We will all die. "Fine" comes from the same root at "finite" and "finish."

Life is only fine, as is death, if there is an inevitable conclusion to wrap things up here and move on to what is next.

It is 1:18 in the morning and I really want to get up in 2-3 hours because there is so little time to get everything done ... tomorrow ... and the rest of my life.

And I wasted so much of it today.

I cannot do that tomorrow ... er ... today. I cannot. I will not.

The funny thing is that, in order to insure a good start on "tomorrow" (for lack of a better word), I have to close out "today," which is now "yesterday."

I must create a boundary between the two, a buffer that is sleep. Every finish is a refining for a fine new day to come.

I did "waste" much of today and I have learned a few things in the process. I cannot tell you what it is at the moment, but it is there. In the meantime, I am going to call it wuits. I cannpot improve on Thursday, but I can surely embrace Friday.

Hopefully, there is some food for thought here.

" ... I see Him walking on the waves, no shore in sight, no success, no goal, just the absolute certainty that it is all right because I see Him walking on the sea. It is the process, not the end, which is glorifying to God. "

This is from today's "My Utmost for His Highest" by Oswald Chambers.

We are all at sea. We are all vulnerable to waves and apparent chaos. He comes walking toward us and we ask, "Where are we going if we follow you?"

It is, perhaps, the wrong question.

"God's end is to enable me to see that He can walk on the chaos of my life just now."

So, we walk on it with Him ... and the journey is the destination.

3 Things to Do in a Hurry

I am in a hurry.

I do not like wasting time.

I have some time ... but not much.

I can either do something or write about doing something.

That gave me a title and a premise. What are three things a person can do in a hurry that are valuable in their own right and not just killing time?

THINK - That is one thing. A person can take a moment and reflect, retrospect, or connect the dots on multiple strands of thought. Not usually thought of as something we 'do," thinking actually takes some time, but can be accomplished in small bytes of time.

BLINK - That is another thing. One can close one's eyes and rest a moment. In that resting, one can meditate, cogitate, and integrate one's thinking and experiences. What is wrong with just interjecting and inflicting some margins here and there. If margins give you migraines, then migrate to the third thing you can "do."

WINK - Find someone in proximity to you and engage in a short conversation. If you must consider it networking, exchange business cards. Whatever you do, ask questions, listen, and mentally record what you learn. Talking to people is not just a space filling activity; it is life-enhancing.

If you don't care for those three suggestions, you can always just raise a STINK about how much time you are killing. I don't recommend it. I would prefer to use time to give birth to new and living ideas and relationships.

That is how I just spent the last ten minutes of my life since I started this entry. Now, i must leave for a meeting.

Later!

Have You Considered My Servant, Job?

Here is the deal. God, on speaking terms if not friendly terms, asks the adversary (His, ours, everyone's) if he has thought about Job. Job is a good guy, one of the original good guys. God is asking as if He wonders if the Satan is impressed.

He is not.

Nor is The One surprised.

Satan has a question of his own.

Does job serve God for no pay? After all, he is pretty well off, protected, and blessed. Is that why He has reverence for His Creator, for what he can get out of it?

Most of us, in our most honest moments of self-examination, would admit that we expect something from the deal. Job is plunged into such a season of introspection that he wonders about it himself.

Stripped bare, he has no "fall-back" except to somehow understand himself in terms of His relation to The Eternal.

Personally, I would be happy to think that the accuser/prosecutor/adversary never considered me ... but I know better. If he didn't exist to mess with me, something inside me would probably create him ... but he does and I don't have to. I would be equally satisfied never to confront the question of why I reverence God - just to do it ... but that is not possible either.

It all happens in spasm, tension, and apparent chaos out of which emerges unexplained and unexplainable shalom (I thought about saying, "order," but it is really shalom.).

Is the BIG question ever answered?

In the end, Job finds peace, not in knowing the answers to his questions, but in encounter with The One who keeps bringing them up to us and plunging us into existential reflection. In the end, it is all about relationship, encounter, love, and  even questions ... but very little about answers.

