Under the Jacaranda tree.

Did you ever need a second chance?  A chance to heal a desperately broken part of your heart?

It's a rare thing in life to get those chances. 

My father was a working man.  Blue collar.  He thought in terms of pay checks and not career.  I am my father's only son, his last child after three daughters.  I was closer to my mother.  I never really got to know my father while growing up and I didn't understand him or love him until two years ago when I turned fifty years old.  That was about twenty-six years after his death in a hospital bed.  The night my father died my exhausted mother reluctantly took her first break away from his bedside and went to my sister's for rest.  His only son, twenty-six, sun-tanned from a ski resort in Colorado and dragged away from the party life I was living in Malibu, was now home and just down the street from the hospital sitting in a movie theatre completely numb in denial.  I wasn't much farther than a few blocks away, I might just as well have been in the darkest part of the galaxy.

The year I turned fifty God's grace and mercy poured out on my life and my heart began to break under His heavy hand.  At that time His work in my soul was terrifying and relentless.  It was a sense of burning, a searing, without any remedy except to wait in hope for God's divine pardon and forgiveness.  It was serious correction and the pain in that correction was a constant part of my life for about eighteen months.  It was my personal terror that I might die in that state of: agony, hopelessness, isolation, sorrow and dread.  I wasn't in hell though, I was in correction.  I do not want to imagine a place without the hope of God's loving mercy finally coming to pardon a soul.  To suffer in torment knowing you failed in every way and now do not have the mercy of God to deliver you, that is hell.

I had many things to review about my life in that precious time and I was given the grace to carefully examine my life .  The failings that came to mind were tremendous.  It was then I remembered my father in his hospital bed.  My relationship with my father, my thoughts and beliefs about him as a person, my wrong understanding of his heart towards me and how damaged my life was lived out, in part because I did not have a bond with my father, was brought into the light.  In that light, I wept for my father.  I missed him.  I wanted to thank him for his love and talk to him.  I wanted his pardon.

My father was a WWII veteran and was almost killed on the coast of North Africa.  He was wounded in action and received the Purple Heart.  His Naval assignment was bringing troops to the shore in a landing craft.  When the doors opened to his craft there was carnage and death waiting for many young men and my father witnessed it, peering straight into the eye of an inferno.  He was eighteen when he entered the war and twenty-years old when he was wounded in action.  My grandfather died when my father was only five years old.  My dad grew up without his father.  It was my grandmother who would sign papers for him to enlist because he was too young to sign the papers without her permission.  He entered the war a very sensitive but troubled young man who would be turned into a commando.  He wanted the adventure and the privilege of serving his country while leaving his small hometown in New Hampshire.  He wanted to become a man.  He could not have imagined what he would experience in just a few short years and how those years would affect his life.  He went from a quiet town in New England, to a beach in North Africa, in a landing craft under enemy fire in a little over a year.  Not a lot of transition time.  He shared some of his stories with me as a teenager, stories of spilled brains and guts, body parts and vomit, the crying and dying of young men my own age by then but I couldn't hear him so he gave up telling me.  He was trying to share his pain but I tuned him out.  I only wanted to deal with my teenage angst, not knowing the intrinsic connection.

He carried his war's visions and sounds the rest of his life. My father no doubt had PTSD but he didn't realise it and we didn't realise it. He got through his days and his family got through their own.  Now we know about PTSD from all the broken men and families from so many wars since WWII and that has helped my family and I understand so much about our father.  My father returned home from his war and his injuries with nightmares that would cause him to jump up from sleep with terror in his eyes.  The softness of my dad's eyes were replaced with pure adrenaline, ready for what I cannot begin to imagine.  He tried to manage his life, marriage and children doing what he thought was right but he struggled through his life with a broken piece that was never restored and never talked out past a few war stories.  The sad irony is the war didn't make my father a man, it kept him frozen in that time of his life emotionally and rationally.
He died, more or less, a sixty-four year old teenager. 

I needed a father so badly but there was such a divide.  He failed me as a boy when I really needed him to help me.  He let me down and my heart broke.  It was an event at school and he didn't come through, he never knew it but I dismissed him after that.  I had no relationship with my father again, only a difficult distance.  I felt loss and a gnawing loneliness and it settled into my life.  I was only ten years old and that pain would remain and materialise in different ways for over forty years.  A foreign ache came into my heart when my dad let me down and that would send me on a search for healing.  For years I tried to escape the lies and pain that insisted my father didn't love me.  Despondency cut me and distorted my world.  I was sullen and moody and found peace by various escapes but the pain grew and got more tangled up.  I couldn't forget that pain and bitterness and selfish pride filled me like poison.  He tried to connect with me at times but he didn't have the skills and he didn't have time.  Things were coming at him in his own life and he wasn't prepared or able, he had enough on his plate just to get through his own day.  He did the best he could but I didn't understand so many complicated things in his life.  I just knew that he made a promise to me that I begged him to not forget and he let me down.  My pain was in the way of our relationship.

As I grew older I flailed around looking for direction.  Bitter and proud, I rejected most of his views on life and we argued constantly or sat in silence.  Eventually I left home breaking away from my parents, then miserable attempts at college, multiple disasters in relationships and failings in lists of other areas throughout my life. I was angry and it came out in various shades of self destruction.  My father was a loving, kind and gentle man but all that translated differently to me, I just saw his limitations and felt a divide.  I had no concept of his pain that made him check out as my father, I felt forgotten, and worse, awkward.  Being awkward with someone you should be connected with is so much worse than total separation.  Awkwardness causes confusion, distance and longing, questions and feelings that need to be sorted out.  Suffering and other emotional dregs fills the gaps instead of relationship.

As he was dying of cancer I was swinging like a pendulum on a chairlift caught in a war going on in me to continue to hide in a ski resort or to return home and try to connect somehow.  I pushed it all away with denial and postponed my decision until the last few days of his life.  I had no bonding with him to fall back on and no character in my life to rise up to the challenge.  I had no love.  I had feelings though, tons of them, but feelings and love do not necessarily intersect.  I skied and beached away my inner fears of losing my father far away from him and home and kept my oblivion going.  In my time of correction with God I began to vaguely understand love and how shallow my concept was.  In that time with my heart laid bare before God and myself, I began to understand my father and my broken relationship with him; I also began to fall deeply in love with him.

