The Dark Night

It is 11:45 AM late Wednesday morning in the flow of existence. I took Rudy for a walk this morning at Kollen Park. On the way home I stopped at Lemonjello’s and got me a mocha. I then went next door to the Full Circle music shop to talk to Carl and then stopped at Village Used Books to look around at their new digs. I am now down in the basement listening to music and making a report.

It is now dark outside and it is suppose to rain today and tomorrow. Last year at this time it was snowing.

I have not read anything this morning. I have been carrying around a book titled “Visions of Cody” by Jack Kerouac. I feel out of it this morning. There is nothing heavy on my mind this morning.

I should try to read The Gospel of Mark today. Soon it will be 12 o’clock Noon. Time keeps flowing by.

Well I will close pace back and forth in my cage.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth has passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” Rev. 21:1,2

music: Brendan Canning “Something For All Of Us. . .”

It is 10:34 AM Tuesday morning in the flow of existence. It is painful for me to write the word “existence”.

I just got back from taking Rudy for a walk at Van Raalte Farm. It is a cold cloudy morning here by Lake Michigan.

I am going to go to our local public library around 11 o’clock AM to buy a used book I saw yesterday in their used book room. Yesterday I saw a used paperback edition of Jack Kerouac’s book “The Visions of Cody”. I already have this book by Kerouac, but I am buying this edition for its book cover. (plus it is only a $1.50)

I need to read soon either Jack Kerouac or St. John of the Cross. I need to keep myself balanced. I need to keep my freak flag flying before I am destroyed.

I do not know what I will do the rest of the day? It is too early to have a party.

This morning I read for devotions a book titled “The Labyrinth Of Solitude And Other Writings” by Octavio Paz [Winner of the 1990 Noble Prize for Literature].

Last night before watching TV I read some of the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament. I recommend this book for family devotions “Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark” by Rikki E. Watts.

I need to call this morning Jude 3 a local Christian bookstore to see if they had a small book titled “Liturgy & Worship Pocket Dictionary” by Brett Scott Provance.

Well I will close to feel a shadow of dread breathing down my neck.

music: Swans “Forever Burned”

It is 8:15 AM Tuesday morning in the flow of my ephemeral existence. I am down in our basement listening to the music of Pelican. I am seeking to wake up to another day in a quiet manner. Carol should be home from work anytime.

I got up this morning around 7:44 AM. It is a cold late autumn morning. Last year around this time it was snowing here in West Michigan. I wonder when it is going to snow? We will have a white Thanksgiving Day?

I have no plans for the day. I should give Rudy a bath. Carol is home from work. I will close to visit with her before she goes to bed for the day.

“May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.” 1 Thess. 5:23,24

music: Pelican “What We All Come To Need”

It is 1:57 PM Monday afternoon according to the wall clock in front of me. I can not stop Time. Time just keeps going by no matter what. All I can do is let time carry me to the grave. “For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day-and not only me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.” 2 Timothy 4:6-8.

I got out of bed this morning around 8 o’clock AM. Carol was already up and about when I got out of bed. We watched professional football last night and did not get to bed till almost 1 o’clock AM.

This morning Carol did errands and I stayed home to recover from last night. I had a nice private party.

When Carol got home we went to the library and took Rudy for a walk at Kollen Park. It is a cold gray day.

Carol picked up at the library used book room this morning a book titled “British Kings & Queens” by Mike Ashley [British Royal History From Alfred The Great To The Present]. I did not see anything to ADD to my book collection.

When we got home from our walk I ate lunch and just wandered the house. I am feeling a little out of it. I am not a party animal. Carol has gone to bed for the day, because she goes back to work tonight.

I have no read anything today. I have been carrying around to read a book titled “The Augustan World: Life And Letters In Eighteenth-Century England” by A. R. Humphreys. I should read this afternoon the Bible. I am now reading The Gospel of Mark in the New Testament. “The word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” Hebrews 4:12,13.

I can smell a fresh baked pumpkin pie down here in our basement. I dig pumpkin pie as I wait for death. The Lord is way, the truth, and the life.

I do not know what I will do this afternoon to keep myself awake? Well I will close wander my cage.

music: Pelican “The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw”

music: Carl Craig “Sessions” Double Mix CD

It is 4:47 PM Sunday evening. Carol is sleeping. I do not know if she plans to get up and go to Covenant PCA this evening to worship the Lord God? She told me this morning they had Communion today at church. During the worship service she said a young man had a grandma seizure. The pastor stopped during the service and prayed for the young fellow. The young man after the seizure went to sleep. Carol told me the fellow was in his 30’s.

