(My blog here is in construction. I’m very busy hoping to finish it soon.)
In another way of saying what Jesus said on the cross, “They know not what they do” He was saying that we do not know how to be real with God. That is, we do not know how to break down, apply truth, implement, and use right words to interpret and express our sinful ways so that we can REAL LY walk with Him.We are frozen cold by the winter storms of life. We must Thaw into Real by His love.
So a shout-out to all who are badass, atheist, Wiccan, anti-God, pagan, critic, addict, doubter, weak, gangster and skeptic. Whew. That’s a lot. Anyone left? If you are fed up, like me, with phony religion and sham Christianity, I’d love to sit together, and share the thoughts that bury us the deepest. Let us thaw to real. What I mean is this. Being real is not child’s play. In fact, for the majority, it’s a daunting task, a herculean art they will never enjoy because, tragically, they don’t want it. They love to live a lie. Crazy but true. (Mt.11:25/Jn.3:19-21/2 Thes.2:10). All our lives we are trained by culture and a deception of heart to be anything but real (Jer.17:9). Real is a power, a freedom, a joy, a love. There are multitudes of variations like the vast spectrum of colors. We choose what shade of real we want to be, on any given subject, with any given person, at any given time.
Somewhere along your past, you left footprints of your longing to be real, who you are. But pressures and insecurity of unknown life forces sent you to claim an image that drove you to do and be things that buried those traces of your deepest desires. I’d like to help you thaw into the real you. It is only here that you can get on the path to destiny in Christ.
“It is never too late to be who you might have been.” – George Elliott.
A lackey moves with the herd, oblivious to an end determined by others, never daring to find his true path as an individual. He follows the mob, no matter how wrong the mob may be or how dead he feels himself to be. He will never be an individual. I made my stand long ago. It cost me who I was. But that was good, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Today I am an individual of more life in the living Jesus than I ever imagined.
You may think that because I write so much about God you can’t relate to me but there’s something you don’t know. I have a ‘special place’ in me for you that didn’t happen by a dream or prayer. In the backstory of my journey I was pierced by various wounds. They brought me to the dark hole in me. Long story short, a spark ignited in me when I was arrested in bar fight and ended up with my face in jail sewer. I made a budge to believe God. I struck a ‘match’ against the flint of real and it ignited a flame for God that burns in me today and led me throughout the world. His fire of love cauterizes the hole. I want to give you this ‘match’ of real. Nothing to brag about. I just hated being patsy to the mob and so I became enamored with real. It led me here. I love it here, with you. I got my grit. Let me lift you.
Finding your way out of the storms of life requires you embrace being real because it is the key to thaw. No way in hell anything happens if you refuse to budge…for real. All of us live in as in an ”Emergency Ward”, bleeding out from within. I’m so sorry my brother or sister. You may think ‘No one even knows I’m here. So how could I ever hope for someone to help me?’ What I tell you is no lie but beautiful news if you can ‘hear’. The way out results from your own choice to be real. Staying where you are, frozen in the cold, is not an option.
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.
When you look for the Lord what do you think? Are you not more conscious of your own emotional or mental state? Unlike physical injuries, our dark hole doesn’t bleed out in a conscious but subconscious state. We hide and suppress our pain, even to ourselves, with subtle untruths, that keep us away from real. We are bewildered and feel betrayed by dark ways of our sinful humanity. If we are not real about this struggle, even to the transparency of our deepest contradiction, we stay unreal.
We fear there is no cure because we have not yet attained it. My friend the solution awaits. It doesn’t require surgery or medication but a mere budge to start being real with God. To restart the process of translating the pain and loneliness into a training field with the Master of the soul. It does require a journey into Psalm 51:17 and many other ports of entry into truth. What is a broken and contrite spirit? How do we navigate sorrow with faith? How do we see beyond our grief into a meaningful purpose that brings us into His Presence.
Your most real moments don’t happen with others but all alone. Remember, back in time, when you were a kid trying to figure out life. What was your source? Let’s go back there. Let’s DO SOMETHING thats not hard to do, but rare. Lets think. Let’s reverse things. It’s like moving furniture around in your head. It takes muscles in your mind and heart to replace an old smelly chair, in a dingy basement, in exchange for standing on a moutain with an overlook for a fresh restart. God says you can restart 490 times (Matt.18:22).
A pagan dude named Abraham did exactly that. He is master of the thaw. His story blows me away. One day he just up and walked out of his pagan hometown of Ur (modern day Iraq). This heathen became a wandering nomad and a father to the fatherless. His real life story shows us the beauty of change. You may be at one level of real now and another as you read, then another tomorrow, and the next day. Abraham faced danger and desolation we can only imagine. He existed at the dawn of time before all phony religious crap came along. So don’t worry about any stuff told to you. Any cursing or rage is no issue. Just settle in to this moment and be real.
”Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Take this moment and make it perfect. it may not come again” — Zig Ziglar
Abraham was an OG of pagan thought (not like complex paganism of today- just a heathen like me). The backstory of his change was that he’d seen enough, faced the truth within himself, and decided to stop denying what was real, even if everyone around him insisted otherwise. He chose to leave all city comforts of food, water and friendship to face endless miles of desert heat, scorpions and snakes. Why?
“To find yourself, think for yourself.”– Socrates
Abraham discovered contemplation (Rm.4:19). It’s one thing to define this in our culture of superficiality and anxiety. It was quite another thing for Abraham to discover it, not defining it as such, but just a choice of disposition. The priority of Abraham was to find the essence of his existence. It made him a rebel-outlaw against the norms he had grown up with, that led him into a false image of his identity. Abraham was irked and so driven by being forbidden to cut across pagan culture.
Jesus says “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (Jn.8:32)
Enough already of being told that because life is hell there is no God. What then is to be made of living in an evil world as the aftermath of Adam and Eve bowing to the devil who took over the world, saturating humanity in depravity? Why should he listen to the mob curse God and deny his conscience, common sense and indiviudal intelligence that ascertains a Presence in the universe ‘speaking’ to all of what is real. Yet we must deny it because fellow heathens say it ain’t so. In his still silence of listening he ‘heard’ righteousness; what is right.
as a chaldean pagan he did something very unpagan – he connected the endless white dots in the black sky and drew an image in his mind of an unseen God. he INVENTED a response that triggered god to reward him- FAITH. “Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” (Gen.15). This was not an “experience” but a resolution. Abraham claimed his identity to be real in God. God was his identity. Period. Nothing else mattered.
The constant image the Scriptures portray of being in Christ is wind (Jn.3:8). I don’t walk in God in some type of mystical experience. I walk BY FAITH in God for my time on earth. Faith holds the power to project our spirit into the Spirit. I would strongly suggest going to some park or place where ravens fly and contemplating their movements and flight patterns to see the ways of seeing and find real. The ways of being real lead us into His Spirit of Truth. It is not by emulating the moral law or righteous behavior or words. It is a freedom in the Spirit to be who you are in Him, free of your lower nature. (to be continued) (I stuck in the secular quotes to show the struggles of real are in all men.)