AspieWritesWhat

     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...