Tired Of Taking Offense?

"More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense."
(Ken Keyes)

Eating Out Of Your Back Yard

The idea of Eating edible wild plants has been fascinating. I've been reading on the subject a bit.

".........I selected common plants that everyone in North America will be able to find somewhere between their yard and the local neighborhood. Included are important wild greens and vegetables eaten by our European ancestors since the beginning of time. Many of them grow as weeds in the typical garden. The benefit of local plants is that you can have everyday access. If you can grab your salad from the backyard in a matter of minutes, you are more likely to eat these plants than if you have to drive two hours to reach more exotic habitats. That is how our European ancestors ate, from foraged plants growing around their homes."
(Edible Wild Plants. John Kallas PHD)

Edible Wild Plants

"If you venture out of your nuclear-proof, earthquake-proof, asteroid-proof bunker into the real world, you might be at risk. Yes, it's true! You may be hit by a bus or get E coli or staphylococcus poisoning from a church potluck. If you kiss someone, you may get herpes, mono, or worse—a tragic relationship. On the golf course, you may be hit by lightening. If you go ice skating, you may break your neck. If you go on a hike, you may trip on loose rocks, fall over a cliff, and die. Or you might be in the World Trade Center at the wrong time. Look, you can either curl up under your bed covers and live a safe, dull, insulated life reading about other people doing things you wish you were doing. Or you can join the real world. If you venture into the real world, you risk living your life to its fullest. You risk the rush of climbing that mountain, of dancing all night, of scuba diving in reefs of mind-blowing color, of standing in the rain on an ocean viewpoint, watching huge waves crashing against the rocks, of meeting the partner of your dreams. You risk getting exercise and breathing fresh air. You risk making life worth living. So if you decide to venture into the world of wild foods, you'd better prepare yourself for some fun, adventure, and risk. Yes, there are risks to eating new foods that you've never tried before. You might make some mistakes or have allergies to foods you haven't been exposed to yet."
(Edible Wild Plants. John Kallas)

Friction Of Souls

Gray's statement to Michael......"To have the friction of two souls sharing the journey together and to be changed by it, that is what it is to know Truth." (M. C. Lang. The Bastard Tree. Pg, 107)

Winning a Man's Head But Not His Heart

"Truth is not something you can master. It's a person—Jesus. You have a relationship with Truth, not a mastery of him. And you can introduce people to him, you don't need to convince them. It is not solely an intellectual ascent, though many have made it that. Sadly, you can win a man's head without his heart. That's a dead man walking for he has become self-righteous and yet does not really know Truth. Information can only tell you about someone, but it is not the same as knowing them: to share experience with them." 

(M. C. Lang. The Bastard Tree. Pg, 106.)

Organized Religions Mania For Ideal Order

"Much of organized religion, however, tends to be peopled by folks who have a mania for some ideal order, which is never true, so they are seldom happy or content. It makes you anal retentive after a while, to use Freud's rude phrase, because you can never be happy with life as it is, which is always filled with handicapped people, mentally unstable people, people of "other" and "false" religions, irritable people, gay people, and people of totally different customs and traditions. Not to speak of wild nature, which we have not loved very well up to now. Organized religion has not been known for its inclusiveness or for being very comfortable with diversity. Yet pluriformity, multiplicity, and diversity is the only world there is! It is rather amazing that we can miss, deny, or ignore what is in plain sight everywhere."
(Richard Rohr. Falling Upward)

Necessary Church Suffering?

"My soul, church people get so hacked off when I post things like this. The unpardonable sin is to confess a reality. Speak of it, even just a few times, you are labelled divisive, or bad attitude, or have lack of vision, or........ The only accepted response is to sit down, shut-up, and listen to what our leaders tell us, and jump through the program hoops they put before us. When you do confess that what we do hurts people, in many varies ways,  they deny it. They have to.

We are not so different than the the people who buried and hid the truth in church sex and child abuse. How so you ask? Well the absolute desire to protect the image (false one) that we are not like that here at THIS church We would rather perpetuate a false illusion, even a lie, than live and deal with some of our baggage we struggle with. It is there, always will be to, all we have to do is keep working it through. The beauty of the church is lost when we can't' talk about it, move on and grow. Great truth in the following words.

"I must start with my birth relationship with Catholic Christianity (I presume you know that I have been a priest for forty years, and a Franciscan for almost fifty), because in many ways it has been the church that has taught me—in ways that it did not plan—the message of necessary suffering. It taught me by itself being a bearer of the verbal message, then a holding tank, and finally a living crucible of necessary (and sometimes unnecessary!) suffering."

