Something About The Joy

I have become convinced that the only people who will go to heaven at the end of this life are people who want God.   Heaven is God's home.   It is filled with Him.   If we don't want God, we wouldn't feel at home there.   In fact, if we don't want Him, we probably wouldn't even notice His presence, and the greatest pleasure of heaven would be lost to us. It is lost to us now.   We were created for fellowship with God, and when Adam and Eve broke that relationship by their rebellion against His authority, that relationship was lost to them, and to all of us who are their descendants. They lost the joy, and eventually even the awareness, of His presence.   And they passed that loss on to us.   God's presence is still here.   He is everywhere, touching us with His love. He touches us in the sunlight, and in all things that give pleasure on this earth; He gives us every breath we breathe.   But in our natural state, we go about our lives seeing on

This summer, for no apparent reason, a vicious bout of anxiety hit me, knocking me off my normally sturdy emotional feet.   It persisted for a full four months, resisting all my tried and trusted coping mechanisms.   I'm still thinking about the experience and learning from it.   Once I had thoroughly dissected and analyzed it, I decided the reason was probably an overall angst about the state the world is in.     Evil news invades our hearts and minds in this information age.   There seems no place to hide from it.   Just when we think nothing worse can happen, a new media revelation bursts upon us.   So maybe anxiety is not so unreasonable after all? I am tempted to think the world is getting more evil, but I suspect it's not.   As I begin to come out of my funk and start thinking about Christmas, I realize evil has been around for a long time.   The Nativity Story is full of it.   And when I realize this, the age-old question comes back at me again.  

Last post I shared a story from Will North's book, Water, Stone and Heart . The story was a sermon about Peter walking on water.  I told you I had a problem with the Vicar's sermon and I asked you to tell me what my problem was.   Kind of like Nebuchadnezzar asking Daniel to interpret his dream, I guess.   Not really fair.   But Jean Pedersen picked up on my question and gave me the response I was looking for.   I suspect others of you would have come up with the same thought, but Jean stated it in a nutshell. She wrote: "It's not faith in faith. It's faith in Jesus." In all fairness, I thought the sermon was a pretty good one, as far as it goes.   It communicates truth in an entertaining and effective way. But at the end, in the vicar's application of the truth, her message strays a bit, and that straying has the potential to lead us off a cliff into thin air (or into cold water, depending on which of her great analogies you follow.)

I've escaped happily into a few novels this summer.   This one, which may be my last for the season, is a gentle read, and is pretty much a perfect escape, in spite of the one fatal error I encountered on page 476 of the Readers Digest Condensed version.   The last sentence of the Vicar's sermon was the killer. Here's a rather long but satisfying excerpt from Water, Stone and Heart , by Will North: _____________________ At the top of the Valency valley, Andrew climbed over a stile in a stone wall, walked through the cemetery of St. Juliot's Church, with its lichen-encrusted headstones leaning this way and that, and ducked under its fifteenth-century porch.   He'd been looking forward to this moment.   He wanted to see what [Thomas] Hardy had done during the restoration of the church in the late 1800's.   But when he pushed open the church's heavy oak door, he found a small clutch of parishioners, Lee and Anne included.   A female priest stood at

"The most powerful incentive for change in our lives is discomfort." I plan to post suggestions for getting rid of besetting sins, but first I want to talk some more about the most important, and the most difficult beginning step in that direction.   I want to talk about putting Christ at the center of our lives. Depression and anxiety are rampant in our society. The signs of this discomfort are all around us. We spend billions of dollars on sedatives--both legal and illegal--in an attempt to ease our pain.   We charge headlong into distracting activities--from pornography, to internet gambling, to obsession with physical fitness and recreation--all in an attempt to escape our unhappiness. This is not a new development.   Depression and anxiety have been around for a long time. In 600 BCE, the prophet Jeremiah suffered this ailment on behalf of his people, the Israelites. They had turned away from Yahweh, their Creator, to worship the id