O-Dark-Thirty

It's a tough month. Honestly, it's been a tough couple months. I'm trying to balance work and home, and I'm not doing too well at either one right now. For the foreseeable future, this blog is on hiatus. I'll be back eventually, but I don't know when. Take care. God bless you all.

They beat me up. I stand close to six feet tall, weigh right at two hundred fifty pounds (it isn’t all muscle, but don’t underestimate me) and part of me still cringes when I think of it. Rick beat me up too. That was later, but it still hurts. Suzanne beat me up – emotionally, but the pain is the same. My first divorce hurt. My second divorce almost killed me. Some memories have pain in them, and I don’t really know how to exorcise that pain from my life. Maybe I can’t. Maybe you just learn to live with it. When my wife’s mother died, I thought of my Mom’s death, a decade ago now. It still hurts. “It always hurts,” I told my wife, “but I guess you get used to it.” Perhaps that’s the way it is with some pains in our lives. Not the stubbed toes, nor even the broken bones. I don’t feel pain when I think of my broken hand, for instance, though it does hurt when it rains. I don’t even know how old I was, but probably between fifth and sixth grades, which would...

As I finish this trilogy of posts, let me sum up the last two. Prayer is communicating with God. We must listen more carefully than we speak, because until we hear from God we can’t be sure how best to pray. Being in the center of God’s will is exactly where God wants us to be. As one Pastor said, God is more concerned with your spiritual welfare than your physical (or mental/emotional) comfort. Some things are clearly not in God’s will, and we should avoid praying for these. I recall one person saying once that God told them to get a divorce. Quite unlikely, because we measure what we think we hear from God against the Bible, which is the revelation of God’s character. Though God does not disallow divorce, He certainly hates it. Malachi 2:16 (NIV) says “I hate divorce," says the LORD God of Israel, "and I hate a man's covering himself with violence as well as with his garment," says the LORD Almighty. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith. This i...

Let's sum up where I left off. Prayer is a conversation with God, and conversation is a two-way communication. I want to ensure I am hearing God clearly before I act. Asking God for stuff is easy. People do it all the time. The key for me is to ask for the right things, in the right way. Pastor will preach about prayer sometimes. He’ll get all fire-and-brimstone and preach how wrong it is for people to add “if it be Your Will” to their prayers, as if  giving God an escape clause in case the prayer doesn’t get answered. You have to pray believing, he says, and don’t waver in that belief. Wavering is why the prayers don’t get answered. I have a hard time with that. I almost always pray with the phrase “if it be Your Will.” Though I might not voice it, I certainly think it. I don’t pray that way because I doubt God’s ability to answer prayer. Far from it! If God didn’t have the ability to answer prayer, and infinite, unknowable, unfathomable abilities besides, then He wouldn’t be God...

Prayer is hard to understand. Like Cocoa When I was a boy I prayed for a pony. This thought came to mind the other day when I saw Immortals. Stavros, the thief says he quit believing in the gods because he prayed for a horse and didn’t get one. (MINOR SPOILER ALERT: At one point in the movie he dismounts from a god-provided horse and looks in awe, saying something like “It’s the horse I asked for.”) I didn’t stop believing in God because I didn’t get a pony. In fact, I did get one, except it was a horse. We named him Cocoa and owned him for a few months before Dad figured out he was more work than a dog or cat. Perhaps it was Mom that figured that out. Seems like Mom was the one in the stable mucking it out. Getting a horse didn’t make me believe in God more either. Even as a child, I knew He was the God of the Universe and he was sitting somewhere in Heaven on a throne and He could do whatever He wanted. If God wanted me to have a horse, I was good with that. Choose wisely I wa...