(Richard Four. Falling Upward.)

Who Changes Their Mind These Days?

"'Repent' which literally means to "change your mind," it did not strongly influence Christian history. This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present...... We all receive and pass on what our people are prepared to hear, and most people are not "early adopters."

( Richard Rohr. Falling Upward)

Church More Influenced By Plato Than Jesus

"I remember the final words of my professor of church history, a very orthodox priest theologian, who said as he walked out of the classroom after our four years of study with him, "Well, after all is said and done, remember that church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus." We reeled in astonishment, but the four years of history had spoken for themselves. What he meant, of course, was that we invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question—even when it is not entirely true—over the mercy and grace of God."

( Richard Rohr. "Falling Upward")

 Yes, Church style, and attitude, is often far more influenced by Plato, than Jesus.

No Room For Honesty or Relationship When You MUST Be Right

" "They align themselves on one side of the paradox at the expense of the other. They solve the unsolvable by denying half the equation, but their answers are never wholly satisfactory, which only makes them more inflexible. Unfortunately, there is no room for honesty when one must be perfectly right, and if there is no room for honesty then there is no communion, only false and shallow interactions. When people believe their salvation depends upon having everything figured out, their insecurity can contort them in ugly ways." (The Bastard Tree. M.C. Lang, pg 106)

Seeing The Suffering Of One......At Least One

" It is peculiar in men that, somehow, seeing suffering amongst many makes it much easier to ignore than seeing the suffering of one. The commonality of it somehow lets us push our convictions aside; perhaps reasoning that one couldn't possibly help so many people. But when there is just one—and any man passing by knows full well he could certainly do something, maybe even something very significant—then we are confronted with our innate selfishness and we hate that man for it. Who is he to reveal the dark corners of our hearts? Projecting scorn is perhaps the quickest way to deflect that searing spotlight from ourselves.
(The Bastard Tree. M.C. Lang, pg 84)

What is Our Body?

"It is only after one sees his first dead person that he can truly learn the reality of the body, which is only a temporary housing for the soul. Until that point, the soul inhabits and intermingles to such an intimate degree with the housing—tilling it to overflowing—that it makes it very difficult for one to truly separate the two. And indeed, we shouldn't; for until the soul leaves, the body is very much pulsing with the soul. But once it's gone, the body is revealed to be an empty wine cask."
(The Bastard Tree. M.C. Lang. Pg 72)

12 Symptoms of a Spiritual Awakening

I can't even put into words how insightful these insights are. I'm learning to live there reality more and more. Maybe it's just my age, or phase of life I'm in that sparked the change. Or maybe, just maybe I'm beginning to grow up to some new experience in life. Loss of interest, seems to characterize my life these days. Loss of interest in managing all the old institutions, paradigms, attitudes, narrow perspectives, judgements, and opinions.  Loving Christ, his church, and the world... And people are dumbfounded how I could possibly still have the spiritual life that enables us to live in a 100% Muslim community in West Africa, and start Jesus communities there. People assume a loss of interest in all this "Churchy" stuff must mean no interest in kingdom purposes or a weakening of spiritual resolve.... As if it's impossible to get there, to any meaningful active place, without it. But that is what each local church is trying to sell you. You need this, like this... or you can't make it... You need the body, not necessarily in that location, not necessarily there group, or of that kind, in that way...  Ya, I have a lack of interest in that guilt game....

AJ

12 Symptoms of a Spiritual Awakening.

1. An increased tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen.

2. Frequent attacks of smiling.

3. Feelings of being connected with others and nature.

4. Frequent overwhelming episodes of appreciation.

5. A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears based on past experience.

6. An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.

7. A loss of ability to worry.

8. A loss of interest in conflict.

9. A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.

10. A loss of interest in judging others.

11. A loss of interest in judging self.

12. Gaining the ability to love without expecting anything in return.

This is an excerpt from the new book We Codependent Men-We Mute Coyotes, copyright 2011, Recovery Trade Publications.

http://www.recoverytradepublications.com/blog.html?entry=12-symptoms-of-a-spiritual

And We Run Away!

"In second grade, I ran away. I did not know grown-ups still did." 

(Young Peace Corps Worker in Africa... Monique Schmidt. "Last Moon Dancing: A Memoir of Love and Real Life in Africa", pg147)

Hate The Sinner

"When Christians talk about "hating the sin", why does it sound & feel so much like hating the sinner ... plain old garden-variety hate." 