In the middle of that time of examination I went home to spend some time with my family and my mother.  A few days before I left she mentioned some things that were my dad's that I should see. In a drawer I found his wallet with all that he carried until he died.  The first thing I saw inside was his license.  He looked tired and worried.  At the time of his photograph he had gone through the first part of his cancer treatments and surgery.  Pictures, even drivers licenses, don't lie, my dad was scared.  I noticed the expiration date on his licence and realised he never lived long enough to renew it.  Did he know he would never renew his license?  That kept my thoughts for a while and then I found a buried photo of myself that I had never seen.  I froze.  I looked into my own eyes and saw a time of my life that was forgotten. I was probably about fourteen.  A mixture of compassion and regret filled me, I loved that person I was looking at now.  I didn't loathe him.  I was fifty-years-old and I was comforting a part of my teenage life that was afraid, lonely and hurting but trying to find something to go forward and not lose hope.  I remembered learning to ski and how that changed my life and opened up a way for my future.  A future that was now remembering it's process,  "Yes, there are going to be very hard and sad days as you move through your life but there are going to be amazing people, powerful moments and events in your future that you cannot imagine right now.  You are going to set out to see the world and almost get consumed by darkness and excess, sensuality and vanities but you will meet God, and incredibly, God will not let you go.
He will call you back to Him by grace."

When I saw that forgotten photo buried in my father's wallet and knew that he carried it with him all of those years I was overwhelmed.  Then I found my ski-instructor business card.  I had to sit down for a minute.  He loved me and he was proud of me. The grace of God was revealing something to me I never knew.  A little later, my mother quietly came in and handed me some of his letters before he went overseas for war.

In incomplete letters, and in handwriting similar to my own, he told her stories about the fear and frustration of "some of the fellahs" and their crazy indoctrinations into their new military world.  He talked about his dreams past the war, to learn to cook and open a restaurant, and he asked her to say hi to some of his friends and family.  It was written in pencil on U.S. Navy stationary with the date of 1943.  I could hear my father's voice as I read his brief notes back home. I heard him and somehow I understood my father's life.  They were written long before I was born and read long after he was dead but time and history dissolved as I continued reading and hearing the dreams of my young father.  It was a time travel sensation, an other-worldly meeting, a reunion of a broken father and a hurting son.  As I understood him more through those letters, I was free of so much childhood confusion and pain I had carried my whole life.  A few days later I stopped by his grave that I had only been to once in twenty-six years and paid my honest respects to my father.

There was still a hole in my heart for how I never got the chance to thank him at his bedside.  

The chance to heal was in my future, orchestrated by the goodness and mercy of God who knows all things ahead of time.

My father and I never had the chance to speak to each other before he died.  I waited too long to come home.  When I finally got home I immediately left for the hospital frustrated with the gloom everyone was under.  "He is going to be fine!"  I was angry that I had to stop my life for what I was certain was going to be just a hospital stay.  In complete denial I imagined my dad in his hospital bed with a game on and a can of beer at his bedside talking to the guy next to him.  My oldest sister drove me to the hospital and didn't say a word as I went on about all the family drama.  When we got to his floor it was late and the lights were dimmed way down.  I marched down the long, dark hall passing many rooms of dying men expecting to find my father sitting up and walked right past his room.  My sister gently grabbed my sleeve and pulled me back.
"This is dad's room."
I peered into the dark and saw my father from the light of the hallway, his bed was closest to the door.  He was lying completely still.  His thick grey hair was almost gone and his skin was as pale and smooth as porcelain.  He was almost gone. I  took two steps towards his bed and crumpled to the floor in a heap of agony, shame and fear.  On my knees I reached for his hand and sobbed. He had lost so much weight his wedding band was only dangling on his finger.  He never spoke to me, he just sighed and slowly shook his head.  I got up from the floor and tried to speak to him but only managed to cry.  My sister waited patiently without intruding.  My face was buried on my dying father's chest but he was so frail he didn't have the strength to lift a hand to comfort me.  His skin smelled like chemicals and body powder because I had waited so long to come to him even his smell was gone.  We drove back home that evening in silence.  If my sister spoke to me I didn't hear her.

In the few days I had with him I could see it in his eyes that he was struggling with all of his strength to remember who this young man was at his bedside.  He only looked at me and shook his head.  And I was too afraid to talk to him.  I grasped at my Bible but I had zero understanding.  I had no refuge and no comfort from anyone.  I was losing my father.  After painful visits to the hospital I would go to my parents home at night and try to find solace in a bedroom that I had left behind; slowly coming out of my total denial, my body would fold up in a pain that felt like I was being broken in half.

My father died on a night when I went to a movie with a friend and decided to go home afterward and not to the hospital.  It was a horrible decision not to stop and be with my father.  He died alone.  The phone rang at home and I picked it up in our kitchen.  After I knew he was gone I sat alone at a table scratching a fuzzy memory into a journal that I would eventually lose somewhere in my life.  I was past tears as I wrote that night, I only felt shock.  The next morning I went to pick out his casket and the shock continued so my brother-in-law made the transaction.  Later that day a pastor would come over to meet the unfamiliar family he was going to represent over a man he never met.  My father had faith in Christ but it never led to church attendance.  I think it would have been a good conversation between them.  A generous and kind man, the pastor asked us questions and we were thankful for his company.  At some point I asked the pastor if he would care for a drink and he suggested that he would have what we were having. A tough call for me, I hesitated for a moment and then I poured him a stiff vodka and orange juice.  He took a sip and left the rest of the glass untouched.  After conversations and some prayers he left and my mom and my sisters would laugh when I told them what I offered him.  It was the first laugh for everyone in a long while.  It's one of those nervous laughs that is happening even though you are in pain.  A life can be lived out like that.  Things are happening, pleasurable things, necessary things, your life is being lived out but just under all of it there is this tragic, untouched pain that needs to be resolved.

