So Where In My Mind Do Start?

Well I guess the biggest hurdle is that I’m sorta tired of the mishmash I hear, and see. I want to taste the Truth, everywhere I go.
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Oh, I know, I live in a fallen world, the devil hates Jesus and the Father of Lies has been busy, but God has built his Church and the gates of hell shall not, can not, prevail against it. I meet her every where I go, or at least that is what I’m told.
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I want to roll the ganache that is the smooth and lustrous beauty of God around in my mouth and swallow a mouthful a hundred times over from one spoonful. I want to savor every corner of His word. I want my head to explode like it does when the dark richness lets a migraine break through. I want my mind to expand beyond the boundaries of my tiny little skull.
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Lately, my standing muscles have been thoroughly tried. Some of my stand up routines have gone swimmingly well and some, not so hot. When the not so hot ones hit, a little of that thirty-five year habit has flared and I’ve wished I could ride the fence once again and call a bunch of stuff grey areas, or semantics or some horrible misunderstanding most likely blamable on the shoddy translation that I was using. (I say, always keep those questionable translations handy for just such times.)
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So where do I start Dear Reader? Heck, lets start with a couple of pieces of shoddy thinking from this week and work backwards. This week, not to dissimilar to other stand up instances, the garbage is nothing new and nothing I haven’t spoken against before, things that have caused a further deeper search for the truth and to avoid the deceptive philosophies of this world that the Church has allowed in through her sweet doors.
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This week, I was hit with one more round of “we all have dry periods.”
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Explained, not so dissimilarly to other times this concept has been espoused, as a time that God, for whatever reason, removes himself from us.
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Key in the sound of that needle scraping across the vinyl that my mind so often hears.
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What the heck, did that not follow directly on the heels of the reading of scripture: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Jesus’ words in Matthew 28! (emphasis mine)
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I did not read in my suspicious translation, “And ya know, surely I am with you most of the time. But sometimes you might find that I’ve sort of left you, well as much as an omniscient, omnipresent, indwelling, immanent sort of God can. I’ll do it so that you buck up and grow a little and want me more. Consider it sort of like a legal separation in marriages these days, you know how much I love to use marriages to compare our relationship, well you folks have really got that whole absence makes the heart grow fonder crap down pretty stinking good, well except for the times those separations end sorta ugly like Paul will warn you about in one of his more stirring letters I help him write, but hey lets ride with the analogy for now. I will move out, or so it will seem, I might be hiding in the closet, who knows, so that you will miss me and try a little harder when I’m back yakkin’ at you full time. Now I’m not talkin’ here about the times Paul will tell you to toss some rebellious, blatantly grossly rebellious dad’s-wife stealer out of your church so that he will repent, I’m just talkin’ takin’ a powder from letting you feel my presence.”
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I don’t give a crap what your experience has been.
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And my experience does not trump your experience.
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But what does tell me to call hooey on your experience or this opinion that “we all experience dry times at the hand of God“, separate from our own choice which is usually from wallowing in sin, is that no where in the Bible, in the New Testament, in the crucifixion and resurrection Reality and Word, does God promise that He will remove His presence from striving Christians to make us stronger. No where.
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In fact the way I read it, and you know what, I’m not going to sit here and cite scripture, it is all through the New Testament, and I am going to paraphrase sumpin’ fierce, the way I read it is that we are only, only, made stronger as we abide in Him and He in us. It is through Him and Him alone that I am strong enough to do all things, or everything or anything or what He calls me to do. So where does one read that the removal of God’s presence grows someone? Or that He does indeed remove himself?
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Another thing for tonight, and this one is going to be harder for me to explain because it will slightly sound to the half asleep mind that I am contradicting what I have always said, well in the last twenty-eight years, that there is no sin, none what so ever, that God can not forgive. He is just that big. That huge, that powerful and that mighty. None of our sin, even mass murder, is bigger and more powerful, more evil, than He is good.
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That said the other thing that came out this week is that same ol’ same ol’ crap of “ya, that’s the goal sure ’nuff, but we all sin, its just a big circle, down we go into sin, up we come, down we go. It is what it is.”
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Holy shoot fire, you’re sure God is okay with that freakin’ attitude? Oh ya, that’s gotta come from that whole misreading of Romans 7. Read it again folks, but this time read it from chapter one on through to the end. Blow on past the end and read a bit in Philippians and some of Paul’s other inspired letters and maybe, just maybe you’ll get the sense that the helpless guy is the guy under the Law, not indwelt by the Holy Spirit. No, we are not without sin, not saying that, but we sure as heck are not freakin’ slaves to the “Circle of Life” that includes dippin down into sin and coming up for a little God-air.
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So this is me, not having learned to be very graceful over summer vacation: Get over yourself. Get over yourself and help me get over myself. Don’t tell me anymore that my sin has an excuse if only the excuse that “we are all sinners.” Ya but, should I be wallowing in it or scheduling it into my cycle?!
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And stop wringing your hands or being complacent even about these imagined dry times. There is no such thing. God is willing to yap your ear off. It is just that He is most likely saying things that make you warm under the collar, make you wiggle in your seat, make you question your conformability, make you consider disrupting your life. Perceived dry time? It is not because He is withholding, it is we that are withholding, we are the ones who are cheating on the relationship, it is we who look for a sweeter lover, not God. He chose us, He wed us, and no matter how horrifyingly skanky whorish we are He is never leaving us even for a trial separation.
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But we oughten to come at God and demand that we have our way, our time of disobedience and then our forgiveness, our endless chats about ourselves.
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Hope you’ve settled into the easy chair Dear Reader, there are many more chats about ridding ourselves of the mishmash, the deceptive philosophies of this world.