ON GOD’S PORCH

ON GOD’S PORCH

ON GOD’S PORCH

So let me see, SUNDAY, October 2. I am still here and I have the sharing of Two Guardian Angels keeping track of me. This morning’s walk included about 7-8 squirrels as we walked to the park and back. It is interesting to have squirrels stop what they are doing and then up the tree to the closest limb and just stop and stare at us as I stop by to say hello.

Each one, different trees, as we made our way to the park and back.

“You’re doing well, have a great day, take care of yourself”.

They were making my day as I moved about.

We are not alone in this Iowa universe. The Owls chat, the squirrels chat, the other dogs say Hi, and I smile and say hi. They record my progress one to another, to another to another. We are all entities that watch the sunrise and sunset. They feel the air get cooler and the wind blows more, or less. A human walks by and says “What a beautiful day”. The journey of more than people.

As you go about the day see all the creatures that GOD has provided you, as well as the people of a world that GOD enjoys. OUR CARES AND PRAYERS GO OUT FOR ALL OF YOU, AND ALL OF THEM.

THERE IS ALWAYS A GIFT ON GOD’S PORCH

ME, Mack and Jake

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Accomplished

As I was sitting down the other evening, and thinking about just what “Life Is” some 70 years into “Life Is”. Some things came to my attention. I found myself thinking about just what have I accomplished so far in my life?

I thought about my debt to asset ratio after all these years. I have seen many of the retirement preparations shows on the TV and how I have made it to this point. I am in the Social Security part of my life. I still work and probably will for the rest of of my life. The question rambled throughout my head just what have I accomplished?

I explain it to people that I am independently poor.

That word ACCOMPLISHED seemed to jump out at me like I had just entered into a boxing ring. Just what have I accomplished in my life? I have a long list of what I have wanted to accomplish. What I wanted in elementary school, or high school, or college. How about that first job, or the last one.

In the world of religion and GOD and JESUS and BUDDHA, and many more different religious groups and beliefs is UNORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY.

WHAT HAVE I ACCOMPLISHED?

How many of us ask ourselves what have we accomplished so far in this Life? People I have talked to in my life have asked me, religiously, in different ways, what have I accomplished in my life? So I asked GOD for a clarification.

Just what, GOD, have I ACCOMPLISHED in 70+ years so far?”

As though it was written by an ancient prophet from somewhere, GOD wrote it like this:

Life is not about all the things you may have wanted to do. Life is about all of the things that you have done. The people that you have met. The opportunities that you have had a chance to help of or be a part of something important or just fun.

Life is not about what I may feel that I have missed in life. Life is about the journey that I and you have been on as individuals. That is what started on the day I was born and won’t end until I have the opportunity to start over again, and again, and again. That has been called eternal life. It is a thief sharing a cross with JESUS that recognized that JESUS should not have been punished for being good, and Jesus’s response was “Today you will be with me in Paradise”. For a thief, It was recognizing that it was not for accomplishing the great things that he may have wanted, It was now about what he had ACCOMPLISHED in the journey. “Today I will be with Him in Paradise”.

The journey starts every day. It is all you have done and enjoyed and what has become your journey. It is about where you may have crossed the path with someone you will forever remember. The smile someone else brought to you face. The bottle of water that came over to you when you were working to help someone next door. It was watching a baseball game of the kids playing next door and the smiles on their faces. It was opening that first box of girl scout cookies.

It is not about me, it is whatever you have done and what it has become. It has become your life, your friends, your challenges. Your decisions. It is your story and your history for you. You have accomplished more than you recognize. You have worked on LIFE since day one. You can sit in your easy chair and smile at the things that have come your way and made you smile, or changed a disaster and met a friend you will only meet once and forever remember.

Unorthodox Christianity is rooted in an opportunity to take a tremendous journey through Life in what has been and is your world. Just what have you accomplished? You are on your way there, everyday.

On Gay Lifestyles: Love is like a Diamond

It is Time : A Treatise on ‘Homosexuality’
Gay Lifestyles: Love Is Like A Diamond
from 2-05-2006

I was listening to the sermon the other Sunday at our local church. It wasn’t scathing, but it dealt with the issue of gay lifestyles. Of course, the various Bible passages that deal with ‘homosexuality’ were brought up. Paul’ s take, the passages on marriage, between a man and a woman, and others. Couched within the language of ‘care’ the passages non the less were all interpreted so as to equate ‘homosexuality’ as abnormal, inhuman, or somehow outside of GOD’S design.

