peeling back the callous

i've been around a lot of scammers in my life. a few of them were family members or good friends of the family. Growing up with people like this around you, It gives you a kind of "intuition" about when someone is full of it and when they are being honest.

I sometimes feel like i'm getting a little too cynical about people though. You see so many abuses and you start to get all tough and callous-like...

but i keep trying to remember to peel back the callous... that doesn't mean i'm going to become a sucker. But maybe there are worse things in life than being the sucker. Maybe having a crusty, hard heart is worse.

i'm not sure of my point :) maybe just pray for me to be wise and yet "soft"
cheers.

heaven-the heavens

i said something in a message the other day that got a few people asking the same question. Jesus said "heaven and earth will pass away but my words will never pass away" a few people were puzzled that "heaven" should pass away.

It had never occurred to me before how confusing this word could be. Not only the word but the concepts that have come to stand behind the word (which is i guess is simply what "meaning" is).

The Bible talks about "the heavens" as everything that is not on earth. Sometimes it's translated as "the expanse" some have hypothesized that a better translation would be "the universe"-though meaning the universe that is beyond earth. To say "heaven and earth" is to talk about everything that is created.

Interestingly we have come to talk about the place where God lives as "Heaven" it has become a proper noun. We say that our deceased loved ones are "in Heaven" And this sounds reasonable because in the prayer Jesus taught us he started off "Our Father in Heaven" Sounds a lot like "Dion in Walled Lake" (not that i'm comparing myself to God :)) but is that what it means?

Jesus' prayer was indicating that the Father he was praying to was not someone who was bound to earth. I've got a father in Milan, Michigan... a father in law in Rochester Hills... Jesus had a father named Joseph who lived in Nazareth. But in his prayer he is talking to the father who is NOT of earth.

In the same way when people die we often say that they are in "heaven" to our ears that means they are in some far off place with God... which is true. In the Bible's language though that would mean simply that they were no longer here in the earthly, created realm. Perhaps it would be more fitting, even more Biblical to talk about those who died in faith being "with God" or "with Jesus" since that's the good part anyway... who cares about whether you are sitting face to face with God in Detroit, Ft. Wayne, San Jose, on a distant star...or beyond it all...the point is that you are with God.

When we get to be with God, there will likely be no roadsign on the way that says

now entering...HEAVEN
"a nice place to spend 10,000 years"
population billions

If the place has a name perhaps it will be called "the LORD is there." (cf. Ez 38) but again the place isn't important. The one who dwells there is. But it won't even make sense to call it heaven anymore... that indicates what is beyond us and it won't be "beyond" anymore and God's face won't be hidden.

So Heaven and Earth will pass away, everything in the created universe will...but the dwelling place of God (wherever it is and whatever it is rightly called) will not, he sits above his creation and will endure forever. Have i made any sense here?

get political?

So by now you've heard of the "religious right", right? :) A name given to conservative Christians who are very political with their views and work together to get their voices heard by the government on certain issues.

I'm not at all opposed to Christians making their voices heard in government. We could stand to do more i think.

But to put it on the table, I get pretty uncomfortable with the "religious right" and the many movements of Christians trying to exert political influence.

Again, not because i oppose the idea of Christians in politics, but really it's because i wonder about the battles we've chosen to fight.

I think a good number of the initiatives being put forward by Christian groups at present are more or less good initiatives. But I wonder why it is that we can get millions of Christians fired up about protecting marriage (which again, i tend to think is a good thing) but can't get a fraction of those same people outraged about racial divisions in our country and ongoing discrimination against whole segments of God's creation. Or what about the way we treat widows and orphans, the poor and the alien?

When i read through the Bible there are MANY things about which God consistently "beats his drum" and yet when i look around the political scene today, i see Christians beating lots of drums, but conspicuously absent are some of those that God has been most passionate about since the beginning of humanity.

Isn't that odd? Does God care MORE about protecting marriage than helping relieve extreme poverty and exploitation? Does God care MORE about praying in schools or teaching creationism than he does about the growing numbers of people cast into prison and forgotten by society? Are school vouchers closer to the heart of God than the starving people worldwide?

If you looked at the things Christians get worked up about you'd have to say Yes to all of the above. But if you read the Bible, you'd be hard pressed to make such a case [eg.].

Again, let's not quit standing on those issues we love to stand on. But what if we stood on the things that not only get us passionate, but the things about which God tells us to be passionate?

something to think about.