The Secret of Forgiveness

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. (Matthew 6:12 NAS95)

Thank-you, John, for taking a very careful look at this verse. I always find it very rewarding to ask the kind of tough, close questions that you brought up with a mind open and ready to receive deeper insights from the Spirit of truth. And while I do not want to replace the role of that Spirit I believe that when people join their minds and hearts together to seek to see God's face more clearly through this kind of study that they are never disappointed. God is eager to interact with people ready to receive.

I combed through each word of this verse in the Greek and tried to listen to the sense of what it seems to be saying. I am not sure which translation you were referring to when you said you looked at the literal translation. I have Young's Literal Translation but it does not have it written the way you described. And I have to also say that since I know nothing about how Greek is written sequentially I cannot propose myself as an authority of any kind on the subtle aspects that may be in the original language. All I can do is to compare the meanings of each word in relationship to the surrounding words and then try to get a sense of how those meanings may interact in various ways that are consistent with the truth that God has revealed about His character.

I did see the word for our from the Greek and it denotes ownership of something. In fact, it seems to be the word defining ownership. It is the exact same word used in the previous phrase also translated our connected to debts. So both of these instances seem to be noting the owner of whatever is the object of the phrase. In the first phrase the word debts seems to be the object of the our. In the second phrase it is debtors who are the object of the our.

What I find interesting is the difference between the words behind those two words that could give some insight for the our in each phrase. The first one refers to something that is owed, a debt but not just in a financial sense. It refers to a moral debt which in my understanding involves a hurt or injury at the heart level. It is that feeling you get when you know that someone owes you an apology, a debt that has been created by an injury or a violation of your freedom or your spirit. Your feelings and your spirit have been injured and damaged and someone clearly is the cause of that. Because of the way we are created we sense that an imbalance in our connectedness with others (or even ourself) has been created that needs to be restored to balance in some way before we can feel at peace.

The second word translated debtors is very similar but refers directly to the person involved who apparently created the injury. It carries all the same implications of the first word but places the focus on the person involved, not just the nature of the feeling.

Now when I add the our to each of these words involving debt what I see is that in the first case I am the owner of the debt created and in the second case I am the owner of the debtor – not owner in the sense of the one who generated it but owner in the sense that I am the one still holding the bag, the one who has controlling interest in the existence of this debtor and what is done about it.

When I see it from that light I see more clearly how consistent that is with everything I have learned from the various healing ministries and my own experiences in this area of life. The mistake that most of us make in relationship to the concept of emotional debts is that we think that the person who has offended us is the one responsible to remove the debt. After all, they are the one who clearly created it and therefore we assume that they likewise have the power to remove or fix it.

Wow, the more I get into this the more my own heart is being affected by what is emerging. This is really stirring up deep feelings inside of me as I ponder this. Thanks again for inviting me to look at this. Maybe God prompted you to bring this up for some very specific purpose that I am not aware of quite yet.

Believing that the people who have offended me are the ones responsible for repairing the damage they caused me is like going down a dead-end street expecting to emerge into the freedom of a super-highway. For it is becoming more clear from my own study and from all the things I have learned from other people that have explored this area is that the only way any of us will ever become free from the heavy weight of the emotional debts we all experience is to first take full ownership of the debt. Otherwise we can never be in a position to do anything truly effective about it.

The other alternative that produces even worse results is to indulge in the temptation to desire revenge or retribution against the debtor (who happens to also be owned by us in some sense according to the wording here). And this brings me back around to the main point of your original question yesterday. You said that what you saw in a literal translation of this verse was that we would be forgiven our debts by God just as we forgave ourselves of our debts. In a certain sense that is actually very accurate to a degree but can be confusing if not carefully considered in the context of everything else surrounding this.

The sense in which this can bring significant insight to this concept of forgiveness is the fact that we are the owner both of the debt created and have controlling interest in the existence of a debtor. When this is more clearly perceived I believe the difference between whether the debt was created by ourselves against ourselves or was created by someone else against ourselves may become possibly insignificant. What may be the main point that Jesus is making here is that we are the one with all the power to initiate a resolution of the problem and that even the forgiveness of God may be blocked from us by our unwillingness to release a debt or grudge that we carry, either against others or even possibly ourselves.