Upfront, I disagree. And that is to be expected from my Unorthodox Christian viewpoint.

Somehow, in my viewing language and within my history, I deal in colloquialism. Is what the old languages called ‘eunuch’, a term interchangeable with what we today call homosexual? Is the term we refer to as ‘gay’ apply to many of those that the Bible writers were referring to in various passages, those who showed a preference for their own gender rather than the opposite?

I have asked many questions to myself regarding the gay lifestyle over my life, especially within the context of my own theories of spirit movement. As I have discussed previously, there can be no mistaking Jesus’ belief in spirit inhabitation. The stories of spirits cast out, returning, inhabiting bodies, etc. are many. The Legion story leads way to the woman who sweeps one spirit out only to have seven return. One might assume that only bad spirits travel about, but there must be ‘good’ spirits also that wander and seek homes in people. The ‘holy spirit’, as one is called, comes and visits by “GOD’S’ direction. If a ‘holy spirit’ can come and go, then there are no doubt others that come and go amongst people, some perhaps not so holy, and some just sojourners on a journey through the physical world on their way to wherever they go. For all we know, the journey of spirits from one human life to another to another could be the entire structure of life, its design, and function. It was a belief held prior to Jesus time, during Jesus time, and exists to this day in various world religions. Christianity, as a religion, is relatively new comparative to ‘time’. How long have spirits been journeying? In what forms have these spirits journeyed, as male, or female, or both? Once or twice as each, or a thousand, or a thousand thousand? Do they always return as the same gender, culture, race or time? I discuss this throughout my spirit writings.
I recall relationships that seem as though the spirit, or perhaps one of a few spirits that dwell in me, recognizes the spirit that indwells another, someone whom I recognize as familiar, yet whom I know I have not yet met physically. Yes, I said spirits, plural. Is Legion unique, or merely an extreme?

What causes a good person, child or adult, to commit a vicious crime that seemingly is totally opposed to his or her nature? What causes a sane person to “go off the deep end?” Is it a temporary possession, or merely the manifestation of a dormant spirit. Can the spirit of a memory inhabit a new friend, and then just as suddenly retreat or leave that same person? Is the exorcism of a spirit imagined or real?
In light of this, what is to say that after many lives within female bodies, the sudden manifestation of a female ‘gendered’ spirit into a male body causes extreme confusion in that male ‘host’. Is this some sort of evil manifestation, or merely the natural result of the dual nature that is caused by spirits inhabiting human bodies. Is this ‘gay’ lifestyle, merely reversion into a previous existence where two spirits recognized the relationship they lived before subconsciously and are attempting to duplicate it, whether in the same gendered bodies or not. Is it the manifestation of a previously female gendered spirit within a male body trying to duplicate its previous existence as a female human or a previously male gendered spirit within a female body trying to manifest a duplication of a previous male existence?

Would we call this, ‘the way I was born?” Or would it be, “I am more familiar with the way that this is.”

In Matthew chapter 19, beginning at verse 1 Jesus discourses on marriage. “Have you not read that the creator from the beginning made them male and female?” and then He said, “This is why a man must leave father and mother and cling to his wife.”

Is the male and female of which Jesus speaks merely referring to the physical body, or also a spirit gender that travels through lifetimes? Male often refers to the spiritual existence and female the earth (or physical) existence in ancient writing (i.e. Nag Hammadi).

In verse 12 Jesus discusses the issue of eunuchs. Again, is Jesus addressing an issue of whom we refer to ‘gay’ (both women and men). In our modern interpretation of language are we translating what is a reference to ancient homosexual tendencies as referred to in those times as ‘eunuch’?

Was there, in that age, female gendered ‘eunuchs’ or only ’emasculated’ males?

It is not a topic that received much attention in the colloquial writings of the day. Irregardless, Jesus states, “ there are eunuchs born that way from their mother’s wombs, there are eunuchs made so by men and there are eunuchs who have made themselves that way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”

Is it unlikely that many are born ‘emasculated’ from their mother’s womb, or who choose to be ‘emasculated’ for the sake of the kingdom of heaven? A Catholic priest, choosing a celibate lifestyle, would by this definition of Jesus be considered what the translator refers to as a Eunuch, one who chooses to live outside of the traditional male/female relationship, in this case to further the kingdom of heaven.