I believe in divine healing. I believe in the power of God to heal people with seizures. I would have put my hands on that afflicted brother and asked the Lord to display His healing power. I often lift up my hands to the Lord and pray for divine healing. I am a sick sinner. I need healing. I need to be restored to my right mind.

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God-which is your spiritual worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will.” Romans 12:1,2

I have been mainly reading since I last wrote “The Augustan World: Life And Letters In Eighteenth-Century” by A. R. Humphreys. I like the way this book is written. Humphrey is a good writer. I looked for other books for A. R. Humphreys this evening in Amazon. He has written a book on a play by Shakespeare, but that is all. I enjoy reading well written non-fiction books. I have never read any of the plays by Shakespeare. I have his plays in my book collection, but have not read them. Every learned flop should read the plays of Shakespeare at least one time in their nowhere existence.

I do not know what I will do this evening? At 8 o’clock PM there is a professional football game on. I will see what my wife will do this evening.

Well I will close to see what my wife is going to do this evening. She has to be a church by 6 o’clock PM this evening if she wants to worship God.

music: Lucero “1372 Overton Park”

The Gospel of Mark

Chapter 5:1-20
“1: And they came over unto the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gadarenes.
2: And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit,
3: Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains:
4: Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him.
5: And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.
6: But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him,
7: And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not.
8: For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.
9: And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.
10: And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country.
11: Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding.
12: And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them.
13: And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea.
14: And they that fed the swine fled, and told it in the city, and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that was done.
15: And they come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil, and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.
16: And they that saw it told them how it befell to him that was possessed with the devil, and also concerning the swine.
17: And they began to pray him to depart out of their coasts.
18: And when he was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him.
19: Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.
20: And he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men did marvel. ” Mark 5:1-20

music: Carl Craig “Sessions” Double Mix CD

It is 2:47 PM Sunday afternoon in the flow of existence. I am down in our basement messing with my lap top. Carol has gone to bed for the day. I watched some professional football this afternoon. I have not read anything this afternoon. I did read this morning “The Augustan World: Life And Letters In Eighteenth-Century England” by A. R. Humphreys.

This morning I took Rudy for a walk at Window on the Waterfront. I got back from our walk around 11:15 AM. Carol got home from Covenant PCA around 11:50 AM.

I turned on the TV around Noon and watched professional football, so has gone by existence.

I have been up since 5 o’clock AM and should feel tired, but I am not ready to call it a day.

This afternoon besides watching football I wrote a letter to our son Josiah and wrote a couple pages in my private letter. I can not remember the last time I wrote a letter to someone. There is no one to write to in my old age.

My wife told me today I am shiftless. I asked “What should I do with my life?” She said she did not want to go there. I told her I am ready to get on the fast track. I am already to experience the american dream or nightmare. I am not afraid to face the truth. I am not afraid of the man in the mirror. I am a slave of Christ. “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” Phil. 3:12-14

To be completely honest I am doing all that I can do to keep going down the road of death. I am living the kind of life that enables me to keep living in this dead american world. I know I am a flop, but look to the Lord to make me whole. “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Phil. 3:10,11

I really do not have anything to write these days. I just write to make sure I am not dead. Well I will close to wander my cell. The Lord is faithful.

music: Kings Of Leon “Because Of The Times”

HOWEVER LONG it may take to relinquish its hold on American culture, evangelicalism in the United States—still probably best defined by the British historian David Bebbington as a movement whose members adhere to conversionism, Biblicism, activism and crucicentrism—faces near-certain extinction. It has been blinded by its symbiotic relationship with the Enlightenment, and has perpetually failed to see beyond its hopelessly Western perceptions. Confined to the paramaters of liberal rationalism, it has mounted no challenge to the present political order and offered no intellectually acceptable explanation for how one is to live and think in the postmodern world. As this magazine has chronicled, its brightest children are throwing up their hands in record numbers, defecting heavy-heartedly to less temporal churches, or to no church at all.

But rather than recognize evangelicalism for the sinking ship it is, its cheerleaders are calling in increasingly desperate tones for a regrouping. Last year, a collection of prominent leaders met in Washington, D.C. to consider an “evangelical manifesto” designed to clear up the theological and political confusion that is intrinsic in the movement. In January, the hard-right Web site WorldNetDaily offered a checklist for identifying “true Christians.” Southern Baptists assume the apocalypse is coming from within, and mobilized this year to draw lines between themselves and cussing drunkards like Mark Driscoll and Rob Bell. (Ironic considering that those same leaders, often perceived as “liberals,” are just as insistent on salvaging the term for themselves.) Most recently, the ecumenical journal First Things launched an evangelicalism-focused blog that devoted its first few days to further pulpifying the dead horse. Evangelicals simply cannot stop talking about who is and who is not an evangelical.

