Why is there remorse for the dead and not the Living?

I have been reading “Jesus for President” and I have been thinking a lot about people and their actions and why they do what they do. To me their actions seem to be irrational. The story that I just read that made feel the need to write down my thoughts and feelings goes something like this. A homeless, mentally ill man was beaten and soon died after he was in police custody. What made me so emotional about this was the reaction of the people after his death. There was a memorial set up and people flocked to it and showed their support for the person who died. But the question that I have is why? Why do they show remorse for a person that they do not know and if he was known to them, why was he still homeless? The article also made note that there was a father, why wasn’t the man in the care of the homeless man? I mean I can understand that the father may not have had the ability to take care of his son and I will give that no other thought. I will give him the benefit of the doubt, but the other people are the ones that I still question? Why do people feel remorse over death and not for the life that they lived before? Doesn’t that make more sense? This person was so much before he died and now he is nothing. His life is expired and nothing more to do. The thing that bothers me is that people mourn death, but they do not help the living! This man was someone, someone in pain and he had nothing but no one helped him. He needed something more then a homeless life. But instead he was left on the street, most likely to fend for himself. So why do we not do anything?
I am not free of the wrath that I bring on those people. I see “homeless” people on the streets all the time as I drive home and I make my own excuses of why I do not help them. I believe that I am too low on cash to help them, it is either of me or them. I say that maybe they are just peddlers and they are not homeless but they make their money by asking other people for it. I have my own excuses and I make my own rational, but the truth of the matter is that I want to love everyone and not make excuses why I can not. I want to see people as Jesus saw them and bring them to Christ, but instead I don’t. I make the excuse that it is not my ministry, mine is working with kids and building their foundations so that they are able to better themselves so that they don’t fall into the same fate as the people that I see on the street. I want to help them build a better life for themselves.
I know that I can not be superman and help everyone that I come into contact with, but I can’t. I can’t be there for everyone so I have to make my choices of who I can help and who I can not. But still my heart longs to do something more, but hat do I do?

To the question, "Is America Islamaphobic?”

That question would really depend on your definition of the term, for until you can really identify the definition you cannot say if America is or is not. Until that is brought forth, no real answer can be given, but we can look at the facts of the matter.

What are the facts? I think first you need to look at why the American people would be called Islamaphobic. It goes back to the attacks of 9/11 when America was attacked by a group of people claiming to be doing it in the name of Islam. These attacks hurt the American people in many ways, but one of those is most likely the strongest reason for the question at hand. This attack took away the feeling of safety and security from Americans. When this happened, it brought people to start looking at how they can stop another attack of this from happening. But what could they do? The first thing they could do, whether instinct or reasonable reaction, was to look out for people of the Islamic faith. Why? Simple. Because it was people claiming to be Islamic were the ones who planned and carried out the attack. Does that mean that all Islamic people were responsible? No, but that doesn't change the feeling that came naturally. Just like a person who is bitten by a dog is fearful of all dogs for a time. It is not because they hate dogs, but they are scared of being bitten again. That one dog who bit the person has taken all the trust that the person had in the K9 community and destroyed it with that one bite. That doesn't mean that all dogs bite, but that doesn't change the mind of that person, for all that person knows right now is that a dog bit them. It then takes time to rebuild that trust again. But then again, this is not the first time that we have been attacked. It was December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the country had the same reaction as the person who was bitten by the dog. Their trust in the Japanese was lost because of that attack and we took action against them.
The country made many Japanese live in internment camps because they didn't know who they could trust. This didn’t mean that all Japanese people were in on the attack, but the country needed something to regain their safety that they felt they had lost. Time has healed us from that attack, which was over 60 years ago, but the fact still remains that we, as humans, remain the same, untrusting of the people that have hurt them.
This problem is not limited to the people of America for the same fear lives within us all! The same goes in North and South Korea, Israel and most of the Islamic Middle East. We are a people who when hurt, lose trust in the other. So to be honest about the question whether or not America is Islamaphobic, it is probably a yes. But that doesn't make it a fair question to ask. Just like that reporter who was fired for saying that a Muslim in full garb scared him is nothing more than the natural reaction to being bitten by a dog. If we are honest with ourselves, we are all scared of a group of people when one of them hurts us, right or wrong. Our basic instinct gives us that fear so that we are careful to not let that happen again. So if you want to ask that question, then I think that it is only fair that you ask a woman who was raped by a man why she hates or is scared of all men.

So the conclusion that anyone can make is that the people of this country is hurting of an attack on their safety and so they are wanting anything to be done that would stop the attacks from happening again. So to ask the people not to be afraid is ridiculous, their needs to be healing done before it is even fair to ask anything of the people.