For the sake of questioning let us say that two spirits, who perhaps were physically married to each other for many years in a previous existence as a male and female spousal unit, reestablish their relationship in a time where they inhabit bodies of the same gender. Is the ‘love’ less for the sake of being the same physical gender? Do we seek out a special person in our journey of this physical life, or are we truly trying to reconnect with a spirit in a host now in this physical journey irregardless of the physical gender in this life journey?

If the spirit of a previous female gendered host’s life or (previous) lives, all of a sudden inhabits a male body in this new life (or a male spirit in a female body), how would it react if the opposite gendered historical spirit was dominant over the instinctive host (as it may be after many journeys)?

Is this “made that way from their mother’s womb”?

Do we know enough of the kingdom of GOD to pass any judgements whatsoever on the structure of human existence? I believe not.

Is it possible, or even necessary, to ‘fix’ spirit genetics?

I go back to diamonds. A diamond in the rough is a rock. The diamond requires a master to cut facets into the rock to create a diamond that reflects light and creates the beauty we recognize as a diamond of great value. The human race is to the kingdom of heaven what facets are to the beauty of a diamond. It requires all of the various facets of the diamond to make the diamond brilliant, so it is with the great variety of human nature, cultures, teaching and languages. Each is a contributory facet.

I am not so naive as to ignore the fact that many spirits can be self centered and instinctive. History is filled with the evil, power driven spirit that wishes to succeed at all costs. The death, destruction and viciousness of people to one another is not news to anyone. Success AT AN-others expense, is not an external force. Jesus admonishes, “It is not what goes into a man from without that defiles a man, it is what comes out from within.”

What I am saying, is that we simply do not know enough about the structure of life, the movement of spirits, or the design of existence, to pass judgment on those who love in whatever manner that they do.

I have been privileged to have been an outside salesman for many years. In the course of these positions I have called on many hospitals, hospices, nursing homes, care facilities, etc. and have found that the sensitive and caring male nurse that would exhibit what we may consider gay traits, give unceasingly and tenderly to those who require their care, in many instances where no one else will.

When asked about discipleship, Jesus also replied, “Love one another, by this they will know that you are a disciple of mine.” No caveats. It does not read that the key lies in fish symbols, or cross necklaces, or Judaistic caps or Catholic robes, by espousing Love alone and by living the new commandment to Love One Another, you display your reverence for love and become a disciple of Christ’s teaching. Is it necessary to brand yourself with a cross to follow a discipline of love? I do not believe so.

Jesus did not come to destroy the law of GOD (LOVE), but merely to fulfill the law that had been adulterated by men.

Love One Another. No caveats. By this they will know that you are a disciple of His. Even without knowing His name, such disciples preceded Jesus, their names simply have not been recorded, and those who have their names recorded permeate our scripture and the scripture of other cultures.

As Jesus said, “Let anyone accept this who can.”

Amen. (Moderately edited from 2005)

PS: The discussions of spirit travels are contained in many of the other writings on this site, and I will be adding to them as the ‘spirit’ so moves. God Bless.

dennis: The original is from my original site unorthodoxchritianity

http://unorthodoxchristianity.com/GayLifestyles

 

Living With Hope

The teachings of Jesus emphasized hope to a people in a time of persecution. Whether it was political, physical or mental Jesus’ message was one of hope through hard times.
It is my desire that Unorthodox Christianity also carry that message to all of those who feel disenfranchised by a traditional church and reflect a Jesus that was giving a message for all those who followed and even came in contact with him, that hope is always available and can become a way of life. Too often we interpret the promise of Jesus is life after death. The reality is that the hope of Jesus was that this hope is yours to have every moment. Change in a world of a GOD who is LOVE, is accessible to all who are open to its possibilities.
When asked once about how he was going to celebrate his birthday, the Dalai Lama replied, “Why would I celebrate the birth of my sufferings day?” The message of Jesus is that the hope of Jesus is a message of the joys that are inherent and available to us every day of our living. Life is to be embraced, even when it seems as though the persecution is winning. Hope, as has been said, springs eternal.

PastTense

Its seems sometimes as though the past is not so far away,
As if the past has found a home inside your everyday.
With power born of a tenacity that never seems  to tire
It stands its ground and won’t let go And pulls you through its fire.
And for what purpose it comes around to remind you of its presence,
That what was once does come again to live within your essence.

Past Tense is not simply left behind, it resides within your soul
and adds itself to this life’s living, as it did the one before.