I hasten to add that blocking God's forgiveness from our heart has nothing whatsoever to do with God's side of this matter. We cannot prevent God from forgiving us. That is a fact that has always existed, even before Jesus died on the cross. Jesus did not come to die in order to procure forgiveness for us but He came to die to reveal the forgiving reality of the heart of God, both the Father and the Son. Forgiveness is a fact of reality that we only struggle to believe because of the massive deceptions that we struggle under, not because God has to be convinced to forgive. Forgiveness is something that describes the very nature of God that has never changed and never will.

The process of salvation is totally dedicated to bringing us back into alignment with the heart of the God in who's image we were created. Because of that Jesus came to both teach us and demonstrate what that original looks like and acts like and feels like and thinks like. And part of that process of re-education is exposing the basic principles by which reality exists. This issue of forgiveness and who has the power to initiate resolution and reconciliation is one of those principles of reality that has been seriously obscured by the great deceiver.

What Jesus is telling me here is that if I want to experience the reality of God's forgiveness and all the commensurate healing that will accompany that experience, I must choose to be willing to act in the same manner as God acts toward me. Of course, if I still have mistaken ideas about how God feels about me or how He forgives, then those mistaken ideas will corrupt my ability to live in the perfect freedom from bitterness and resentment that Jesus demonstrated in His life on earth.

Jesus wants us to realize the tremendous power we have within our own mind and heart to initiate our own freedom from all the debt that is literally killing us slowly in our hearts. God respects and values our freedom so immensely that He will never force us to forgive. Our will is the most important part of our makeup and is the key element that enables us to reflect the real nature of God Himself. Our free will is the only thing we have that empowers us to enter in to the experience of genuine love, for love has to be free or it is not love.

God deeply desires our love, for He created us to interact with His heart in that way along with all those around us. Forgiveness is the door waiting for us to pass through on our way to that freedom of perfect love. But one of the most important parts of this situation that we must be aware of is that we ourselves are the owners and possessors of the key that can unlock our prison cells of fear and pain or resentment. Our will is the hand that can take the key of forgiveness and with the authority of ownership we can both release the weight of the debt that is crushing the life out of us and can change the attitude of our heart toward those who we insist are our debtors, whether that be someone else or even ourselves.

A debtor is a label, a description of our perception of the identity of someone. When we determine that someone deserves the label of debtor, we ourselves are the one who determines that label in our own mind, we are the owner of that mental and social opinion of someone described as debtor. So because the whole concept of indebtedness is really an attitude, a state of mind that we maintain about someone, we as the owner of that concept are the only ones with the power to change that belief. For nothing that anyone else can do can force us to change our belief about the identity of whoever we consider to be a debtor. That is something only we can choose to do.

But likewise, I believe Jesus is revealing a parallel principle in this verse. We will always act like the perceived God we believe exists in our life. So if we refuse to forgive and release a debt and a debtor from our hearts, we also incapacitate our own hearts from embracing that forgiveness that has always existed and has always been available to us from the heart of God. This is not because God withholds it from us but because we lock the door of our hearts from being able to let it in.

This is very clearly implied in the word translated as in this verse. It denotes a direct linkage between the way we choose to act and think with the way we receive from God. It is a law of the mind in this case that the only way we can experience true forgiveness is to be willing to exercise it just as it is offered to us. Apparently the same part in the brain is required for both of these things. It is only when we unlock the door of our heart and release the debt owed to us that we will be able to experience the receiving end of that same experience. It is a very pointed application of the principle seen in what is called the Golden Rule.

Getting Real About Emotions

When we deny the reality of what we feel, we force ourselves to live a form of self-deception. It also results in consequences for others.... It produces either dishonest relationships or no relationships at all. - Jon Paulien.

These are words that I read this morning from Jon's devotional book that made a deep impression on me today. He talked about the fact that there is a lot of reference to emotions in the book of Revelation. Emotions are part of God's design for us and as such, to live in denial of them is only to ask for trouble and dysfunction in our lives.

This was particularly interesting since just moments before I had opened up my heart to God in a deeper way emotionally than I have been able to do for a very long time. For whatever reason I found myself capable of a level of honesty, an ability for my left brain to more accurately give voice to the deeper feelings of my right brain than is usually accessible. As I did so I also experienced a deeper level of bonding to God and more assurance than I usually feel which creates greater trust and faith as a result.