The morning of his funeral I woke up to the sound of a dove loudly cooing on my bedroom window sill and I remembered God's love to me and His great compassion, "God is close to the brokenhearted."  I got through those first few days but it would take decades to heal my shame and the horrible life choices I would make after his body was lowered into the ground.

I often talk about God's intervention in my life.  I have experienced a love, tenderness and a mercy that silences me in awe.  A God of love so rich in grace, I can believe why it will take eternities to thank Him for His many comforts and kindnesses to those He saves.  He has sewn my heart together over and over again with His love.  In His timing and patience, as I floundered through my life, God moved me to Portugal to live with my wife's family where I would love her amazing father.  I was on a course of healing and I did not know it.  Chapters of my walk with God would be written in a strange country, with a different language, far from my own family.  My father-in-law would be a significant character in those chapters.

My father-in-law was Hollywood handsome with a very sharp mind.  There are photos of him throughout his life in Africa where he worked as an assistant-scientist.  Sepia toned photos of a celebrity look-a-like carrying a rifle in the Bush or behind a microscope lay in drawers around the house I moved into. The photos are portraits worthy of a LIFE magazine story of his days in the 1940's and 50's.  He was married to his only wife, an Ava Gardner double, and eventually moved to Portugal with their five  children.  For years the huge house was filled with parties and entertaining.  Their mother loved plants and flowers and they gushed out like fountains running along the drive-way and down staircases and throughout two gardens.  She filled that house with a great big personality and love but she died unexpectedly and tragically on a New Year's Eve and the family suffered an irreplaceable loss.  What I understand about pain now is that it can devour everything in our lives and we have to look for avenues of healing that do not make our pain much worse.  It can be a very treacherous journey and we must be extremely conscious and careful with our choices.  After she died the house caved in to sorrow and loss.  The parties were never as full again.  The flowers would fade away.

Before moving to Portugal from the States I had an encounter with God that was so powerful I assumed I should attend Bible school somewhere and I prayed for the opportunity.  I imagined classrooms and chalkboards as I prayed about this.  Clean shirts and maybe a tie?  God had perspiration in mind.  I would go to the house of my father-in-law and clean up a drive-way and clear dead gardens contaminated by a decade of dog waste.  I would empty out and paint rooms covered in mildew and chaos.  Wash floors and dishes.  Clean toilets.  For over two years I would wrestle day and night in a spiritual war against pain and sorrow that hung over the house like a damp blanket.  Even the Portuguese sun couldn't get deep enough into the house to cut the darkness.  Eventually my wife and I moved into our own home but my mission was partially completed and I knew it with regret and unsatisfactory justifications.  When God began to correct me in my time of terror I went back to that house and to my abandoned Bible school.  Almost seven years of my life had quickly passed me by.

Under the flowers of a Jacaranda tree and surrounded by it's fragrance that I will never forget, I was on my knees pulling up weeds in the drive-way.  The weeds were always a menace in that yard.  In a deep quiet I began to understand my years at that house and my wife's family through different eyes.  My anger, self-righteousness and sense of failure began to wash away and healing came in.  I was filled with gratitude for all that I learned there in those difficult years.  It was a precious time of learning and growth but I was too angry and spiritually immature to appreciate it.  My mission wasn't ever to be about the house, it was about the people who lived under it's roof.  As I cleaned the familiar drive-way again I reflected on my time there, and my heart and mouth.  God was teaching me things I missed there and missed in my life.  I once again thought of my own father and his love for people.  His love for gardens and planting.   His love for flowers.  I remembered the sweat on his face with a rake in his hand.  I begged God to forgive me for despising my father's labor; his gardens, his dirty work boots and his garden tools.  As I stood in the yard with my hands covered with dirt I remembered his compassion for poorer people than my family and his gift of understanding broken hearts.  I remembered his laughter and his many sacrifices for his family, even in his deep emotional pain.  I remembered his hidden love for his only son.  I asked God to forgive me for how I treated my father at the end of his life and how I responded to my failure in later years.  I believe He forgave me but there was a deep wound in me.
Twenty-six years had not been able to heal it.
Time sometimes heals nothing.
We need a second chance.

My father-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this past summer.  He began to show signs of illness before his birthday last January.  In less than a year he would become a man who could no longer get out of bed.  His stubborn independence and ability to take care of everyone was now confined to a bed or a chair.  For many months his head hung low toward his chest with his eyes closed, the ability to help his children and do what he always did was leaving him.  The end of his life was now about hospitals and bed care while still trying to give to his family somehow.  How he would give, however, was beyond his ability.  His life's end would be about his children coming together around him while they dealt with the realities and inadequacies we all face with a slow and certain death of a parent.  He was given some time and his grown children had a second chance to be there for each other in their loss this time.  That precious gift was stolen from them when their mother died so suddenly on a night the world parties together.  In the very similar scene of a hospital bed, twenty-six years later, a broken part of my heart and life would also be healed.  I was familiar of the landscape of a father dying with cancer and I was determined not to detach my heart this time.

I watched and prayed for my father-in-law and his children over the months as he slowly left this earth.  I watched them grow and struggle.  I watched them love each other.  I remembered my past failure and I was afraid I would not get the chance to thank my father-in-law for his love, that events somehow would cruelly prevent it.  Two nights before he died I went to his bedside and held his hand. He was awake and alert.  I spoke thanks into his ear for all of his love and his help to me and my family.  My past and present were simultaneous at that moment.  Tears that I never got to share with my own father rolled down my cheeks.  I held his warm hands and kissed him good-bye.

He told me he loved me and a desperate need for healing came into my heart.  They were precious words that I ached for years to hear.

The God of the Bible is the God of reconciliation.  He, a loving Father, gave His only Son Jesus for humanity.  That through the Son we would know the Father and we would know that we are loved and how much we need restoration in every way back to Him.  Lies, pain, pride, self and self-destruction gets in the way but grace is always reaching for us to return and know God alone as Father.  The Author of reconciliation uses grace, forgiveness and perfect truth.  The ingredients are always the same and the dosage is applied carefully.  He knows our pain and our needs individually and meets us personally.  Personally.  No one on this earth knows us like Him and no one can reach into our depths to satisfy us.  That place is reserved for God alone.