(Karl Ingersol Fredricon NB)

Does everything that you don't like or agree with, have to be stupid? That's just pain stupid. - KI

We's So, So Good!

"Heaven goes by favour (grace). If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in." 

Mark Twain

The Loyal Soldier Guilt.......

"It takes a huge push, much self-doubt, and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what Mom and Dad always wanted them to be and do. To move beyond family-of-origin stuff, local church stuff, cultural stuff, flag-and-country stuff is a path that few of us follow positively and with integrity. The pull is just too great, and the loyal soldier fills us with appropriate guilt? shame, and self-doubt, which, as we said earlier, feels like the very voice of God."
(Richard Rohr. Falling Upward)

When God is Big!

The grander my vision of God became, the smaller and more confining my denomination and my theology became. - KI

A Friends Shares Our Solitude.

Sharing Our Solitude

A friend is more than a therapist or a confessor, even though a friend can sometimes heal us and offer us God's forgiveness.

A friend is that other person with whom we can share our solitude, our silence, and our prayer. A friend is that other person with whom we can look at a tree and say, "Isn't that beautiful," or sit on the beach and silently watch the sun disappear under the horizon. With a friend we don't have to say or do something special. With a friend we can be still and know that God is there with both of us.

Nouwen

Religious Rocket Science!

"When one takes theology or creed as the center of Christianity, it naturally follows that there must inevitably be a division of Christians into denominations and sects."

(Kokichi Kurosaki (1886-1970), One Body in Christ)

You would think that this is suggesting theology is not important. The process is, but not all the conclusions drawn from theology are important, good, or even true.

The only "creed" that united the early Christians was, "Jesus is Lord."..... Nothing more, nothing less.

When we look around at all these religious people, in all these christian denominations, people who truly don't see it like I do (or like 'my' church does), we often hedge and row ourselves off.

When we start looking around with our church lens, we get one image. But, if we begin with a Jesus lens first, something changes.

If we have no "Creed but Christ", and look at who is saying "Jesus is Lord", it's easier to see who is mindful of Jesus or not.

The bible (1 Corinthians 12:3) says..... "and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit."..... and I always hear people add the big 'but'.... but, no one can say "it" and REALLY mean "it" unless.....of course the implication, and judgment is that there are lots of people saying it who don't really mean it......(see their hedge?). After all, not everyone who says Lord Lord will enter......

It's my experience that there are not many people saying Jesus is Lord who don't mean it. However, a lot who only talk "my church" is......

I see and hear a few people, but people in crazy and diverse places, saying Jesus is Lord,  and meaning it.

But I also hear most religious people saying I'm Baptist, Catholic, Pentecostal etc with great pride in what "church" they are branded to be part of (be it by birth, choice, or osmosis).

They talk about their church, their denomination, their religious tradition, their affiliation.... Talk about "where" they belong,  but never to "who" (Jesus)  they belong.

You'd never ever hear a word about Jesus from them. They don't seem to have the "Jesus is Lord" vocabulary. They have their "what church they belong too" vocabulary..... but that is it.

There is no Jesus talk, or talk of Jesus' walk.

I now look for people who are talking and walking "Jesus is Lord". Not those talking about their church, how good it us, how right it is, or how to fix it, tweak it, modernize it, market it, how to fill it (church here meaning building of course), how to get people in the door of it, make leaders for it, or get volunteers to run 'it' ..... It....IT....

What I am finding is that those saying Jesus is Lord are  naturally already serving the kingdom and naturally loving their neighbors deeply in real helpful ways. Sometimes, though rare times, they do this through a "church" program. But mostly I see the "Jesus is Lord" people doing it outside of any church program, in a very natural way. Because they obey Jesus now, they don't wait for someone to organize it. They never waited until the church catches up. They don't wait until the church organizes an event to promote (or manage - or try to force) some Jesus kind of action or reaction that "Jesus is Lord" people already have, but "this is my church" people naturally don't have, and don't want to do.

My church is better than your church!

Oh really? Really?
Na!
Jesus is better than your or my church's division and pride.
Who's talking and walking "Jesus is Lord" long before the church clued in. Who's long been talking and walking "Jesus is Lord",  long before its leaders were, long before the new church vision casting team sprang up,  long before the new lead charismatic priest or pastor came. Who has been off doing it under the nose off,  and often in spite of the church.....
Those are the people I have been paying particular attention to knowing and understanding better. They're in every church, and they are hard to find because they are rarely on the stage, and don't want to be.

