Moments

  We often use a location app that helps us follow family follows when they travel. Often when the app is first accessed, the view is close up.  It is hard to determine where the family member is, where they are going, or where they have been.  Consequently, we have to zoom out to take in the full map.  Then we can see how our family member fits into the full map, the big picture, not the small little circle we first saw them in. I find  this true in the Christian experience as well.  We can lose the sense of our true place and time and feel our little circle is the world and sometimes we think we are the center of it.  Our problems, our responsibilities, and our little issues and our importance become all there is.   There doesn't seem to be any big picture. We get so lost in ourselves and our little worlds that, like the blown-up locator view, we don't really know where we are, where we are going, or where we have been.  And to make it worse sometimes at the end of the day we

  Church can be problematic.  I once told my wife that I had to stop going to church before I lost all my faith.  Many times, I have found the church to be  a regular insincerity center, where God is supposedly worshiped but worship gets seemingly lost in church promotion, and or self-promotion.  It's a business model for God so to speak.  What  about love?  Where does love fit into this business model?  I have been to big churches with big performances, and I've been to small churches and everything in between.    In big production churches folks praise and raise hands with their eyes closed like they are having a real experience with the Holy Spirit.  They sing the seven words of a song for the 11th time and the band makes loud music to enhance the full Christian experience.  But oftentimes when the "high" subsides and the service ends, I have seen these same praise and raise people close ranks and show little interest in any one other than those of their own group.

    There was not a breath of air.   The humid stillness hanging in the silence of the forest   tense in its breathlessness. Amplified by the quiet, a loudness suddenly crashed about in the limbs of a large tree.   A large dead branch was tumbling noisily through the other branches to end its days above the earth.     What made the limb fall at this one moment.   Surely, not wind or gust or freeze.   Perhaps, it was just time, that’s all: just a time, the moment, the breaking point when decay had mitigated the limb’s strength that it could not support its own weight-----Yes, perhaps, it was time.   And in life there just sometimes comes a time, to shed off the dead and rotting in life and let it crash to the ground.   Sometimes it is time to give more wholly to God and the things rotting fall.  

        As a child I once got lost in the woods.    It is hard to remember it now but I do remember the fear upon realization that I was indeed lost.    Things looked differently.   Nothing seemed familiar.    Finally I came to a gate that I had never found before in my other adventures in these woods.   When I looked across the pasture past the gate, there was a strange old house.   In my young mind I wondered if it were a witches house.   Then the conflict:   I was lost and this was the only sign of civilization that   I had found in seemingly hours of wandering around in the woods.    I had to take the chance, but I would be ready to run back to the woods if things got bad at all.     As I left the gate and the woods and walked cautiously toward the old house.   Little by little it begin to come to me as.   As I began to come to myself I realized that the gate that I had come   to was the one I opened to go into the woods to begin with.   The old house was no witch’s house b