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet
Before the great and terrible day of the Lord, 
And he will turn
The hearts of the fathers to their children
And the hearts of the children to their fathers, 
Lest I come and strike the land with a curse.

Malachi 4:6

I am so thankful to God for His gift of mercy in my life.  I got a second chance to love a father that gave everything but was shy with his feelings of love.  I ran through the awkwardness this time and loved him.  I was as present as I could have been in his last days but there are emotional weights in our hearts that cannot be lifted until we stand before God and He wipes the tears from our eyes.

I love my father now.  I am so thankful for two excellent but imperfect fathers that God gave to my life; but more importantly than these earthbound graces, late in my life I learned about my Heavenly Father and how much I need Him.  I am finally discovering an intimate, patient and perfect Father who is willing to correct, forgive and bring us all through deep sorrows and lift great burdens.  A Father who teaches me who He is and that I am loved, even though I am nothing more than dust.  I have never been closer to the God I pray to than I am at this time in my life.  I missed so much of my life because of a lie I believed and the poison it caused and I want to renew my heart with truth.  I want to know things and do things that must be done but I have never done them.  I need my Father.  I do not cry to my dead father in my weaknesses and profound needs, I cry out to a Heavenly Father who is alive and present.  A Father that knew my grandfather's grandfathers and knew my father and saw me long before I was born.  In grace and truth He opened my blind eyes to show Himself as Father to me in a way I never knew Him.  He revealed my great need and opened my heart. I pray in desperation for His help and wisdom, and for everything He is willing to give me as a father and a husband, to help me love, and raise our own son so he will know that in spite of my own struggles, he will know that his father loves him.

The house of my father-in-law will be left vacant eventually.
And so will the gardens that I can only hope and pray I grew in.
Those chapters of my life are now over and I look ahead with hope.

tr

Calling all terrorists.  Part IV

"Turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness."

That quote is an allusion to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is the cry of the true Church all over this earth to every person doing violence every day, in every way, against God and against His Kingdom.  The message spoken on that porch goes out to every "spiritual terrorist" out there,

Confess your sins to God.  Repent of them.  Renounce them.  Seek God's forgiveness and His  pardon.  Turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness.

The Bible says the following,  "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life."  John 3:16

That verse spoken out loud in 13 countries will get me killed.  In 53 other countries it is illegal to preach it.  It is restricted in 40 others.  If I go into those nations with a Bible and proclaim that message as the only truth that man can put his complete trust in,  I am a "terrorist."  However, I am now a "terrorist" against the kingdom of darkness where deception blinds people to the grace and mercy of God.  Darkness is a kingdom using the weapon of deception to blind people to their sin and their need for salvation.  The power of the gospel destroys the kingdom of darkness and saves souls back to God.  The gospel brings light into the darkness. It reveals hidden things giving blind eyes sight.  It brings truth into error.  It radically changes perspectives.

In Watertown Massachusetts, when the police began a house to house search looking for the wounded terrorist, I was reminded of the words of Jesus found in the Book of Revelation.  In chapter three, Christ says the following,

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me."

He is knocking on doors all over this earth seeking spiritual terrorists and waits for the enemy inside to open the door to Him.  Christ is at the door of the heart looking to save the spiritual terrorist but not to kill him or take him by force.  Every single Christian on this earth was once a spiritual terrorist that had to open the door to Christ, voluntarily.  They had to confess their sins, to abandon their terrorist acts and their treason against God's government and become a son or a daughter of God.  A once, violent enemy, confesses to God and desires to learn about life and love and reject death and terrorist acts against His government.  We learn to walk in a new way living the message that God has left us in the Bible.  God helps us every single step of the way. 

I prayed for that young man, a murdering terrorist, a "loser", (according to his Uncle) who is deceived by the kingdom of darkness. I prayed that he would have the opportunity to confess the evil that he did in Boston and ask for mercy.  I prayed that Christ would spare his life so that he might repent of the evil in his heart and seek God's forgiveness.  That he might cry out to God and have his soul saved from hell.

Is that outrageous?  Yes.  

Is that the outrageous hope of the gospel?  Yes.  

Does he deserve it?  No.

Do I?  No. 

Do you? 

The Gospel is an offer from God.  It is a divine exchange through mercy, from grace and love and pardon.  It cannot be paid back but only lived out in humility and the poverty of need.  We become poor in ourselves to be rich in Christ.  We are nothing. He is everything.

The terrorist in Boston doesn't get a pass for what he did if he cries out to Christ for mercy, but he receives pardon from an eternal hell and a new life.  He killed and maimed people for a reason that seemed right in his own mind, and that has consequences, like all sins have consequences.  They don't put people in prison for sleeping with girlfriends and the earthly consequences may only be heartbreak, but eternally speaking, it will put you in hell.  The urgency of the church is to get the message out to a world that has lost that perspective; sin will destroy you and only Christ can redeem you.

That perspective is the only high ground against the flood of evil rising all over this world.

Nothing we have or own can save our souls.  One can own bankers, lawmakers, politicians, and expand their power globally but that will not deliver one's soul.  Profits in the billions and a wage that one makes that is 500 to 1000 times the amount of the workers will not save one's soul.  That earthly wealth is nothing but rags rotting in a suitcase. We can only be delivered from the system of darkness and deception by God's truth, mercy and justice.  God's justice.  We cannot get out of it on our own.  There is no getting off of system's grid by our own means.  We need the Gospel.  However, mankind has freewill.  Christ doesn't kick doors down on anyone.  His rescue is an invitation from mercy.

We voluntarily turn ourselves in to Him.

We admit and confess our actions.  We ask for God's pardon.  We come to God with blood on our hands and violence in our hearts.  We see our condition and it's horrific conclusion.  We ask God for a new life, a new start, a new way.  We turn ourselves over to God.  The turning is both immediate and progressive.  We learn a new life day after day, decision after decision; determination and resolution under the direction of God.  Self begins to die and we begin to actively kill it off.

How can God possibly offer mercy for the terrorist, an actual or spiritual one?  How?  His Son died on the Cross as a terrorist.  Although Christ was the complete and perfect and an actual, historical, physical representation of God on our earth and in our history....He became sin.  Being sin He became us.  He died as sin in a brutal death so that the punishment for every terrorist was upon Him, taking away the eternal punishment of death for every terrorist opposed to God, making them sons and daughters instead.