They just live it, and always have. They don't need the church to set them up to get going,  because Jesus already has. Because they know him. It's that simple. They know it's not the rocket science the church inadvertantly seems to make it into.

(Some one posted this video on YouTube. It is more about "Look at how Good My Church Is" than the little Jesus tag on at the end. It's typical church marketing today.... and I will get labeled for pointing it out ( that's the worst sin in church today- talking about anything in other than is a glowing manner). But it turned my stomach.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhy3khbpC1s&sns=em

Let Our Illusions Die

"We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.". —W. H. AUDEN

Theology Can Be An Empty Husk If...........

"'Aren't theologians trying to learn about God and help others do the same?'

'Oh, yes, there are a great many who are. But theologians have the same problem all people have, and they can fall into plastic religion as easily as the next. Thus, the drift in a few religious scholarly circles is not really about knowing God. It's more about mastering God. Then you can develop systematic theologies to explain away the problems. It becomes a nice religious formula and can limit relationship with God to an intellectual ascent. You see, theology is necessary and can be a very healthy thing, but it can also be the empty husk of life people cling to when they leave intimacy behind.'"
(The Bastard Tree. M.C. Lang)

Assumptions

"When you 'assume' you make an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me.'...
'You don't really believe it's a coincidence that the word ass is contained within the word assume ...do you?"
(The Bastard Tree. M.C. Lang)

Never heard this before. However, there is a lot of insight gained by this statement. I've had too many assumptions about others. I feel I was on the receiving end often enough too.

This is a fiction book. But no fiction in this truth. The title would put off Christians, but the book is absolutely not what you think. It's actually a redemptive story. This book can not be judged by it's cover. Publishers suggested he change the name. However, the author refused. I recommend it.

Consumer Driven Christianity of North America.

The Jesus Way vs. The American Way

by Eugene Peterson

The great American innovation in congregation is to turn it into a consumer enterprise. We Americans have developed a culture of acquisition, an economy that is dependent on wanting more, requiring more. We have a huge advertising industry designed to stir up appetites we didn’t even know we had. We are insatiable.

It didn’t take long for some of our Christian brothers and sisters to develop consumer congregations. If we have a nation of consumers, obviously the quickest and most effective way to get them into our congregations is to identify what they want and offer it to them, satisfy their fantasies, promise them the moon, recast the gospel in consumer terms: entertainment, satisfaction, excitement, adventure, problem solving, whatever. This is the language we Americans grew up on, the language we understand. We are the world’s champion consumers, so why shouldn’t we have state-of-the-art consumer churches?

Given the conditions prevailing in our culture, this is the best and most effective way that has ever been devised for gathering large and prosperous congregations. Americans lead the world in showing how to do it. There is only one thing wrong: This is not the way in which God brings us into conformity with the life of Jesus and sets us on the way of Jesus’ salvation. This is not the way in which we become less and Jesus becomes more. This is not the way in which our sacrificed lives become available to others in justice and service. The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, “deny yourself” congregation. A consumer church is an antichrist church.

We can’t gather a God-fearing, God-worshipping congregation by cultivating a consumer-pleasing, commodity-oriented congregation. When we do, the wheels start falling off the wagon. And they are falling off the wagon. We can’t suppress the Jesus way in order to sell the Jesus truth. The Jesus way and the Jesus truth must be congruent. Only when the Jesus way is organically joined with the Jesus truth do we get the Jesus life."

"The North American church at present is conspicuous for replacing the Jesus way with the American way. For Christians who are serious about following Jesus by understanding and pursuing the ways that Jesus is the way, this deconstruction of the Christian congregation is particularly distressing and a looming distraction from the way of Jesus. - Eugene Peterson

I'm Smart, But I Can't See It.

"I'm living in a tent...." "You shouldn't be living in a tent", said the commentator. "No! I know I'm smart. But I can't see it. I don't know why." 
(A Young Homeless girl (22yrs old) on Streets of Vancouver.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78EuiFXkZ34

Touch Something.......

"He told me, in a moment meant to be poetic, that the Wind, like a person, was only noticed when it touched something."
(Monique Schmidt. Last Moon Dancing: A Memoir of Love and Real Life in Africa. Pg139)

This may threaten some people in education. However, it makes me happy to know people are not really dependent on everything I say, to learn. Exposure, opportunity, and time, enable curious kids to learn much from curiosity. This is a powerful article, and is a real insight into Home Schooling, an should help parents relax more about Home Schooling's potential, and remind us to take a more relaxed approach.
Also, maybe I'm getting too hippy these days.... But I enjoy any article that sticks it to the system... just to let it know some people can "make it" without you.  

