So Much News to Give

We had our first trip to Bethel Church this past weekend. Three wonderful days of church (real church!), prayer, and fasting (for me, at least).

I have much to post including pics, miracles worked in me, and many other experiences & thoughts thereon.

Without faith, it would be difficult to believe all that happened for us there. But, having traveled through Buddhism, agnosticism, atheism, and a couple more different mindsets to new life in Jesus, perhaps I'm in a decent situation to try and convey these things for believers and nonbelievers alike.

Also, much love to two new friends, C. G. and M. R.

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Sneak Peek
He gave me a word:

Let there be respect for measures of time, but let time only be given measure.

All things important are given without measure: Holy Spirit without measure, mercy without measure, love without measure. Measures of distance across the planet have been largely overcome with high-speed transport and the internet. Our big limitation in being put here on the earth is our being confined to time as it exists for us. That's the only real obstacle with which we have to contend in bringing His heavenly will to our hungry, desperate, longing world.

Measures of space, however, do provide beautiful analogies through which I'll someday soon be able to explain ways of thinking mathematically that will point the way to God, and then to right relationship with Him, especially for the math-minded.

The equations already started coalescing this past weekend at Bethel. So close I can almost taste them.

Praise and glory to the Lord!

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Timing

I just awoke from a dream wherein my dream-self was visited by an angelic presence, and it had a lot to do with timing. I'll attempt to describe it a bit.

A tangle of vehicles, from motorcycles to RVs, some moving and some stationary, a TV in nearly every room of every residence, houses without outer walls such that there were no completely enclosed rooms, and motion, constant motion back and forth among these dwelling places. I was darting around, always glancing at a TV to see what was going on in this community and who needed my help. It was as though I were some sort of spirit of comfort.

People were going through things like relocations, divorces, family issues where children were coming back home, broken limbs, auto accidents, and travel to faraway places. I was somehow zooming around among them, checking TVs as I went; the TVs were changing channels every few seconds and when I looked up at one, I got an eyeful of whatever (or more specifically, whoever) was the object of the current channel. I never had time to stop for more than a few seconds to watch the TVs though, because I'd see some urgent need arising and would need to go to the people I saw who were in need.

They were always glad to see me and they kept asking me questions I coudn't answer; all I could do was go to where the calls were strongest and try to do my best with the situation.

Will my arm stop hurting in this cast; will I get better?
When will my son come home to visit me?
Why do you think such-and-so thing happened in this situation; can you explain it for me?
How long should I keep dancing?
Can I be joyful and celebrate now, or is something bad about to happen?
Is my expected party on their way?
Will I make it as far as I need to go?

but sometimes it was just a cry out for comfort, like:

I'm alone and in a strange place; would you come to me?
I'm feeling sad and need your support; would you come to me?
It seems like the dark times will never pass; would you come to me?

Oddly, it was as though I were still in some period of training; I was still learning how to react to these questions and situations as I visited people, and some visits were more awkward than others. I recall things got a little smoother by the end of the dream as my experience built up.

But at exactly 7:00 PM in the dream (a constant urgency that I had to keep checking my watch as I went around to different people and places), I had to be in a particular broken-down, red truck with a crack extending halfway across the windshield, in the front seat. I felt maybe 80% sure that's what the message was, but I knew that if I got there on time and something happened then and there, it would be something really big. It was one of those thoughts that just comes out of nowhere in my head but comes with great weight and certainty. I just had this faith about it.

I made it to the truck in time (but not too early); I could finally rest a little and take a breather, and my eyes lazily followed the crack in the windshield and I just sat there quietly examining and comtemplating it for a moment, but I didn't have to wait long before the angel came. I either don't remember or never could discern the angel's gender, but it was clothed in radiant white and it was very glad. My spirits absolutely soared, I felt restored and no longer weary, and I burst out into smile and even into joyous laughter as the angel and I communed.

I was as glad to be with this angel as people were glad that I had come to visit them.

Then I woke up.