To those who would turn to Him.  He that bore our sin would become our redemption.

Christ died for that killer in Boston.

Christ died for me.

Christ died for you.

"Turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness."

tr

ps.  

My writing dropped off with this blog as I went through six months of affliction.  My desire to grow and overcome what I allowed myself to be was challenged.  I tore my knee to shreds and needed surgery and then rehabilitation.  My wife and son survived a horrific car crash on a sunny Friday morning with only two scratches.  A dear man and family member needed great care as his body began to fail from pancreatic cancer.  I was challenged to overcome lies that limited me and prevented me my whole life.  There was success but great pain and heartache in the struggles to those successes.  I learned.  I grew.  I am thankful.  I also know how much strength and power I need to live in a world that I withdrew from years ago, and how little I have in my heart to do so.

I'll write about these things soon.  Thanks for reading. 

Calling all terrorists. Part III

Calling all terrorists.  Part III

I'll repeat.

If you cannot accept the things that are seen what will you do with the things unseen?  You may not agree that man is responsible for global warming but there is very little argument that our earth's temperament is running a little hot lately and is predicted to do so into the future. The seas are rising but by how high and how long it will take to change coastlines will only be answered after it happens.  What's interesting to me is that there is a conversation going on about the sea levels rising, the seas temperature's warming and that Jesus Christ made a point that when He returns the seas will be roaring .....

and there will be upon the earth anguish of the nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the rolling of the waves. Luke 21:25

The earth is getting slammed by hurricanes, floods, tsunamis and cyclones and man stands perplexed when these things happen. These are devastating natural events that are out of our control and they are happening in concert with societies breaking down, wars, diseases and famines. These things that are seen are connected to what is unseen.  There is a spiritual dimension to all that is going on in our world but that dimension is unseen because of deception.  The "system" we have all participated in (willingly or collaterally) for generations has been able to get us to where we are because of the system's lethal weapon of mass destruction; the weapon of deception.  

For the whole world to be somewhat oblivious to our reality requires a blind spot.  If the blind spot is fully operational when faced with dire ecological realities that can be seen, what about the spiritual realities that cannot be seen?  Spiritual deception is the most destructive weapon of all weapons.  Spiritual deception and it's cataclysmic results in our lives and in nature can be perceived simply by scanning a newspaper or watching a half hour news program.  It is not rocket science but accepting and connecting global realities; accepting the reality of melting sea ice and then connecting that to the reality of humanity's propensity to evil, requires the counter weapon to the system's weapon of mass destruction. The counter weapon is spiritual truth.  Truth is the ultimate counter weapon to the system's weapon of mass deception.  If we dismiss the truth and close our minds off and hide from global realities we willingly become a casualty to the system's weapon of deception.  The system then takes more and more ground, in our natural world and in our spiritual world.

In part II of this blog I used the challenges to change the perception of the global population regarding the serious issue of sea ice melt as a reference to the power of this deception.  The general public remains uniformed or casual to what is happening; even as the Ilulissat glacier breaks up on film and the polar caps melt with meteorological and scientific data to prove it.  If the public is oblivious regarding something that can be physically seen, for example, an area of glacier described as the size of Manhattan breaking apart, what is causing that lack of interest?  The answer is deception.

Deception is the weapon we are assaulted with and deception is the fuel of the system we are living in.  Deception blinds us to danger and reality.  It blinds us to responsibility and accountability. It blinds us to the truth.  No one expects to see our coastal cities under water tomorrow so we push away the reality of what is certain and deal with our lives in our today only.  The world exists in a, "Today Only" reality. "Today Only" thinking is the horrific surrender to the system and to it's deception.  The ultimate cost of Today Only, Here Now, Mine First, is us and the earth we live on.

The high cost of Today Only thinking and the consequences change dramatically, revolutionary, when that thinking becomes engaged with spiritual truth and an eternal mindset.  When we lift our eyes from our preoccupation with Today Only and comprehend an Eternal reality, everything in our living is upended, transformed and revolutionized.  What is happening in our world, in family, society and our physical world is not being played out only in a natural realm that we can see but in a spiritual realm we cannot see.  Unless we have spiritual vision we are blind to the forces of the system and we continually scurry around trying to get a handle on eternal things with a Today Only approach.  We look to charismatic leadership and brilliant minds, we look to innovation, we look to a paradigm shift (somehow) in the system but we are looking apart from the Eternal in those approaches.  Man has created these problems that are way past his ability to rewind or unwind and we need (in our totality) help from outside of man.  We need help from God.  

To dismiss God is to continue in deception.  And we don't need just "a" god but "the" God.  We need help from the God that told us exactly what is coming and how we got here.  We need help from the God that says the answers to your problems in your individual life or global life are found only in Christ.  The only God that says that is Jesus Christ.  Every other religion on this earth seeks the answers to our destruction from within.  The, "Within seeking",  for our personal divine truth is grossly flawed because what we find within is what we see in the without.  The heart of man is polluted so the earth is polluted.  War starts in the hearts of men.  Misery and greed starts in the hearts of men.  Mankind cannot change his heart apart from God's help and intervention.  If the heart does not change the reality of our living and our destination cannot change.  Globally or personally.

If a person picks up a Bible for the first time in their life they can read verse after verse regarding the times that Jesus Christ describes before His return, and they will see that we are in those days; but they have to pick up the Bible and open it up and read it.  To open it they have to fight against deception, a deception that the whole world is under.  The only escape from deception is the Gospel and the power of Jesus Christ.  That's it. There is no other cure, no other rescue, no other place of protection and the call is out now louder than ever for everyone on this earth to come to Jesus, quickly and desperately.  Why?  Our world is not going to get better but worse and we need the Savior. 

That is the truth, and that truth is bombproof information.