For some this may seem like a discussion of what should be obvious. For others it may sound like dangerous heresy. I happen to come from a background more oriented to the second reaction. And though I have had trouble at times controlling my emotions and that has gotten me into trouble at times, especially when it comes to authorities, at the same time I have been subtly taught to repress my emotions for so long that I now find myself helpless to even connect with many of them that still need outlet in appropriate ways.

This issue of how to relate to emotions can itself generate a great deal of emotion among people. My own view of this has changed quite a bit over the years and I am still in great need of more training by the Spirit of God as to how to not only live in right relationship to my own emotions but how to rightly relate to others when they are experiencing emotions that may frighten or overwhelm my own. What I still find is that my own reactions to other people's emotions range from isolation and disconnect to urges that if followed through might compromise my integrity. This is likely the area of my life that is in the greatest need of more maturity.

One thing that I am learning however, and that was brought out by Jon Paulien in today's reading, is the important fact that it is not wrong to honestly express how I feel to God. In fact, that is likely the most important lesson that most of us yet have to learn and that can bring an enormous amount of release and peace into our lives if practiced regularly.

One of my good friends named Doug some years ago shared his experience with me of how he learned this important lesson. He was living the double life of a very practiced hypocrite in the church and had it developed to a fine art. However, his inner soul could not sustain the immense pressure that always accompanies such a life and one day while standing in front of the congregation he confessed to them that he had decided to go to a recovery house designed for drug addicts and alcoholics to get help for his addiction to religion.

As he related to me, this did not go over well at all with the people sitting in the pews and their faces reflected little emotion or compassion for him. Instead, what he felt was something like rejection and horror that he should be so brash as to blow his cover and threaten their own nicely manicured facades. He did go to the recovery house and ended up spending more time there than most of the other addicts because his problem was so deeply embedded. In fact, the leader of the retreat told him that he was one of the worst cases of religious addiction that they had ever seen.

While trying to work to a place of recognition of his problem there, he told the story of how he finally cracked the shell of his facade and broke into the reality of his true heart. During a group session he was finally triggered and angered to the point that he went off to a room by himself and burst into violent accusations and an intense outburst at God directly. He began to call God every vile epitaph that he could imagine and his heart just gushed with rage that had been pent up for many years.

He assumed that this would be the end of any relationship that he might have ever had with God and that God might even be so upset that He might send a bolt of lightening to end this outburst. But to his absolute utter amazement what he keenly sensed as his tirade exhausted itself was something the exact opposite. As he stood there emotionally exhausted and spent and in fear of what might happen next, he had a most distinct perception that God was looking down on him from heaven and was clapping vigorously and even smiling. He had the impression that God was very excited about him and was eager to establish a whole new relationship with him based on the new honesty that had finally emerged from this release of emotion. He heard God in his heart saying, “Finally! I've been waiting for years for you to get this off your chest and out of the way. Now we can start to build a real relationship.”

This story that I have heard from Doug many times never fails to be given without fresh emotion each time it is told. And because of that it has had deep impact on many with whom it has been shared. And while each person comes from their own background and will have very different experiences in their journey to being real, I have no doubt that God's deep desire for each one of us is to get real and honest about what is really in our hearts instead of obsessing about keeping our appearances in order and propping up the facade that we have so carefully constructed for most of our lives. As one of my favorite speakers and writers, Clarissa Worley Sproul has said, “God doesn't meet with shadows and He doesn't dance with facades.”

Learning to be real and to be honest about our own emotions is a very delicate and tricky business many times. But it is also what Jesus was talking about when He insisted that unless we become like a little child we will never be able to enter the kingdom of heaven. I often find it so refreshing and energizing sometimes to just intensely observe little children who are still open and honest enough to live life without a facade. It is like a glimpse into the potential of what God created humanity to experience all the time but has been largely obscured by the oppressive darkness of hypocrisy and deception that nearly all adults practice in this world.

While it is very frightening to even consider moving toward that place of living in total honesty and transparency, it is also one of the important requirements for being able to function within the true body of Christ in the kingdom of God. But at the same time it is generally well beyond my own capacity to accomplish. That is exactly what I was discussing with God this morning. For if God does not work in me and transform me supernaturally by His grace to bring me to that place of complete openness and truth then it can never happen at all. For it is not something that I can ever do in my own effort.