With all affection for Andre Crouch, and with heart agreement regarding his musical pronouncement that "Jesus is the Answer," I am more impressed this day with the troubling and peace-provoking reality that He is also the Question.

Shalom.

Love or Progress

"...we have too often sacrificed love for progress."  - Gerald May, "The Awakened Heart"

I have been reading Gerry May's book at the gym. It is ideal gym reading.

I read a paragraph and then it takes a set of weight lifting to think/pray/meditate it over.

During the time I knew Gerry on CompuServe, I had never read any of his books. How I cheated myself!

I sure need the time between sets to let it all sink in. May is one of the deepest, most profound writers on the inner, spiritual life I have ever read.

I will be posting some quotes from "The Awakened Heart" in coming weeks. Here are a few to start:

"The greatest commandments are not obligations at all, but affirmations of grace."

"We are created by love, to live in love, for the sake of love."

"The only way to own and claim love as our identity is to fall in love with love itself, to feel affection for our longing, to value our yearning, treasure our wanting, embrace our incompleteness, be overwhelmed by the beauty of our need."

I am discovering that I have much to discover, that there is much I lack, and that the dissatisfaction of my soul may be one of the best things in my life.

"When I am weak, then I am strong."

Paul's affirmation of dependent poverty and faith were foundational to his power and influence.

We, who follow The Way, are a paradoxical and conflicted people, who, in the midst of paradox and conflict, possess the sweetest shalom of all.

In a contest between love and progress, I choose love.

Lift

I was lifting weights yesterday.

I suppose I lifted a bit too much -- or for too long --- or on top of an injury --- or something.

No pain, no gain. I know and embrace that. I also know that I can overdo it. There is a balance to it all and sometimes I don't know where the edge is until I've gone over it.

All is well. We break down tissue and the healing brings development, strength, and a host of benefits.

None of those dead weights achieved any benefit from being lifted by me. I received them all. It is different with lifting people. Then, the person lifting and and the person being lifted are both blessed.

So, I thought I'd see what we could do for an acronym on "lift."

L - Love - No to be trite, but if what we do to lift another is not moved by love and enfused with love, nothing positive has happened. It is always about the other person and never about ourselves. When I lift weights, it is about God and me. When I lift people, it is about God and them and I get benefits in a peripheral way.

I - Intuition - How do you know when to encourage, edify, or lend a hand to help? You learn to feel your way through it. You do that by developing the vulnerable art of sensitivity. For some, it comes easy. For others, it is counter-intuitive to be intuitive. However, by slowing down and using all of our senses, we will know when we are needed.

F - Fight - When we lift a weight, we are fighting resistance. The resistance is the weight, but the greater resistance is within us. We press against what seems to be an unmovable force with strength we do not know we possess. And that force retreats. We are lending our shoulders to a soul who does not know he or she can move upward. We are not fighting their battles for them, but with them. We become a team and rejoice with them when they overcome their resistance. In the process, we realize that we have overcome much as well.

T - Today - The question is, and always is, "Who can I lift today?" We make ourselves available and stay available. If we are willing, the one who needs a lift will cross our paths. If will happen because the world is full of people who are struggling. Some are discouraged. Others just need a hand. God will bring you into contact with people who need a lift and with others who will lift you. After all, it is also His work:

1 Samuel 2:8
"He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor. "For the foundations of the earth are the LORD's; upon them he has set the world." (NIV)

Getting Organized

If you think there will be some good advice or helpful tips here, you might want to click on. Getting organized is one of the hardest things I do. Staying organized is harder.

And that is what I am doing this morning with my home office, my papers, my email, my computer files, and whatever else seems to need drastic attention.

And that is why I am taking the time to blog. I also went to my garden and did some weeding. Do you have any idea how much I hate weeding?

However, I need to do at least some of this so I can move on to a multitude of projects.

Did you know that the word, "organize" cannot be found in the Bible? Not in the KJV, the NIV, nor the NASB. However, it is in The Message 19 times. 