Life is a Tree

Christ was the Seed
Holy Spirit the Water
God making it Grow

The roots of our fore-fathers
hold us firm to the ground of the life giving the love

The trunk the doctrine of our foundation:
That is the base that our faith that from all things come

The branches of the Tree have gone off in all directions.

Some branches continue to grow up,
as if reaching for the life giving Son.

But the worst is the dead branches that grow strait back
towards the ground,
sucking life from the tree but yer still thinking
that it is still apart of it.

The Great Metaphor of the Old Testament

I was sitting having lunch with my brother on the couch in the other room showing his wife this video on youtube. The video was a man talking about how the stories of the Old Testament are great stories in and of themselves, but to take them only at face value leaves them empty. He went on to say that every story in the Old Testament is really a metaphor of Jesus conquering sin for us. This completely changed my view of those stories that I grew up hearing about in the Sunday School as a child. I am always amazed at my God who shows me so much more to the things that I already thought I knew all about. The story of David and Goliath is the one that stands out the strongest to me. What better metaphor of Jesus conquering sin then this? The people of God standing on the battle field of sin and death against a foe that seems to be unstoppable, unbeatable. They stand in fear looking on the giant that they believe can not be taken down, who stands their taunting them and taunting our God. Goliath did this for days and not one of the people believed they could stand up to him or defeat him, but then God sent us his champion. The prophets tell of Jesus, a man who, “…had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men… he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” (Isaiah 53:2b-3) David was that representation for he was a boy, a shepherd with no experience in battle. His brother’s laughed at him and rejected him when he stood up and even his own Father didn’t believe in him and kept him home from the battle. But on the field of battle David stood up before the giant Goliath and took him down. After David cut the head of Goliath off, the people rallied behind him and chased the enemy without fear! In the same way Jesus hung on the cross and killed sin and death for us, giving hope to his people. Another story that shows the promise of Jesus was the exodus of God’s people from Egypt. They were under the bonds of slavery and Moses came and freed them from it and lead them into the riches of God’s promise. Jesus broke the bonds of sin and lead us into the kingdom of God and all of its riches. The stories go on and on; the serpent lifted up in the desert, the rock that was struck, and so on. The Old Testament is a giant metaphor for God’s love and deliverance from sin through his Son Jesus. It is stories of real people that show the future promise of our Savior.

Jesus Saved Us From the God of the Old Testament

When I hear that statement, I scream in reply, “Heresy!” To say that Jesus saved us from the God of the Old Testament is complete heresy, for Jesus said “A house divided against itself can not stand.” Saying that Jesus saved us is correct, but to save us from what is the question that needs to be asked of this statement. Jesus is apart of the Holy Trinity; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Jesus can not save us from the God of the Old Testament because he is as much the God of the Old Testament as God the Father. Besides the fact that it divides the House of God, it says that God can change and to say that God changes really says that God can make mistakes. Now to argue about other parts of the Bible that look like God changes His mind is for another time and many people have already made the arguments to prove that God does. So for now I am going to leave that out of this, but I may revisit this another time to show in my own words the unchanging nature of God. But to answer the question simply, through out the whole Bible, Jesus and God the Father both are referred to numerous times as “The Rock” which tells of his unchanging nature. The statement doesn’t understand the God of the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament is a God of justice and mercy. It is easily seen in the first story written down, the story of creation. God created the perfect world in the Garden of Eden and in the center of that Garden he put the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. From the beginning you can clearly see that God didn’t want perfect zombies to follow Him, he wanted real people who chose Him. So he gave them the choice from the beginning to follow Him or follow evil desires. That is not a god of wrath, but a loving God of mercy. But the story does not stop there, after the fall of man God called out to them in the garden, not that He didn’t know but He again wanted them to choose Him. Mercy. After they talked he placed a curse on man on the earth. Now the people who would say the statement above would stand up and say, “see!” but the story does not stop at the curse, God goes on to give them a promise. “So the Lord said to the serpent… I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your hear, and you will strike at his heal.” (Genesis 3:14a, 15) God didn’t want the sin, that now entered into the world through the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, to put a wall between Himself and His creation that He loved so much so he gave them the promise of Jesus. The God of the Old Testament is not a God of wrath and hatred, but of mercy and justice. He was just because he put the curse on them, for a God of justice can not let evil go unpunished. All sin has consequences and to deny that would be ignorance. Even science knows that with every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and this is not only for the physical motion but also for all aspects of life and social interactions. Thus as a just God, he placed the punishment, in this case the curse, upon the people that committed the wrong. But He is a God of Mercy and provided a second chance to his creation. In the passage quoted above we have the promise of a Savior who would save them from their sin. The serpent is the devil and his seed is the evil that now entered into the world, but God promised that the seed of Eve would crush the head of the serpent. From the woman’s seed came Jesus, which the Bible makes clear through the genealogies, and when Jesus came he took the punishment of all sin. He crushed the head of sin with his death on the cross by being the perfect sacrifice to cover all sin. And even though the devil struck the heel of Jesus, Jesus crushed the devil and all his power. Justice and Mercy are the characteristics of the God of the Old Testament as shown in the first story of our human history. Jesus did not save us from the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Old Testament sent his only Son to save his people from their own choices and sin. I will only leave the argument with this one example, for it is enough to prove the point I am making but it is only the first example and the best example of God’s justice and mercy. Easily I can go on and tell you about Abraham, Moses, and countless others told about in the Bible and how God shows his characteristics of love, mercy, and justice to his fallen and rather unloving children, but for now this is enough.