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To Forgive

Generally speaking, forgiveness is easy, for a lot of reasons:

1. God's love is an infinite source and is given without measure when we draw upon it.

2. If a person has done evil to me and comes to me for forgiveness, their current state of repentance (changing the way they think and act) means more to me than whatever happened in the past. God put us in a world with a monotonic dimension of time for a reason. I believe part of that reason to be that, as our conscious minds live on the cusp of time as it happens (at the crest of the wave), God is making a point that the present time has vastly more importance than the past (recalled) or the future (imagined). If someone is asking me for forgiveness, their present state has a far greater "weight" than any past state in which they have done evil, and so forgiveness is easy.

3. The very fact of someone's admitting they made a mistake is usually cause enough for me to forgive the person before they ask. One of my strongest attributes, to which I've paid a great deal of attention developing over the years, has been the culturing of a compassionate heart. Compassion goes a long way in our life here on this earth, to say the very least.

4. Close to compassion is empathy, the ability to put oneself in the other person's place and feel as that person feels. When you've walked enough miles in your own shoes, you start to find more situations in which you recognize -- if not a person's actual situation, at least the flavor and power of -- that person's emotional state. Sometimes, being able to switch perspective, to understand (in your own way) why someone might have acted as they did, helps make forgiveness easy.

5. I try with all my heart to follow, and thus come closer to understanding, Jesus' commandment to love my enemies as well as my friends and to consider every human being a child of God.


And yet my heart remains hardened toward just one person, the single person in my life I have never forgiven and, in my current state, cannot forgive. If I go through the list above with regard to this one person, here's what comes out.

1. God's love is limitless, but God's love through me simply does not extend to this person. My limitations do not allow it to reach far enough.

2. and 3. As probably doesn't need to be stated, this person did me high-amplitude damage, but this person never admitted wrongdoing nor came to me and asked for forgiveness in earnest, but only with absolutely transparently false tears, all as a tactic of manipulation.

4. I have tried repeatedly and yet have not been able to put myself in this person's place. I simply cannot understand how someone could act as they did; I surely cannot imagine myself doing as they did.

5. There is no love in me for this person. I can admit, on an intellectual level, that they are a child of God, but still my heart is stone cold.

Last, as this person is dead, there is no hope of interactive, human reconciliation. I don't foresee any hope of reconciliation without divine intervention of some sort, for which I actually do hold a pilot-light-sized hope in a faraway corner of myself.


My spouse believes that I do not need to forgive this person. My last therapist was an atheist and did not help at all because he simply could not fathom, in the end, the depth of my need to forgive because it's a manifestation of my hunger to draw closer towards God.

I know that I do need to find forgiveness for this person because the lack of it, I feel, is actively keeping me from drawing closer to the Father. I can walk (or stumble, as the case may be) in some semblance of alignment with Him, as a compass aligns to the magnetic orientation of the earth (ever slowly, and often not quite rightly due to the influence of other, nearer fields), but my distance from Him cannot close any further until I can forgive. It's as though I have to stay a certain radius from the source of the Light, no matter the direction in which I try to travel to "get around" and get closer.

I feel that I could be ready for the next step in my calling should I be able to resolve this issue. Sometimes it feels as though the only thing keeping me limited to my level is my inability to resolve it.

Feeling His light and warmth, drawing as nearly as I can and reaching out as far as possible, I hear His voice saying to me -- with this brilliant, ever-enduring, all-pervasive and depthless love, almost as quietly as to be a whisper, just barely voiced:

No.

Not until I'm able to forgive.

It feels as though I could run up even into Jesus' arms if just this barrier were removed. How I could walk in the spirit! How I could be this force of God's love in this world! Almost. Almost. So very close it hurts, it aches desperately, it makes me cry; it feels like it's killing me.


Now into the early morning of Saturday: just as you can sense another person's eyes on you even not knowing exactly where they are, I feel the Creeping Sunday begin to draw near.

Will this be my week?


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