The first is Joseph advising Pharaoh on how to cope with the coming famine and plan ahead for seven years of want. It will involve delegation and organization of a network of leaders who will implement a plan that gathers around a central theme.

In the NIV, the word, "order" appears frequently. Once it refers to a life that is swept clean of an evil spirit, well ordered, and yet, empty of real substance. The enemy returns and brings back a van load of compatriots to reoccupy the house. One moral is that organization is not always enough. There must be something to organize and it must be integrated around something or Someone worthy of being the Central Idea (Logos-Word).

I received a distracting phone call as I was writing this about a matter of real urgency. Is it a distraction or is it part of the unifying theme (as I hope taking a break to write this is)?

I don't really know. I told you that I was really bad at this.

However, i do get the point about central, big, unifying ideas.

And I am working on that.

Now, where did I put my to-do list?

No Nothing

In the first place, I take it as a matter of faith that there is no nothing.

Not now.

"The earth WAS without form and void and darkness covered the face of the deep."

Not now and never again.

There is always something.

What we perceive as nothing, that which is beyond our comprehension, is not formless and void ( תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ tohu - wa -bohu)   Even "in the beginning," before form, there was Word and Word created wisdom.

So, when there was nothing, there was all that would be, existing as something in the Mind of God.

That which can neither be created nor destroyed occupies the vastness of unknown and uncharted territories of space. There is that which we perceive to perceive not - empty space, but space is something - if only possibility.

There is no nothing ... only what we perceive as nothing or cannot perceive or conceive at all. Can we not receive what we cannot perceive?

What we cannot know, we can contemplate, celebrate, and cogitate.

Better still, to meditate and anticipate and thus, receive as a gift.

The great gift of nothingness is the "somethingness" of it all. The vastness of spaciousness is the space to celebrate grace. The wonder of life is wonder itself which we enter into as worship of the One.

It makes no "sense" to us and need not. It leads to trust and trust to childlike embrace. We enter into the embrace of grace through faith and never stop exploring.

If that is all true, and I take it to be without fully comprehending even my own thoughts or words, then there is also that inner space to be explored. There is that realm of possibility where we perceive only emptiness and void. It is taking form because Word has spoken there is no nothing there.

We might feel inclined to be "know nothings," but we exist in a universe where there is no nothing.

Let us bathe in the beauty of that which we cannot fully know until we know as we are known.

You are not yet all that you are becoming, but you are much more than you think.

That is all ... or is it?

Nothing Is New

Nothing is absolutely new in this world.

It is recycled, reconstituted, repackaged, or rediscovered, but it is not entirely new ...

Except today. Today is entirely new and we are new in it.

Every thought, idea, experience, dream, and individual is new.

I am new and renewed today by grace.

God's blessings are new every morning.

The sun is now beginning to rise on this new day and I shall walk outside to greet the morning.

The new morning!

From Ponderosa, CA

I was able to slip away for a few minutes to a coffee shop with WiFi a mile from camp.

But first ... I watched a ripple in the pond this morning.

I could not tell whether it came from below or above. It did not matter.

Nor can I tell where it goes when I can no long see its concentric, expanding rings that diminish from my sight.

Yet, I believe that they continue, and that, without limit into an infinite sphere known only to God ... who along knows their origin and destiny.

And mine.

Going to Camp & Offline

I am leaving for camp in a few hours where I will be camp pastor for the week. There is no Internet access there (or very slow and borrowed) and my cell phone does not work. It is my annual week without contact, blogging, Twitter, Facebook, CompuServe, email, or even news of the outside world.

It is both welcome and, at the same time, a source of anxiety.

The anxiety does not last very long though ... and is  smoothed over by several realities:

1. Contrary to my thinking, I do not have to complete all my assignments before I leave town ... especially if I have procrastinated them for this long. What is another few days?
2. I will be back before I know it. Everything will wait till then.
3. More so ... I will be back before YOU know I was gone ... or care.

I will see you all then.

If I happen to post anything in the next few days, it was postdated. I did not sneak back into civilization.