A week at camp and the Revelations that followed

I recently went to a camp in northern Minnesota called Big Sandy Camp because a friend asked if I would help out cause they were short councilors. Of course I agreed because there was no reason for me not to go, because I had no job and no other commitments that needed to be filled. Most of the time I am not sure why God has me do some of the things that I do because I never really am given a clear answer, but here is a some from my journal as I pondered that question:

“Lord, I can’t sleep and I feel that these is something bothering me that I won’t sleep… So I call out to you my God and just ask… What? What is it that you want me to know? What do you want me to hear? What do you want me to say? What do you want me to see? Why God am I here?
There is always a reason for what you have going on in my life so here I am God asking that you would help me see what it is that you have me here for, because God I know that even if you didn’t want me to come you have a plan in that. God you showed me that today while I listened to the story of Jonah. That is so crazy to me! You knew Jonah would run away and yet you used him anyways to bring those sailors to you! So I know that even if you didn’t want me to come here these is a reason for that.
I know and always want to trust in you but at times as a weak human doubts start to come into my head and it is at those moments when I need you most! To work in me, giving me tastes to remind me that you got my back and that I am honoring you!
So please Lord, help me to lead those kids with love! Help me to give those kids an image of your love and life so that they know the Father cause I know you!
So I sit back and wait for you! Come meet me here and talk to me!
June 16, 2010
So to put in the answer to the question that was asked the other night would be hard because God didn’t give me any one answer. These are the toughts that came to my mind…. I am here to be broken, to seve those around me, to be a gift of service to the camp as they need, or even to just to have a fun week. . . Or maybe even to get ideas for Kamp Kace.
So one thing about this trip to camp here.
1. I need to love people better.
a. there are people that have personalities of selfishness, egotistic or what-not
b. I get so angry and want to tell them off and rub their nose in their own poop* (not the word I used) and tell them… see it does stink!
The problem is that I am this person but to be honest I don’t want to break myself!
2. God, I believe, is that I need to be broken
a. Troy barrowed me a book that is about being broken…
b. The book is very compelling… and though there is pain in the offering I know that the out come is what I need!
Take my heart, and form it!
Take my mind, and transform it!
Take my will, and conform it!
To yours, to yours O’ Lord!
That is such a beautiful song and the words really have the feeling of the book that I have been reading. ‘Brokenness is what I need’ This song or at least this verse never made sense to me! So the point as I understand it now is that in order for me to really be formed, transformed, and conformed to God’s, mine has to be broken to really be able to be molded to God. To look like god, I have to take the clay mold of my heart to look like God’s heart. To be broken it then gives God the chance to remake. It will hurt, but in the end my heart, my mind, and my will, will be like God’s and to that is the glory of God!”

So much in that week… I still am trying to unpack it all and still trying to read the book! Why do I never take the time that I am given freely and use it for something that makes my Savior proud of his son?

Where do I go from here?

As of late I have been really thinking about where to go from here… both in aspects of what I want to do with my life and my relationships with people and my relationship with God.
I know a lot of these will run together, but I will try and keep them separated so that I can really explore each and then maybe bring them together at the end…
What I want to do with my life: So what is my calling in life? What do I want to do with my life and what kind of vocation will best fit that? I have been told many times over that I will not find what I want to do right out of college, but that doesn’t help me right now. I want to seriously look into what I want with my life and where I want to go. Life is short and my calling is out there, so I want to take this into consideration as I walk through these first few years of looking so that I don’t waste my time as I try to find the right place for me. I know that I really can’t waste my time if I am trying to find my calling, because I believe with my whole heart that God has a plan for my life and each step is a learning experience for my life. But at the same time right now I am staying up late and sleeping in late and have not done much of anything with my life besides watching “two and a half men” and “family guy” as I lay awake at night. I have not been spending time in the Word or in prayer to see where God is directing me, so I might just have to say that I have been wasting my life. That is the sad part, right now I am feeling so worthless in what I am doing and I am not ok with that, yet I am not doing anything with that to make my time worth while. So what am I doing? Wasting my life?