Christianity says that what we have in our hearts is the reason for our suffering and brutality. It's called sin. Murders, wars, sexual perversions, greed, marital problems, hatred and all manner of selfish and destructive living is from the destructive power of sin.  That power is broken by the power of God. The ultimate weapon of all weaponry is the gospel.  The Bible says the whole world lies under the power of the evil one.  The system of evil in our world is run by one and the system of everything that is in opposition to that evil is run by another One.  The gospel is the power to switch sides; from evil to good, from death to life, from hatred to love, from darkness to light, from living as a terrorist to a radically changed position of being a son or daughter living in the household of God. 

All terrorists operate under the power of evil.  There are no good terrorists.  A terrorist seeks to throw off a government or leadership's control over his life through reckless destruction.  Terrorism is a short-sighted act of violence against any authority that one is not interested in recognizing or participating with.  Terrorists kill and physically destroy to get their own way and their bias are the final authority.  Just like a terrorist, a Spiritual Terrorist is a person rebelling against God in the pursuit of personal aims to self govern, disdaining and throwing off God's government to have his needs met in a way that seems right to him.  His actions are violent, short-sighted and drenched in error and deception.  A Spiritual Terrorist is as blind as a bomber, waging war every day against God, making himself an enemy of God and a terrorist against God's government.  Apart from Christ's life and His truth, cultivated and lived out in our life, we are all in the camp of the evil one ready to act out with terror. 

God's government is a true and actual government and there is a war going on in this world against that government.  Deception blinds us to that reality.  I was once a terrorist against this government.  Like a deceived madman in ignorance and in my rebellion I believed that what I was doing was perfectly right.  There was pain and loss for what I did but it never registered in my head that it had eternal consequences. I walked around every minute of every day in opposition to God's government, doing violence to His Name and to my soul.

What violence did I do?  I participated in terrorist acts every time I slept with a girlfriend.  If you don't believe sleeping with someone outside of God's plan for marriage is a terrorist act against God, you are deceived.  I listened to a young, educated man on a news program yesterday speaking about the Millennial Generation, the generation from 18 to 33 years of age, that he is part of.  One of his descriptions for his generation was, "not having to validate a love relationship through marriage."  It just rolled off his tongue as a harmless fact, a choice, a freedom from religious or societal mores that he refuses to participate in and didn't feel the need for.  I was one of those people once until the truth of the gospel hit me full force and leveled me to the ground.

What that young man said on television was espousing terrorist doctrine against God.  He was wittingly or unwittingly participating in a war against God's government and he was doing so because he is deceived.  His perspective is wrong.  The cause of that wrong is because the system we are all living in also has limited power to keep the truth that removes deception away from him.  The deception that hinders the truth is a mechanism of the system, blinding and distorting God's truth through culture, education, media, false religion and biblical ignorance. Although he can see the effects of the consequences of that blinding and distortion in every corner of the globe, and in every headline, without the Gospel of Jesus Christ penetrating that blindness he remains deceived.  Only the gospel can break through the system of darkness.

The gospel is bombproof information.  The gospel, also called the good news, is called this because it breaks through the system, removing deception and offering pardon to one life at a time.  The true gospel does two things at once: it reveals to the heart that it is an enemy of God, which causes enormous dread, and then it reveals that God is willing to forgive the enemy of treachery and terrorism, causing a relief that nothing on this earth compares with.

The Uncle of the Boston bombers, those two men who murdered and maimed people in blind hatred, said something to the press that stopped me and I could barely breath. He unconsciously alluded to the greatest message on this earth when he stood on a simple porch surrounded by microphones and cameras and said the following to the killer on the run, he said,

"Turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness."

Part IV continues and finishes this blog.

Calling all terrorists. Part II

Calling all terrorists.  Part II

An online dictionary defines "terrorist" as a person who uses terrorism in the pursuit of political aims. Dictionary.com defines "terrorism" as a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.

The F.B.I. reveals that the International Community has not come to a consensus regarding what "terrorism" actually is.

I personally think terrorism goes beyond pipe bombs or rigged cars or an I.E.D. planted by a deceived and delusional murderer in a shopping plaza. Standing in my quiet kitchen in my new jeans watching the story about the pollution in China gave me the perspective that I was an accomplice to an environmental disaster.  The computer I am typing on now was, most likely, physically produced by exhausted and grossly underpaid workers and when it reaches it's end my computer will be stripped down and melted, releasing toxic waste into the starving, exhausted humans who climb through mountains of tech junk everyday to survive.  I have never seen these places but I know they exist because someone took the time to reveal these things to all of us and put them on the internet.  I once worked in a shipping warehouse and my legs would continually throb in pain from the concrete floors I walked on.  I could barely move when my weekend would slowly arrive and that was only after a 40-hour work week, not an 80-hour work week with no lunch breaks and no weekends off.  I can identify, a little, with the suffering of a slave laborer standing in a factory because I have a comparison.

It's limited but I have a perspective.  Without perspective I have little empathy or comprehension.  The internet has given us perspective we never had before.  The things once in the dark are now in the light.

I drive a car, therefore I pollute.  I am a human being living in ease because others are suffering to some extent for my comforts.  I have to consume to exist, even with careful consumption. It is how the world has been set up in the last thirty or more years and it is only getting worse, much worse, for all of us on this planet.  The planet itself is suffering because it cannot sustain how her resources are being grossly extracted without a rest.  It's a system we are all enduring and participating in every day.

What about the people who are responsible for this system?  What should happen to them? Unless you are brutally suffering in a sub-human existence of starvation, discomfort, exhaustion and look forward to only misery and more misery every minute of your life, like billions on the planet are now enduring, you are a participant in their misery.  You and I are the "them".

We are participating in a system. We are living in a system that destroys peoples lives, reducing them to expendable things that make perishable things for some to make gross profits from. It's a global system that we blindly created when we didn't know what we were heading into; when we were ignorant about what we were doing, what our corporations were doing and what our politicians were doing.

Now we have the internet.

Now we see what we are living in and what the cost is.  We cannot claim blindness anymore.  We have to do what we can do to extract ourselves out of the system.  The first thing is self-education and when you begin that process it will take a lot to not be overwhelmed with shock or anger by what you will discover.  Keep going until you find a way to participate in a new way.  Don't get stuck, do. 