Ethiopian kids hack PCs And Teach themselves English, in 5 months with zero instruction

"What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.
Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!"
Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?
But that's not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here's how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week:

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English. Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don't even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.
If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain well-known author, it's not a coincidence: Nell's Primer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell. Here's an example of how Nell uses an evolving, personalized narrative to help kids learn to learn without beating them over the head with standardized lessons and traditional teaching methods:

Miles from the nearest school, a young Ethiopian girl named Rahel turns on her new tablet computer. The solar powered machine speaks to her: "Hello! Would you like to hear a story?" She nods and listens to a story about a princess. Later, when the girl has learned a little more, she will tell the machine that the princess is named "Rahel" like she is and that she likes to wear blue--but for now the green book draws pictures of the unnamed Princess for her and asks her to trace shapes on the screen. "R is for Run. Can you trace the R?" As she traces the R, it comes to life and gallops across the screen. "Run starts with R. Roger the R runs across the Red Rug. Roger has a dog named Rover." Rover barks: "Ruff! Ruff!" The Princess asks, "Can you find something Red?" and Rahel uses the camera to photograph a berry on a nearby bush. "Good work! I see a little red here. Can you find something big and red?"
As Rahel grows, the book asks her to trace not just letters, but whole words. The book's responses are written on the screen as it speaks them, and eventually she doesn't need to leave the sound on all the time. Soon Rahel can write complete sentences in her special book, and sometimes the Princess will respond to them. New stories teach her about music (she unlocks a dungeon door by playing certain tunes) and programming with blocks (Princess Rahel helps a not very-bright turtle to draw different shapes).
Rahel writes her own stories about the Princess, which she shares with her friends. The book tells her that she is very good at music, and her lessons begin to encourage her to invent silly songs about what she's learning. An older Rahel learns that the block language she used to talk with the turtle is also used to write all the software running inside her special book. Rahel uses the blocks to write a new sort of rhythm game. Her younger brother has just received his own green book, and Rahel writes him a story which uses her rhythm game to help him learn to count. LINK

A Telescope With No Stars!

"In college I took astronomy, my chance to look through the observatory telescope and truly see the stars. But it was physics. Astronomy was physics. It ruined the stars for me. There was only one night of observation. After two weeks, I dropped the class."
(Monique Maria Schmidt. Last Moon Dancing: a memoir of love in real life in Africa 2005, Pg134-35)

I suppose some would simply say the beauty is in the details too. However, when the details cause us to stop seeing, there must be an imbalance.
I've come to feel the same way about my faith. There are extreme in both directions. Simplicity with out substance is not rooted. However, neither is understanding complexity, but loosing sight of the simple beauty. Sometimes understanding robs us of the beauty of simplicity too.
I came from the exegesis camp. I love every detail I learned. But it soon engulfs our ability to see,  and  often we no longer take time to stop , look, see, and really truly see the beauty.
I know MANY Christians who no longer see the beauty, over the physics of church. I was one of them. While running the machinery of church religion, I have shockingly gotten to the place were I was seeing few stars any more. Actually believed active in church was active in Kingdom. I soon learned that this is not always so.
I'm still trying to crack my eyes back open..... I am starting to see beautiful stars in my telescope again.

International Worker Sayings

Only international workers could write these phrases.....?..

" I watched a praying mantis give birth on my lantern."

"Sand dunes replaced snowdrifts creating low visibility due to dust particles, not snow flakes, but no one cancelled school."

"I read the back of one of the antibacterial hand washes I packed in the states. The instructions say it's still 99.9% of all common germs. The worrisome word: common."

