Where I am at...

Besides being Crazy busy.

I get the privelege of bringing a friend home from prison tommorrow. I roll out today with a lot on my mind. I have more than one friend who needs a job. Looking for housing has also become a challenge these days... In this process grace seems to be thin and the room for new chances for new beginnings in our current society feels thin. Any help with networking is greatly appreciated.

The cat for me is out of the bag. A friend a long time ago noticed that I never appear angry. I learned a long time ago to wall out such powerful emotional feelings. Every once and a while I would withdraw with some depression -- I have learned now to call that frozen anger. Even more rarely I would explode in my own unique way... Just recently hurt a friend in this kind of explosion only to withdraw into depression. Here is the secrete root of some of my own compulsiveness... now exposed to the light. It is time to grow time. Time to look and revisit life. Time to learn a wider range of healthy emotions. Mel Gipson's film helped crack the shell. Jesus shows an amazing capacity to stay present and to love in the midst of the pain. I see the same truth in scripture... and his death is equally for me as for any of us...

"Be angry and Sin not"... Comfort at this point and escapism is a threat to personal depth of character. To move from being reactive to being proactive. Fatih functions with eyes to lean into the future (Hebrews 11). If much of my life is reactive... some of that part of my life is yet to be brought under the "Way of Peace" that is found in Christ. What I know in my heart needs time to be worked through in my heart. Like Paul said... "I do not want to have preached to others and find myself disqualified."

Some who know me may say I am being too hard on myself. Thank you for your concern. I know that I have tasted the fruit of faith and I am hungry and thirsty for more. It takes a time of shaking and getting rid of every hinderance...(Hebrews 12) sometimes in a radical way to progress in faith. Love is the goal and the reward... to find in one's heart a genuine love for every neighbor... and this kind of love also is free enough from attatchments not to "keep any records of wrongs" -- I Corinthians 13.

I am not saying that we should not confront or challenge. It is the motive and the method that I am looking to grow in... we work to help love grow... this means working for justice for example... to work for justice being motivated by the wrong doing leads to burn out. To work for justcie being motivated out of love and compassion leads to freedom. I have smelt the fire burning up the twists in my motives... the sifting has just arrived on a public stage of life. "God is determined that if anyone is going to do 'God's work' that it will be done in 'God's Way'".

Leasons in humility are waiting and are in line for me... and maybe some of you as well.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdome of God".