What about the people driving the system?  As much as they have insulated themselves away from humanity with unimaginable greed and indifference they are in the same predicament we are in, because, the seas are rising and that is a scientific fact.  A fact. 

TED Talk James Balog Time-lapse Proof Of Extreme Ice Loss ...

Infinitely more sobering is the fact, the absolute, certain, undeniable fact that Jesus Christ is coming.

You may not be a fan of the Bible or have never even opened it, or, at the same time both, but in one interesting conversation with his disciples regarding His return, Jesus Christ says an incredible thing that has not happened in the history of man but is happening now.

"There will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on earth dismay among nations, in perplexity of the roaring of the sea and the waves,

Luke 21:25

Is that literal?  I read that literally.  One hundred years ago if I were alive I probably would have made that quote regarding the seas a metaphor, but the seas are rising.   If the seas and waves roaring is a metaphor speaking about the nations in dismay, are the nations not in dismay?  What's your perspective?  Do you not dare watch the news anymore because of calamity after calamity?  What is your perspective?  It's important to challenge your perspective because if you can look at data and images of glaciers calving and watch the news as men try to comprehend what to do with global catastrophes or potential economic collapse, mass murders, wars and environmental destruction and be in perplexity; if you can look at all of that and not be the slightest bit engaged or challenged by it, how can you comprehend what is coming spiritually?

If you cannot accept the things that are seen what will you do with the things unseen?

To be continued.

Calling all terrorists.

Calling all terrorists.

In January of 2012 I decided to avoid malls, stop buying clothes or shoes and empty out my closets.  I thinned out everything and made deposits to a homeless shelter and into a collection box for Africa.  Around the same time I was making that purge I was cleaning out my father-in-law's garage space and under a pile of boxes I found a large suitcase.   It was a very large suitcase.  It was a suitcase that I brought from the States to Portugal over eight years ago and I had long since forgotten it.  When I opened it and started going through it I was actually opening a lesson, a proverb, a visual and tactile teaching.

Weather and dampness, insects and mice had eaten through everything.  I pulled out things that I remembered buying that I didn't need and eventually didn't wear.  I once cared enough about these things to lug them through an airport though and dragged them to another continent where they would eventually rot.  As I picked through the remains I remembered wearing a few of those things and felt sad and foolish that I cared about them.  I actually cared about them.  I spent money on them and took time taking care of them.  As I looked at them now I saw what they actually were, an extremely bad investment,   a poor choice to care about or invest in and a very poor choice to collect.  They were now revealed to me that they were temporary escapes, nothing but rags and fit now only for a trash bin.  I threw them away and thought very carefully as I did it.  Those things, reduced to rags in a rotting suitcase and now being thrown into the trash, once had power in my life.

How sad right, a pair of pants or a tee shirt having power?  They actually didn't have any power at all but I gave them power.  I did it.  I did it when I spent excessive time and energy on what made me look or feel good.  I did it when I walked through a mall and looked for something to wear that made me feel good about myself and had spent money on what I didn't need or really want.  I was trying to fulfill a much deeper need and a want with things that would one day be reduced to nothing but rags.  I carefully remembered, as I tossed those items into the trash, that many times I didn't have that money to spend. I was sacrificing money and reality to get something that caught my eye.  

I was buying lies. I was making foolish, worthless choices for momentary gratification, decisions that were now being tossed into a dumpster not fit to use to scrub a toilet.

Before that January day the last purchase I made was on a couple pairs of jeans.  They were dark blue and so blue they were almost black.  The next morning, standing in the kitchen eating breakfast in my new hip jeans, I turned on the news. Just then CNN was doing a story about the Pearl river in Guangzhou, China and the woes of water pollution because of all the poison dumped into that river.  The river flows through the the township of Xintang where most of the jeans for the world are dyed.  The Pearl river is an environmental disaster. I put my cereal bowl down and hunted for the label but I couldn't find out where they were dyed.  But does it matter?  They were probably sown in a sweat-shop for pennies and sold for what the person sewing them would take weeks to earn. 

My jeans didn't look or feel so hip anymore.

I was faced with a dilemma, an endless dilemma.  Do I grow material for my clothing now and sew it?  Do I grow my own bananas and harvest them and make my own cereal, produce my own soy milk?  Do I make my own dinner from scratch, and from scratch I mean in it's totality; ensuring fairness, safety, mercy and compassion in every minute way regarding billions of people and our global environment?  That is now the dilemma for every person on the planet when they think about it.
We can deny the global environmental disasters connected to our marketplace in places where we don't live, but whether the press speaks about it or not, the seas have a lot to say about this because
they
are
rising.  

They are rising.

If you google the above story about Xintang and dye, stay on your computer and google, ted talks james balog,. In the story of climate change James Balog said an amazing thing, which brings me to what I am about to get into.  He speaks about public perception.  He also, interesting enough, uses the term, "bomb proof information."  There is a clip 19:20 minutes long and I urge you to watch it.  Global perspective needs to change and in terms of eternal matters, perspective needs to change for you immediately.  Immediately, because, you are going to die.  Get real about that.

Perspective is everything and ignorance is not bliss.   In terms of what I am about to say, perspective is the most valuable asset we have in regards to the vernacular of,  "terrorist", "terrorism", "justice" and "death-sentence". 

Perspective is everything.

To be continued.

Me and my shadow, continued.

Me and my shadow, continued.

We found a pizza shop that was still open under emergency lights. The dining room was completely dark but near the windows, with the sun going down, you still had enough light to eat. I wanted to eat and run but Jerry was waiting for a bus to Queens. The schedules were slow and random so we waited for a while.  In that couple of hours or so we talked about our lives.  Mostly it was Jerry talking as I listened.  It was the most amazing night I could have possibly fallen into.

The whole time Jerry talked to me, he spoke using Bible verses.  I cannot explain how he did it really, but somehow, he flawlessly weaved his life story through the Bible using different verses along the way.  He could not read or write but he had memorized huge chunks of the Bible from messages spoken from the pulpit.  Through Bible verse after verse he narrated his life and that life lived in a halfway house. He talked about God, a lot.  He narrated his life in that deep, quiet, "other-voice" from Jerry as we waited at our table for the bus.  I was sad when it came and he got on it.  I wanted to sit with him longer but he had to go.

