What love do part 2

Do people who have never been under the religious laws of the Bible need to be put under those laws? If they are not placed under those laws how can anything but lawlessness abound?  These are 2 questions  that come from many church leaders today.  My answer to both questions is no and here is a brief look at why I say that.

This has always been an issue from the very earliest days of the church.  When Paul was writing to a group of Christians in Rome (most of whom he did not know), he wrote this:  NLT© 2:14 Even Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it.  2:15 They demonstrate that God’s law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right.

Now Gentiles just means anyone who is not a Jew.  So, Paul is really saying here that people who have never been subject to or have even heard these religious laws started doing them instinctively.  If they had never heard of these laws, what caused them to start doing them?  This is what "living loved and loving others" causes one to do.  Love is the fulfillment of the religious laws.  These laws just show what the byproduct of love really is.  

Love was written on their hearts and so they started doing rightly.  Love will guide, accuse and confirm their actions within the heart.  So I believe that when people start behaving badly towards another, they are just really showing that they do not love those people.

If bad actions show that love is misplaced, then why do we focus on coercing laws upon them instead of guiding them towards love?

What love do

There is a story in the Bible that tells of a time when people living under Roman rule and social beliefs [Which are very similar to the way Western Society (including the USA) lives today].  They also lived under the religious rule and commands that are very similar to what the religious right tries to force everyone to live by today.  This passage speaks to me because it shows the spontaneous response of people living in these conditions to "living loved and then being able to love others".

Here is the story from the NET Bible (emphasis mine):  Acts 2:42 They were devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship,  to the breaking of breadand to prayer.  2:43 Reverential awe  came over everyone,  and many wonders and miraculous signs  came about by the apostles. 2:44 All who believed were together and held  everything in common,2:45 and they began selling   their property  and possessions and distributing the proceeds  to everyone, as anyone had need. 2:46 Every day  they continued to gather together by common consent inthe temple courts, breaking bread from   house to house, sharing their food with glad   and humblehearts,  2:47 praising God and having the good will  of all the people. And the Lord was adding totheir number every day   those who were being saved.




Verses 44 and 45 speaks volumes to me about how love reacts to those arounds us.  Now before I go any further, let me say that I do not believe this to be socialism or at least how I've seen socialism played out in society.  Socialism has always been forced upon people and this is a spontaneous outbreak that is not forced.  


As I read this, I see a people who did not demand Government to take care of them, nor did they seek to form Non profit organizations to oversee who would get help and who would not.  This was a case of those who had stuff exchanging it for money so that anyone and everyone who had a need had that need met.


Also, they loved being together and not in the traditional religious settings, but house to house and eating and sharing time as well as their lives with each other.


It seems to me that in a world of good, better, & best; this is the ultimate way for people to live and it is simply the by product of living loved and loving others.

Life since the robbery

Yes, I am calling it a robbery.  There was not any material possessions taken at the time, but something that was more precious to me than anything that I owned was taken.  I am talking about relationships.  The relationships that I had with friends and family.  Of those relationships, only the family ones have really hurt, because I have always figured that I could and would make new friends anytime I lost old ones.

This all happened in the 1990's when some Seminary graduates came into our lives.  Before then, we had lived 20+ years married.  Oh we had our faults and were working through baggage that we had brought into the marriage, but we were committed to each other and would work through anything that came up and as it came up.  The Seminary graduates however started exploiting those faults in order to gain control and to authenticate their position within the church. ( I often refer to these people as Jim Jones wannabes, because that is just what I think of them).  To summarize what I have already blogged about, they used their influence to make sure that everyone gave me the cold shoulder, including my family.  They even told my wife and kids that they should only talk to and heed the Seminary Graduates and only listen and heed me when I am saying what they wanted to hear.  That has continued through today.

I want to make it clear before I go any further, that I am very proud of my family and that in no way are they bad people.  I am dealing with the relationship between me and them and nothing else.  

 That has been over 12 years since those events culminated.  I am still married to the same woman.  I still love her and all my family, although I usually feel like their feelings toward me are no different than   a tick's feeling for a dog.  There is not a day that goes by even now that at some point I still feel the pain and hurt of what I have lost.  This has affected me in other areas as well.