This definitional masturbation is frustrating for those who see many of the values typically associated with evangelicalism as worth preserving. First, it behaves as if evangelicalism were once a unified, coherent tradition to which Protestants can return. On the contrary, with its scatter-shot, authority-averse tendencies, evangelicalism has always been a concept in constant cultural flux, particularly in the democratic United States. Some evangelical denominations have kept a firmer grasp on their senses than others, but the broad sweep of American Christianity is hopelessly fractured, diluted, politicized, ideological, nationalistic, and often plain idiotic. The notion that the term and the culture it represents can be salvaged from this smoldering heap is naïve at best.

The fight to define evangelicalism in its latter days also operates on the mistaken premise that an imagined theological purity or conformance to a “lost” orthodoxy, rather than an emphasis on ethics, spiritual discipline and mystery, will revive the power of the Christian church. It is astonishing that so many intelligent Christians seem to believe there is a deficit in emphasis on evangelism and scriptural literalism, and that, if the hatches are just battened down on a more solid “worldview,” evangelicalism can resume explaining the universe to new generations of believers. In this respect, evangelicalism’s true believers resemble the faction of the Republican Party that asserts with a straight face that returning to “core principles,” and not a radical restructuring of priorities, will bring waves of Americans back to the right wing.

But so many twenty-somethings are not calling themselves “post-evangelical” because they know too little theology or have put too small an effort into synthesizing it with reality. They have come from the most apologetics-obsessed generation of Christians in American history, and have realized that many of their prepared answers are for questions that no one is asking. Adrift in the cultural sea, many turned to traditions and theological systems of the past, only to find those similarly unequipped to address the questions of our time. The only choice has been to begin the messy and at times overwhelming process of drafting something new.

The growing collection of post-evangelicals is what the defensive, definitional evangelical fears the most, and could by itself explain the recent obsession with protecting the label. Surely many of the intelligent professors, students, writers and bloggers rushing to its defense have also felt the naggings of cognitive dissonance and the inkling that the world might make more sense if they abandoned some of their cultural presuppositions. But haggling over the details of theology provides a psuedo-intellectual haven from real-world questions, where evangelicals can exercise their minds without coming to any unsettling conclusions. And thus the cycle of definition and redefinition continues, providing endless diversion as it cuts deeper and deeper ruts into what was once known as the Christian dialogue.

Refusing to align squarely with evangelical shibboleths requires courage, but the sooner it happens on a larger scale the better. All signs point to a near future where religion will play an increasingly climactic role in global culture and politics. Men and women who, as Mark Noll puts it in the final pages of The Evangelical Scandal, “think like a Christian”—by which he means “take seriously the sovereignty of God over the world he created”—should be leading the way on the meta questions that are already besieging society. But as long as they are busy drafting manifestos in their barricaded salons, hubristic rationalism will continue charging unchecked into the 21st century.

Patrol Magazine
http://www.patrolmag.com/opinion/1867/get-over-it

It is 6:15 AM Sunday morning in the flow of existence. I have been up since 5:04 AM this morning. I went to bed last night around 8:30 PM. I had one of those days where I could not stay awake yesterday. I basically watched college football from Noon time till 6:30 PM yesterday.

Now it is a new day and I am sitting in our dining room reading stuff about Christian Zionism and waking up.

Carol is still sleeping. I am thinking maybe I should make pancakes for breakfast.

There is really not much else to report. Time just keeps flowing by. Do not know what I will do today? I could watch professional football all day today? I am not really a fan of professional football.

I should read my Bible sometime today. I need to hear the Word of God. I am trying real hard to read my Bible and not study it. (”Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.” Col. 3:16)

Last night I did read some of the book “The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History” by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite.

Yesterday Carol came home with Christ Mass gifts for our kids. My wife is always buying gifts for someone. Like the Book says it is more blessed to give then to receive. I need to give more. (”So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver.” 2 Corinth. 9:8)

Well I suppose I will close to wander my cell.

“But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.” Hebrews 11:16

Modern Israel in Bible Prophecy: Promised Return or Impending Exile? by Stephen Sizer

http://www.cc-vw.org/articles/czcri.htm