Jon finishes his reading for today by offering this advice. We can begin to achieve God's design by expressing our feelings to God. Jesus did that on the cross. God can take it. He prefers an honest disagreement to a dishonest submission! And He already knows how you feel, so it is safe. Feelings can hurt, but they can also bring us healing, togetherness, and love.

Poverty of Spirit and Faith

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:3)

Wow! This has got me really thinking again. As I thought about this after writing my last piece on this I continued to become aware of more verses that are very relevant that connect with this.

What is the natural reaction to learning that one is poor? Well, I don't think it is wrong to believe that a person upon discovering that they are poor should desire to be enriched in that thing in which they are deficient. And even though Jesus declared that the poor in spirit are blessed, I am not sure that it is safe to conclude that they should be satisfied to remain in that poverty just because they can be considered blessed. I believe that the reason they should consider themselves blessed is not because they should be happy and content in remaining poor but are blessed because they are honest enough to recognize their true condition. And this honesty will allow them and motivate them to hopefully move in the right direction to effectively address the problem of their poverty.

So what is the right way to deal with poverty of spirit? Well, it only makes sense that one would need to find a source that is rich in spirit and then establish enough of a relationship with that entity in hopes that possibly the one who is more wealthy may have enough generosity to take pity on the one who is poor and share some of their wealth with them. Isn't that what most of us would conclude?

That is why I got excited when another verse was brought to my attention that fits this very scenario. Check this out.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us... (Ephesians 2:4)

Now link that thought with this verse that explicitly tells us what God is.

"God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." (John 4:24)

So what I am seeing here is that God is clearly a spirit, the very area in which I am poor, and as a spirit He is extremely wealthy in mercy. In addition, a few verses on in Ephesians it says that He wants to demonstrate through us the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. (v. 7)

Now, I don't think there can be much dispute about the fact that God is rich. In fact, far beyond being rich in mercy as is described here He is rich in absolutely every sense that we can imagine the word to define. And I don't think many people believe that God does not share what He owns with us because He is too impoverished to do so or His supply is just too limited. No, that is not the reason most people have when they doubt God's generosity toward them. What is far more likely to emerge is people's doubts about God's feelings and intentions and motivations.

Most everyone believes God is both wealthy enough and capable enough to give us absolutely anything we could ever desire or want. But at the same time very few people really believe in their heart that God is willing or eager to do so. As a result Christians tend to come up with all sorts of rationalizations and explanations to excuse God's apparent stinginess so as to make Him not look quite as bad as we might suspect Him to be otherwise.

Jesus addressed this problem quite a bit when He was here on earth. He had a lot to say about our attitude about God's disposition toward us. He even claimed that if we had even a tiny amount of real faith that we would be empowered to do astounding things that would amaze the world – like pick up whole mountains and drop them effortlessly into the ocean (look out for the ships and the swimmers below). But so far I have mostly only heard excuses trying to spiritualize away these bold statements by Jesus with the effect of seriously diluting the effect that His statements were intended to have.

What I am starting to sense is that the real problem is not on God's side of the issue but is always on our side and our willingness to really take Jesus and God seriously about what they claim about God's feelings toward us. I have heard enough rationalizations throughout my life to keep my spiritual life quite impotent. What I want to experience is the real effects of genuine faith that will accomplish what Jesus claimed could be accomplished by anyone bold enough to take God seriously.

What I am also becoming aware of is my own deeply-embedded doubts about God's claims of mercy, love, compassion and spirit of forgiveness, especially when it comes to my situation personally. Yes, I am beginning to believe it slowly over time, but the reluctance of my own heart is a constant source of frustration for me because I know that I am the reason that God cannot do what He so deeply desires to do through me if I would just allow Him through the choice of faith. I am quite confident that Jesus could say accurately about me as He did about His own disciples when He was here on earth, O foolish men and slow of heart to believe...! (Luke 24:25)

But I notice a real obstacle to living in the awareness of my own poverty of spirit. It can be embarrassing to admit that I am poor in spirit. It goes against nearly everything I have been trained to do in religion and in society. Appearances and public perceptions are such an important part of life that to be honest about a lack like this in my spiritual life is to admit that I am not nearly as competent as I may think I am or may appear to others. This creates a strong potential for others to look at me with suspicion, to question my credibility and beliefs and to maybe look down on me as inferior to what they thought of me before. And that can really mess up my careful image management program!

