AspieWritesWhat

     The hour we first believed was the hour of our ruin. It was the hour we died.  This death, though traumatic, was actually a transformation. It was the door to life. It was the cutting away of an old identity, leaving a tonsured space where a new, sanctified identity could exist. Because we were terrified of death during that dark night of the soul , we clung to new life being offered and to Him who offered it. A new life, and a newly regenerated self to experience it. W e were escaping one form of bondage to be delivered into another! It was terrifying to have the earth tremble under our feet as this brutal realignment took replace, even if we were safe in the cleft of the rock .  Before our first encounter with the living God, our own original nature was the easy yoke and the light burden.  If dying and being reborn in Christ wasn't traumatic enough, there is the prospect of living in a world not as its child but as its apostate. And why? Because...

"Character is what you are in the dark." -attrib. to American evangelist Dwight L. Moody   (1837-1899) "Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation.  Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely  what others think you are." -Dale Carnegie (1888-1955)      The Ring of Gyges was the inspiration for the One Ring of Power in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings mythos.  http://mysteriouswritings.com/the-ring-of-gyges-the-lord-of-rings-by-duncan-burden/  It isn't like the One Ring of Power, cut from Sauron's own finger by Isildur during Middle Earth's War of the Last Alliance (S.A. 3429 -- S.A. 3441). Gyges was the name of the shepherd who found the ring after an earthquake exposed a strange bronze horse in the Greek countryside of Lydia, the horse being hollow and the ring inside it, on the finger of a long-dead giant, the bronze horse serving as his tomb. Gyges discovered he coul...

     To be made perfect in the Lord is to burn in the Refiner's Fire. Because we wish to be holy as He is holy, our impurities are forcibly extracted yet never without our consent. We choose to go into the fire to have our imperfections burned away. The attachments we form to this world during our life's journey become part of us, something like ennervated flesh, a body of death desperate to thrive despite its nature. It goes without saying that the members of such a body cannot endure the fire of purification. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away from you ( Matthew 5:29-30 ). It's better for you to lose one part of your body through temporary suffering than for your whole body to be thrown into hell to suffer eternally. All souls must taste death at least once, and for many the second death will cut off any hope of ascent on Jacob's Ladder. (Jesus Christ is the Jacob's Ladder between heaven and earth upon whom angels ascen...

     From the secret place in our hearts, God’s Spirit compels us. When the Spirit moves us, it is because the Spirit is moving in us, and through our agency others are transformed as a result of His. The painlessness of this dynamic depends, of course, on how much we resist it. The power of the indwelling Holy Spirit can be as much of a burden as a gift, since the eye of the Witness in our hearts is all-seeing. (Psalm 139:23-24)  Imagine the sound of a ticking pocketwatch, wrapped in cotton. It’s the kind of sound only a man with superhuman hearing could detect. Or possibly an auditory hallucination of a man with deathwatch beetles chewing through the timbers of his mind. In Edgar Alan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) this sound heralds the Narrator’s nervous breakdown while being interviewed by police investigating a disturbance. There had been a blood-curdling scream in the night. The Old Man, who might have been the Narrator’s houseguest o...

     According to the World Happiness Report for 2017 [link] , the happiest place on earth is officially Norway. As of March 29 of this year, the United Nations estimates its population to be 5, 315, 405. [link]  Norwegians as a whole are happier than anyone else on the planet, or at least that's what the WHR would have us believe. According to Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network [http://unsdsn.org/] , the key to human happiness is sound government policy (ie. Socialism). Trust, not guns or walls, says Sachs. The report puts Donald Trump's America, the country to which lack of trust, "guns" and "walls" probably alludes, on the list at #14. Canadians are officially the seventh happiest people in the world, for what that's worth. Some things in the above info-graphic seem straightforward and objectively measurable, like GDP per capita and healthy life expectancy, but the others, li...

Tuesday March 21, 2017 "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”  -The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear Dune , Frank Herbert "If you fear death, you are already dead." ~Bushido (Way of the Samurai)      "Fear" appears 68 times in the NIV New Testament, and 268 times in the Old. The biblical use of the word can be confusing, since its meaning is twofold. To fear the Lord is to obey Him, to follow Him, to be a proper witness to His holiness, and to keep His commandments. It implies having a correct vertical relationship with God, characterized by reverential awe as well as by love and worship. In this sense, fear is positive and beneficial. It is attentiveness, loyalty, the willingne...

Monday March 13, 2017 “CURRENCY”      You’ve heard it said, “Find your treasure-house.” Inside it will be the currency that makes one great in the world to come, stacked to the ceiling like gold bullion in a vault. A vault is designed to be impenetrable save for authorized persons, but your treasure-house is the tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, deep within you. It was meant to feed multitudes. Imagine, if you can, the device neatly stamped into each brick of Kingdom gold: the Great Seal of the Lamb. And underneath, a motto: MORE BLESSED TO GIVE THAN TO RECEIVE. What do you think? Kingdom gold would be nearly transparent, resembling glass. Its brilliance would blind you, as you are now. Such is the stuff with which New Jerusalem’s streets are paved! Your place in the Kingdom of Heaven, the place prepared for you personally by our Lord Jesus Christ, will reflect what you have done with the wealth of heaven as allotted to you. You are to invest the Talents (no ca...

Saturday, January 28th 2017     " And we are put on earth a little space / T hat we may learn to bear the beams of love ..."         ~from  "The Black Boy" by William Blake            = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =           To bear them, and to wield them! The beams of love comprise the living gaze of God. They are the love, joy, peace, and quickening endlessly poured out for all mankind from His generous cup. The tongues of fire above their heads at Pentecost were these beams hardening into fixed points. When we were little ones in the faith, w e had to guard our little lights from the terror of the night  and the arrows which flew by day.  We had hearts of stone becoming hearts of flesh, suffering the new innervations as blood bloomed and blush rose. A round us the holy seal of chrism wa...

Wednesday January 11, 2017       If you tilt your head just so and squint your eyes just right, the whole world looks like a Second Empire sitting room. Specifically, the sitting room from Jean-Paul Sartré's play "Hui Clos / No Exit" , published in 1944. To be sure, this is not Dante Alighieri's malebolge , and there is no Prince of Demons here.  This place represents the refined man's idea of pleasantness and comfort, circa 1944.  Three sofas, one door, a mantel fireplace with an atrocious bronze statuary, and a paper-knife (what we in 2017 would think of as an Exacto knife). I t's an optical illusion, but the kind that reveals what is hidden behind the curtain of our everyday life ... maybe.   Life as we know it to be belies the absurdity of life as it really must be ... according to Jean-Paul  Sartré . Despair/Absurdity is that awful thing behind the curtain, too awful even to think about, lest the void devour our souls. ...