My relationships with other people: What does that look like? What am I suppose to do with my relationships with people? I have failed relationships and I wonder if I am suppose to do more with them and try and work those out or if I am suppose to just let them die? One has been going over the last year, a new Christian trying to set his life right and I wonder what my role in that is suppose to be? We spent the last year talking and hanging out getting to know each other, I supported him as much as I could. I never made any comments about his nights going out getting drunk and going to the clubs, sometimes fights and always dirty dancing, the other things that he would do that I know that a Christian should not be engaged in but I kept my mouth shut and just listened cause I knew that the guy was trying to come closer to God and I knew that he was taking steps and I believed that this was good for him and he didn’t need more rules and things that he had to refrain from. I know that I was there to help him and guide him in the ways that God would want him to go, but I left things because I knew that he needed to learn a lot of these things for himself so that he would take them to heart and believe them for himself so that he would take them seriously and not push them away as worthless advice of someone trying to change his life. Then when there was something questionable that happened in our friendship where he thought I was the one who kept him from hanging out with a girl, which was true in a sense, but yet instead of talking to me about it, he told me to “go fuck myself” which hurt that he wouldn’t take 5 seconds to talk to me about it or even trust me that I wouldn’t do something to intentionally hurt him. He later apologized and so we went on with our friendship, then after school ended we had another fight where he said that I narked on him for a lot of things and that is why he got kicked out of college. So again instead of trusting me in our year (school year) of friendship he blames me for a lot of things and turns our friendship off completely. So what am I suppose to do with something like that? Am I suppose to go and try to figure out what happened and fix this? Am I suppose to just let it blow over? Am I suppose to forget the friendship and count it for loss? Do I go and investigate the whole thing and try and figure out his side of the story?

Relationship with God: What does a real relationship with God Look like? What is the Christian life suppose to look like, feel like? The more that I look at Christianity and what it is, at least here in America, the more that I don’t want to be one. It seems to me that it is so trivial, like a bunch of people who hid behind the greatest gift in the world and almost use it as an excuse for their sin and shortcomings instead of trying to honor Christ in their walk with him or come close to Him. The thought in my head is “who is the Jesus that American Christians worship?” I mean seriously, the other day I went to church and as always I look around at the people who walk in during worship. There were two kinds of people at this service, the ones who came in and as bowed their head and prayed as soon as they reached their seat and the other were the people coming into the service like it was a concert. They were giggling and talking to each other. Now don’t get me wrong, which I know some will when they read this getting angry and saying “why can’t we come to church in a good and happy mood?” But that is not the point of what I am trying to say. I just want to know where the reverence for God, the Almighty Creator of the universe and the one who cares enough for me to save me from my wretched life? When you go back in The Old Testament and you look at what the High Priests had to go through in order to come before God and that was only the high priest and only once a year! Then you look at Moses who took off his sandals and ever time you seem someone who meets an Angel of the Lord they lay prostrate on the ground before them. What I see now a days when I go to church is a bunch of people who treat Jesus as their homeboy and not their God. Where is the reverence that the Catholics hold to or the saints of old? When I see things like this I want to stop being a Christian, because if this is what Christianity is: then the Bible is fake. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” I don’t see that in so many Christians. I see people making their own religion on of “sunday jesus” (I leave them uncapitalised because my God is not in that). I want to see real Christianity and know what it is like! I want to know what a personal relationship is with Jesus that the saints of old talk about. I want to know the heart of the Father and not like I know anyone’s heart, cause I don’t even get my own heart. I want to know what God is and I want to know what the Bible talks about on such an intimate level that I am a new creation. On a level that I have the words of God written on my heart on a deeper level then the desires of my sinful nature control me. I want to be a slave to Christ in that I will give up all my rights and desires and they will become His. I want nothing more then to become like the one that I want to worship and read about in the Bible. So this question is not for someone to comment cause the only answer is going to come from God and no one else. What am I looking for an not finding?

So what is the conclusion to all of this? Nothing… people may read this and be fired up about what I wrote, but the truth is simply that there won’t be change in their lives because they don’t want it. They want the comfort or they are just too lazy to really become a follower of Christ.

My Father in Heaven, I can not deny you, never will I but please save me from the idolism in our world!