The only effective path that I see to arrive at that place of genuine faith and vital power under the control of the Holy Spirit is for me to continue to seek God's face, to pursue the real truth about Him and more frequently expose my heart to the truths about God's richness and kindness. Because the very things that we doubt the most about God are the very things that He is most rich in – like mercy, compassion, patience, justice, goodness, kindness, faithfulness and all the other things that describe the actual truth about Him.

So after coming to acknowledge the reality of my own poverty of spirit, which is a very important first step to maturing in my relationship with Him, I need to come to believe in the reality of His generosity and that He is not only willing but is intensely eager to share all of His true wealth with my impoverished spirit.

There was a man who came to Jesus and wanted Him to heal his demon-possessed son. He had enough faith to at least show up and ask for help but he also had a lot of doubts that were being reinforced by the intellectuals and the religious leaders present who tended to look down on those who thought God might actually want to help them. These people worked tirelessly to promote their view of God as a stern, judgmental deity looking for every reason to keep people out of heaven and who had rigid demands for perfection and purity that must be achieved before He could approve of anyone.

But in spite of all this the man approached Jesus and timidly, fearfully petitioned Him to take a look at his son's case. But Jesus, instead of immediately addressing what appeared to everyone else to be the main problem turned to the father and confronted him directly about the true condition of his own heart and his doubts about God's goodness and kindness. This man suddenly came to see that his words to Jesus had betrayed the reality of the double-mindedness that he had in his picture of God and that what God really needed in order to help his son was a total commitment from the heart to the truth about God by this father.

And Jesus said to him, "'If You can?' All things are possible to him who believes." Immediately the boy's father cried out and said, "I do believe; help my unbelief." (Mark 9:23-24)

What Jesus did for this man is what I need for myself and what everyone of us needs. What I believe Jesus wants from us even more than faith is honesty. Faith can be produced in an honest heart, but self-deception and an unwillingness to acknowledge inner confusion and unbelief is something that effectively blocks even the Almighty from accomplishing what He so much longs to do in our lives. But when this man confessed his true feelings even though they were less than admirable, immediately Jesus was able to bring healing and closure to this tragic situation and fill their lives with joy and peace and life.

I believe this story may be a vivid illustration of one who was poor in spirit and yet was blessed. When this man came to acknowledge his true poverty then he found himself in a position of willingness to receive from the riches of God's abundance. What a wonderful lesson for me. I pray for a spirit of complete honesty like this man so that I too can be in line to experience first hand the power and blessings of God and so that my life can be a demonstration of the amazing riches of His grace in kindness toward me.

What's Wrong with Self-sufficiency?

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:3)

I have been enjoying a teen devotional each morning this year that sometimes elicits some very good insights for me. Today was one of those times. This verse was the one under consideration and the comments about it got me to thinking about this issue of being poor in spirit that has somewhat baffled me all of my life as it has the author.

He posed the question, What is wrong with self-sufficiency? I believe he hit the nail right on the head. After all, self-sufficiency is something that nearly every one of us in this culture have been trained to pursue all of our lives. We spend a great deal of time, training and energy on trying to cultivate independence from others, skills to market ourselves and years trying to get a better job in order to make more money in order to....

But then the author brought up another text that puts this issue into a different light, which is what usually happens whenever we are willing to look at life from heaven's viewpoint instead of our own assumptions and culture. What does God have to say about a group of people who have worked all their lives to become self-sufficient?

Because you say, "I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing," and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked... (Revelation 3:17)

Yes, I know that it is very easy to spiritualize away the meaning of both of these verses. That kind of reasoning is often used whenever we are still caught in the trap of compartmentalizing our lives into different sectors and carefully keeping them separated from each other. We work hard at religion when we go to church or other religious functions but feel free to be a different person to a great extent when we are out in the “real world” as we call it. Oh, we may feel come compulsions to restrict how far we go in our “secular” life so as not to damage our religious reputation, but we find no problem with living a double life. After all, isn't there even a text in the Bible that warns us against becoming over-religious?