Whenever I am in a position of being with families (who are enjoying being together with other families) tends to remind me of what I no longer have.  A real problem for me is the hurt and the feeling that I do not belong, because my family will not come with me.  This first showed up in church.   Most churches are established for people in come in wearing masks of being ok.  You ask someone how they are doing there and they will say something along the lines of I'm ok.  Most churches can't handle people not being ok, especially those with long term problems.  So, if and when I show up, it is obvious that I'm not ok.  This causes me to be shunned or they feel the need to lecture and come down on me, because since I'm a man, it must be my fault and I should be condemned.

That feeling of not belonging is not limited to church though.  There have been times when even within the alumni group where people have been harsh with their words, because they  can't understand why my family does not want to have a relationship with them (even though there are some who know both me and my wife and she has no problem with the relationship with them apart from me).

 I still feel it at other times also.  I felt it Saturday at the Cedar Creek Lake.  I did really enjoy being with and getting to know new friends better as well as meeting people that I had never met before.  As the day wore on though, I was really feeling it.  It was a full day of families being together and enjoying other families.  In middle of that, I was there alone, knowing that my family wanted to avoid the group as well as any mention of the group or my friends within the group.  So I ended up leaving the restaurant where the festivities came to a climax early, not because of the heat, but because of the isolated feeling that ate at me & was really hurting within me.

I write this for two reasons, first as therapy for me.  When I am hurting, it helps me to write about it.  The second would be that if me expressing these thoughts can help someone else, than I am all for it.  We all have grown up in a society that doesn't know how to handle pain and disappointments.  We have all shunned people from time to time, not because we don't like them, but because we are put into situations where we don't how to handle the experiences that they are going through.  So I hope that this helps.

My thoughts about relationship with God.

I have this wonderful friend named Cindy.  Many of you know her or at least know of her.  She is a beautiful person both inside and out.  For those of you who do not know her, you are missing out on having a good friend.

So, how do I get those of you who do not know her to be her friend?  Would it help if I coerced and/or manipulated you into saying that you wanted to be friends with her?  I don't think so.  I really think that would make you not want to be her friend if that were to happen.

What if I just limited my friends to those people who were her friends also?  Would that make you want to be friends with her?  Again, I don't think so.  I would just lose out on having some amazing friends.

I think that the best way is to just be friends with both Cindy and you.  If in doing this, you find out what an amazing person that Cindy is and want to be her friend, then that would be great.  If you choose not to want to be her friend, then that is your choice also and that would not affect our relationship.

It is funny to me that we can see this in our dealings with people but cannot in dealing with God who is a real being also.  I really believe that "Christians" have really pushed more people away from God than drawn to God just because of these actions.  Oh you may be able to get people to recite some incantation that is called the sinners prayer and notch your Bible for a conversion, but that does not mean that a relationship has been formed.  People who do these types of actions, I believe, just push others away from God as well as themselves making this whole process nothing but a stumbling block.

So here is my deal.  I have this friend who is God  and I do not want to deny our friendship or kinship.   Nor will I push this relationship onto anyone else.  If you do not want a relationship, then that is up to you, just as it is up to you about a relationship with Cindy.  If you see something in the relationship that I have with God and want to know more, than at that point I am more than happy to talk to you about it.  That is no different than my relationship with Cindy.  If you notice how having her as a friend has really been beneficial to me, and want to be friends with her then I would be more than happy to talk to you about that also.

I love having each and everyone one of you as a friend and I don't want to lose that friendship by coercing my beliefs and relationships on you.  For me it is really all about living loved and loving others.

Some of my heretical beliefs as a man of faith - pleasure

I have been labeled a Christian and a heretic for my beliefs, but few people know what I believe and what I believe is a changing paradigm and not a static one.  So I thought that might be a good thing to go through some of what I believe.