He thanked me for the pizza and coke with his voice going high again.  He gave me a hug and a, "Thank you brother," and left for home.  We waved as the bus drove off into the darkness.  I wondered what the people on the bus thought of this man in his old clothes that fit so badly and his wild hair that looked like he attacked it with scissors.  I wondered what they thought and how they summed him up.

I never looked at Jerry the same again after that night. Years later, and knowing more of what it means to be a Christian, of how one must live, walk, talk and do I feel my great loss for not chasing Jerry every service to come have lunch and dinner with me. I wish I could have those precious days and nights again and find him in the rows somewhere and sit next to him and take notes for him.  In my arrogance, standing there in my nice clothes with money in my wallet, I was impatient with Jerry.  I felt so smug many times when I saw him. What a fool I was.  It was me that was benefitting most from our friendship and I realize now that he was the gift, not me.  God is greater than us and His thoughts are not our thoughts; and His ways are not our ways. How wrong I was about my sense of being there to help Jerry.

I felt his absence for a long while as I walked back towards the Brooklyn Bridge.  I walked in the city under a full moon, down Broadway, through the middle of streets lined with empty, lightless canyons on both sides of me.  It was so beautiful and quiet.  The sky was full of stars people never see when the city is in full power; the moon was huge and soft shadows hit the sidewalk in front of me.  The only sounds in the quiet city around me were my flip-flops hitting the pavement.  When I got to the Brooklyn Bridge two cops stopped me and warned me before I crossed that there wasn't anyone to protect me if I got jammed up.

I thanked them and took off across the bridge.  The East River was black and silky and sparkled with moonlight under me, next to me the dark, skyline of Manhattan. Under the cover of a full moon and summer stars, the only sound that high up was a warm, summer breeze all around me.  Quiet.  Moonlight.  And a solitude of safety in my chest that was so deep and thick; an otherworldly sense of spirit that was so new to me.  Over me was a deep and real sense of God's love, protection and closeness.  I thought of all the events of that day and all the surprises God had brought to me that night.

I was standing alone on the Brooklyn Bridge looking at Manhattan in the darkness.  I didn’t feel alone because my heart was full of gratitude and a sense of awe for the amazing love of a God I was just beginning to know.  In that nighttime of darkness there was a light in my heart. 

I realize now, and often with tears, that Light is the most precious and most valuable part of my existence.  Without it I have no existence.

I am dead,

beyond dead,

without it.

In the years since that August evening I moved away to a new country and began to face every weakness and frailty of my character.  Starting as a child, my life has been full of long walks and jogs, alone in the woods and in fields, in the snow at night or on a foggy beach, on city streets on both sides of America.  I was constantly seeking solitude to connect deeper.  I often walked through the streets of Manhattan alone except for an occasional work crew power washing the empty streets.  I did the same thing in L.A. and that all started in my hometown.  I was always aware and reaching, or trying to understand, or simply enjoy, the sense of who that someone was that was close to me that I was aware of but could not see.  I was trying to connect with a companion close enough to speak to and almost touch. Starting at Times Square Church that “Someone” had begun to reveal Himself to me.  On that bridge that night I had a personal connection that I had desired my whole life.  I was full, completely full, with satisfaction.  I had everything.  It was extremely hard to leave the bridge that night.  I wanted to mark it in my memory forever.

And, I didn’t want to come down, I wanted to stay up there and not deal with my life.

This past Sunday I sat in church while a friend sat next to me and translated Portuguese into English.  I remembered my friend Jerry.  I never connected the two of us until Sunday.  It saddened me and then made me angry that I do not speak or understand Portuguese yet.  Today I think about my years here in Portugal in solitude.

Throughout my life, solitude was a place to escape and be quiet, to connect with God.  In Portugal, that isolation became a prison without walls.  It hurt my life and my marriage and it stole so much from me.  I came to Portugal and wanted to stay on the spiritual mountaintop that I was on in Manhattan, in Manhattan of all places!  I wanted to permanently stay in that quiet, warm, full moon of peace and connection I had on the bridge.

Now I’m in a valley.  There’s pain here and loss and all of it more painful because I stubbornly resisted.  God was moving on in Portugal and I didn’t want to go with Him.  I wanted to stay on the mountain.  I wanted my comfort, my spiritual solitude and what was intoxicatingly incredible, but all of that without God simply became the grotesque of self.

There is no freedom then but just a prison of self.  There is no growth or gain, just shriveled loss. All building stops. There is no joy, just frustration and anxious feelings. A self in exile, a branch cut from the vine, withering and dying from thirst.

The only way out of this spiritual valley is communion! 

To commune with God is to commune individually and vertically but then horizontally with His body, which is the church.  To commune correctly is to connect with the Head, which is Christ, and serve others with others and to subdue self.  And do the work of love.

When Jerry walked across the lobby that day it was actually a confrontation.  He was invading my solitude space.  He was smashing down a “Do not disturb” sign that I had hung out.  He was oblivious to my shyness and my stubbornness. He did not care about my personal space needs because he was more interested in love. He also brought me, kicking and resisting, into the necessity of sacrifice, service and sharing. The vital parts of my faith walk that I did not want any part of, I wanted peace and quiet, I wanted solitude in church.

And the irony is……I wanted to grow.

All I want to do is find connection now.  All I want to do is come out from hiding and learn and experience what I have missed my whole life, Love.  Real Love.  

The Light, the warm glow, that was filling my heart that night on the Brooklyn Bridge was filtering through cracks in the granite that were just beginning to open.  They began to open every time I reached into my wallet and gave a few dollars to Jerry.  They began to open every time I took his notes for him or was kind to him. They opened up in a huge way that night while we sat in darkness waiting for his bus, eating a meal of lukewarm pizzas and iceless cokes.  The cracks in my heart began to open up when a man that people would pass by on the street opened up his heart to me and shared his walk with God.

Without running into Jerry that night I would have had another night of solitude looking for life through the lens of a camera.  A man and his shadow walking alone down empty avenues.

Thank you my friend, wherever you are.  I’m grateful for your effort and I pray now to put more of what I have recently discovered into practice.

tr