So what is the problem with being self-sufficient in our secular life as long as we don't feel too self-sufficient in our religious life? Isn't that how we are supposed to interpret these verses? After all, the only thing we can imagine a person being who is not self-sufficient is somebody who lives as a free-loader mooching off the charity of others and we certainly would never want to stoop to that level.

But one thing came to my attention this morning while I was reading this. It is the issue of complete honesty with one's self which is possibly the most difficult thing for many of us to ever accomplish. Deception is one of the most important elements of Satan's kingdom and has been his main mode of operation since the very beginning of his rebellion in heaven at the throne of God. And self-deception is a given for anyone born into this world as a sinner which all of us are today.

The fact of the matter is that every one of us are really poor in our spirit. It is in our spirit where the real problem of sin affects our lives the most and sin has impoverished our spirit more than anything else. But self-deception that has been strongly reinforced by the deceptions pushed on us by the world around us keep us from understanding or believing the real truth about our own condition. Religion as we have almost always known it plays right along with this notion of the importance of self-sufficiency though it has a different spin on it at times. But if we really want to know our true condition as heaven sees it we must be willing to open our minds and hearts to the possibility that reality is radically different that what we have been led to believe all of our lives.

This is often a very frightening and intimidating proposal whenever it is encountered, especially for people who are confident in their religious life. Some people are forced to face the truth about themselves through tragedies or traumatic events in their lives and later come to deeply appreciate what at first they strongly resented. They realize that through intense trials they were actually given the opportunity to get in touch with reality and the true poverty of their own spirit and resources, and as a result they chose to turn to the only real Source of spiritual wealth and cast their souls completely on His mercy.

However, trauma and trials are not guaranteed to bring this wonderful result about in every situation. The choices each one of us makes are dependent on our own willingness to acknowledge the truth about ourselves whenever we are exposed to it. We can either embrace the truth of what we could not see before and humble ourselves to accept it from heaven's perspective or we can choose to go into even deeper denial in our effort to cling to the self-deceptions or religious scaffolding we have depended on for most of our lives.

I have been learning that this is not just a one or two time event but is something that occurs on a regular basis. I am daily faced with choices and opportunities to receive convictions from the Spirit about the real truth about myself that I have to decide what to do with. In fact, I have come to sense that if I am not under conviction about something for a long period of time that there is something likely amiss in my own relationship with heaven.

The most effective way that God uses to expose the poverty of my spirit is to allow me to see it in contrast to the beauty and attractiveness of His perfect Spirit and goodness and kindness. I am finding that the more real truth I discover about what God is like as opposed to what religion has often taught me, the easier it is to see my own inadequacies by contrast. For it is a fundamental truth that it is the kindness of God more than anything else that leads me to repentance. (Romans 2:4)

So I see that self-sufficiency is not all that it is cracked up to be. In fact, it is something to become legitimately alarmed about and a cause for concern and investigation. For to enter the kingdom of heaven requires nearly the very opposite of all the things we assume are true from our life in the kingdom of darkness. And just because we are very religious does not exempt us from still discovering that much of our life is still operating under false assumptions. After all, those described in Revelation 3:14-22 fully believed they were religiously correct and had nothing to worry about.

Father, thank-you for Your mercy in revealing to me my true condition. And thank-you for doing it in increments and not all at once most of the time. Your are so kind and gracious and merciful to me, but I need to perceive that so much more clearly. Continue to increase Your light in my heart and mind and mold me into the prince that You created in Your image. Dwell in me with Your Spirit today and cause me to reflect Your gentleness, kindness and goodness to everyone that my life may touch today – for Your name's sake.

Slow Clay Posts

I have been fascinated to observe the different sources or locations from which people arrive on my blog sites. Even more interesting is to see that many times it is the pictures that I selected for illustrations that seem to attract people to look at my sites which is still a bit baffling to me. I have not figured out how people can track a link from a picture on the web to a blog that is utilizing that picture. I plan to do some more research and investigation into this soon.

I realize that I have not been writing nearly as often on this blog as I used to. There are several reasons for this. The biggest reason is that most of my thoughts and ideas have been absorbed by my nearly daily postings on my other blog site, deeperword.blogspot.com where I have been carefully meditating and analyzing how the Word of God applies to me personally. This emerges from my daily times early in the morning listening to God and marinating in the Word. Even then I sometimes have difficulty getting my thoughts posted regularly even after they are written because of my increased busy schedule. I often have to leave the house for work before I have time to edit and post what I have recored that morning and end up doing it later in the day. Sometimes they even pile up until the weekend when I have time to finish each one and back-post it to the day it was written.