Here is my view on whether God is for us having pleasure or not.  I have heard many a sermon over the years about how wrong it is to experience pleasure in our lives.  How that pleasure keeps us from God.  However I disagree with that premise.  I really believe that God wants us to have pleasure.  Before anyone ever did anything wrong by eating a certain fruit, there was a naked man and a naked woman in paradise and the first words that we read that were spoken to them basically said that they were to go have sex and keep having sex until there was not enough room on this Earth for another person to be born.  To me that shows that we were created to have pleasure.  God wants us to have pleasure.  I believe that God is happy when we are having pleasure.

So what then is the deal with all the "Thou shall nots"?  I believe that God did not put those in there to punish us or to keep us from pleasure, but those are to keep us from getting hurt and/or hurting others.  It is a lot like us teaching our kids not to stick their fingers into an electrical socket.  They might think that is fun to do such things but we teach them differently because we know that sticking your finger into an electrical socket will hurt you.  I do not believe that God is wanting to keep us away from pleasure, but wants us to enjoy it without getting hurt or hurting others.

Another aspect of these "rules" are that they are the natural result of true love.  If we truly love then that love will cause us to act rightly towards others.  It does not diminish pleasure, but it makes pleasure more pleasurable.  I believe that pleasure that flows from love is the highest form of pleasure that we will experience.

Dennis

Lollipop Moments

I just recently saw a video on Youtube by TEDxToronto that I thought was great and really started me thinking.   http://youtu.be/hVCBrkrFrBE?t=8s  is the link and web address.  If you see the 6 minute video, you will know what is meant by "lollipop moments".

It seems that we look to people who can do extraordinary things to lead us and change the world.  What this man says that I find intriguing & like is that we need to change our definition of leading to one that leads by "lollipop moments".  It is the "lollipop moments" that we do  and probably have no memory of that makes a real difference in people lives.

My mind goes to four different areas every-time I hear this.  The first thing I wonder is if I have ever done any "lollipop moments"for others.  Has anyone been positively affected just by being around me.  The second is how many times have I been beneficially affected by other "lollipop moments".  Also, have I told them about it.  The third is how if we love others then "lollipop moments" would flow naturally from us.  The four thought is one that I believe that will happen sometime after I die.  I believe that when I am in Heaven, that God at some point will come up and maybe put His arms around me and review all the "lollipop moments" in my life.

If we love then we do not have to worry about changing the world, our love will provide "lollipop moments" that will change a few and they will have "lollipop moments" that will change even more and all of this will go on until the world is changed.

Hatfields and Mccoys - a reflection

The "Hatfields and McCoys" was a mini series this week on the History Channel.  I thought that it was great.  A true "must see" for everyone.  

Really the only bad thing that I can say about the series is the way that it will jump around.  It jumps from place to place and from time to a later time without any warning.  That can be distracting at times.  That said however, they were putting about 60 years of history into a 5-6 hour show, so I think that is understandable.

So reflecting back upon the show, I have been thinking about what I could take away from this experience.  The first thing that I thought of was unchecked anger.  Let me say up front that I do not believe that anger in of itself is evil.  Anger is our natural response when the object of our love is threatened.  If you look that what is threatened when someone gets angry, then you will know what it is that they love.  Another thing about anger is that if left unchecked, it will fester and turn into an evil series of events.  The feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys just shows how bad, bad can get if left unchecked.

Another thing that I thought of is blind family loyalty.    Being blindly loyal to someone is not the same as loving them.  At times they can be opposite of each other.  When you love someone, you do not deny the truth about them.  You don't attack others in order to cover up the evil done by the beloved.  True love will cause you to confront the beloved at times in order to stop them from doing evil.  A cliche  that is often used demonstrates this quite well.  It goes, "Friends will not let friends drive drunk".  Blind loyalty will not only let them drive drunk, but will also attack the person that gets hurt from being in a accident with the drunk and accuse them as being the bad guy.

I love it that Mr. McCoy was shown as a Christian.  You see going to church, knowing the Bible, and the ability to preach to and pray for others, does not exempt someone from theses wrongs.  History has shown that many times those who appear to be the most righteous are the ones that are most likely to show this type of anger and blind loyalty to a certain "righteous" cause.

It is easy to see how things would have been different if the two families had loved each other.  The hard thing is to be able to see that in ourselves.