And that is the second reason that I have had less presence on the web over the past few months on this particular blog. God has blessed me with the opportunity to have a good amount of work this summer with a friend that I met at the Barbershop chorus that I joined early this year. In the past couple weeks we have been working long hours on starting a new home for a customer that will have solid log walls around the house and log siding over the rest of the attached parts. In the past few days we built the garage and put the roof trusses and decking on. We hope to dry it in tomorrow before the rain starts that promises to last all weekend.

Another possible explanation for why I have not spent more time posting to this particular blog is possibly something I might call cyclic – whatever (can't think of a good word to fit here). It is just that there seems to be times when ideas tend to coalesce more often and become more persistent in their need to be processed and captured. But then there seems to be other times when life tends to get more involved in other directions and I wonder what is going on in this arena. But it is during these cycles that appear to be something like down times that I sense somehow that the things I learn during the more spiritually intense times are trickling down deeper into the heart level many times and much of the unseen absorption is taking place. I don't know if that makes any sense but right now it seems to be the best way I can explain it.

I have been requested to lead out in a Bible study class at church this coming weekend. It is the first time they have asked me to do anything like this even though I had previously asked to be involved more. They have tended to act almost afraid or suspicious of me in the past and I suppose that this may be a test of the waters so to speak to find out if I am “safe” to interact with others within the structures that currently are in place. Of course this all may be just my own imagination and lack of mind-sight on my part. I certainly have a lot of improvement in this area to gain.

I know that the notes I have prepared are far more than I could ever possibly have time to cover in the very short time alloted for the study. That is already very frustrating to me but I also must learn to be patient and to develop a much more settled level of trust with them before suggesting alternative ideas to deepen the level of people's interest in hearing God in His Word.

Much of my heart dialog is being expressed on my study blog as I mentioned previously. And even though it revolves around what I am currently observing in the book of Romans, what I am recording is almost always very personal and many times uncomfortably vulnerable. That has not come back to bite me yet as I was afraid when first beginning to blog but that is still a very real possibility. However, as I have revealed in previous blogs I made a decision sometime back that I want to be a more open and honest person and these blogs have been probably my main outlet for expressing my deeper emotions, frustrations, convictions, dreams and desires.

I suspect that as the weather changes in the fall and I find myself homebound more often due to rain-outs at work that I may cycle back into a mode of much more writing again. But most of all I intend to pursue my passion to seek God's face, to discover the feelings of His heart, to be much more sensitive to the voice of His Spirit and to be much more tuned to the promptings and impulses that are available to all those who are truly led by the Spirit of God.

With that in mind I sometimes have to restrict my desires to write to allow my heart to have the time and space to grow without being constantly under the scrutiny of my paparazzi left brain taking notes for its next writing stint.

I have been disappointed that such very few people who actually visit my sites are willing to touch base with me in this venue. But then I continually remind myself that this platform is not something I want to turn into a means for leveraging others or trying to manipulate what they believe, but this is a venue for me to simply express what I am experiencing deep inside. I still find it very difficult at times to share with others verbally what I find much easier to put into writing. And I also remember that God is in charge of all these venues and that the thoughts He shares with me and that I simply report in these posts really belong to Him and are not mine to claim ownership over. As such, it is His business if He wants to use what I post to be a seed of truth or a channel of encouragement for someone without any need for me to know how or where He is using this. My position is to simply rest in Him, express what He is doing in me – which is the real definition of a witness – and leave all the results in His hands.

This reminds me of the parable of Jesus that He gave in response to His disciple's request to have more faith. That story has remained in the back of my mind for a number of years ever since I saw its much deeper meaning. It was not so much the activities of the servants in that parable of Luke 17 that were important but it was the attitude and disposition that they had in relationship to their master that was the key ingredient of the story. God has many times reminded me that that is the direction I am to move toward and the closer I get to having that kind of relationship with Him the sooner I will have much more faith myself. With them I will be able to more honestly say, 'We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that which we ought to have done.' (Luke 17:10)