(Monique Maria Schmidt. Last Moon Dancing. 2005, Pg134-35)

Lonliness Is A Good Sigh

"Loneliness means at one time I had friends."
(Monique Schmidt. Last Moon Dancing: A Memoir of Love and Real Life in Africa. Pg 133)

Africa, Light, And Paraplegics

"Remember where you're from there are no Bush taxis or sacrifices for 120 degree afternoons spent in unair-conditioned tin structures. Remember where you're from there are escalators, ice cube machines, and stores with roofs. Where you're from you don't light your house with candles bought from a woven basket on top of a woman's head. And rats don't run through bars while paraplegic polio victims beg for francs.“

(Monique Maria Schmidt. Last Moon Dancing. 2005, Pg133)

Becoming A Student Of An African Village

"Several times every week, usually more than once a day, I did something that made the villagers chuckle. I told myself they laugh with me, not at me. I didn't believe it. None of the cross cultural training that Peace Corps gave me my first three months had prepared me for being an incompetent idiot in the village..... I had already established: couldn't bargain at the marché, couldn't carry water on my head, couldn't sweep with a palm leaf room, didn't have a permanent man in the house. In their eyes, the first three caused the last one."
(Monique Maria Schmidt. Last Moon Dancing. 2005, Pg131)

Jesus Sees At Much Higher Level

"Well, I quote Jesus because I still consider him to be the spiritual authority of the Western world, whether we follow him or not. He is always spot-on at the deeper levels and when we understand him in his own explosive context. One does not even need to believe in his divinity to realize that Jesus is seeing at a much higher level than most of us."
(Richard Rohr. Falling Upward)

Pewhood Of All Believers

"Instead of a priesthood of all believers, we end up with the 'pewhood' of the disengage spectators masquerading as the body." (Neil Cole- forward in "The Pastor Has No Cloths)

Able To See Clearly?

"I believe that spiritual maturity is not the ability to see (or experience) the extraordinary, but the ability to see the ordinary through God's eyes."
Frank Viola. Revise us again.)

Not Brave Enough To Be Indifferent

"Perhaps some of us are better at hiding our fear. But my mother never claims to be brave enough to remain indifferent. No Hollywood lightening expert could capture the paleness of my mother's face, the quivering of her colourless lips when she hears the rocket fire. She says her heart gets weaker with each explosion, each death and each funeral.... Of course, the war was always real to us, but until now the battles were in the countryside and in other cities. Before this, we used to hear news of the fighting; now we see its victims, bloodied, burned, broken and dead. For years we lived a fantasy of war, but now it invaded our lives. On the streets, inside our buses - even in classrooms - people get into arguments and fistfights quickly. We were loosing our collective nerve. The war has come to our homes. "

(Nelofer Pazira. "A Bed of Red Flowers. In Search Of My Afghanistan" pg,12)

War

"It's not cold, but we all hug our arms around our bodies as if shivering from fear. We all walk fast, very fast - hoping to get away from everything and everyone. It's been ten years since the beginning of the war. Who started it? Who will end? These days, we are so tired that we wish to forget. But is it possible to forget a war when minute by minute, hour by hour and day by day we feel that something bloody in terrible supposed to happen?" 

Nelofer Pazira. A Bed Of Red Flowers: In search of my Afghanistan. Pg6)

Think Right, Or Else!

We are more civilized today. We don't torture or kill, we just marginalize, or ostracize, or give people the cold shoulder, or anything that assures that we keep these persons out of the inner circle loop. Reality is that the same heart is at the root. We have so much fear in our lives and institutions.

"Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not "think" right." (Richard Rohr. Falling Upward)

Tell God So He Can........................... And He Can

"Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one's heart, its pleasures and its pains, to a dear friend. Tell Him your troubles, that He may comfort you; tell Him your joys, that He may sober them; tell Him your longings, that He may purify them; tell Him your dislikes, that He may help you conquer them; talk to Him of your temptations, that He may shield you from them: show Him the wounds of your heart, that He may heal them; lay bare your indifference to good, your depraved tastes for evil, your instability... Tell Him how self-love makes you unjust to others, how vanity tempts you to be insincere, how pride disguises you to yourself and others. If you thus pour out all your weaknesses, needs, troubles, there will be no lack of what to say. You will never exhaust the subject. It is continually being renewed. People who have no secrets from each other never want for subjects of conversation. They do not weigh their words, for there is nothing to be held back; neither do they seek for something to say. They talk out of the abundance of the heart, without consideration they say just what they think. Blessed are they who attain to such familiar, unreserved intercourse with God!"

 

(Francois Fenelon (1651-1715), Spiritual Letters of Archbishop Fenelon. Letters to men, London)

God Blamed!

"I've routinely watched God get credit for things that He never authored and blamed for things He never imagined."
(Frank Viola. Revise Us Again)

Cast Off The Script

"The very day I was converted to Christ, I was handed a script. And I began living from it. Over the years, that script has expanded both in size and variety. As I attached myself to various churches, denominations, parachurch organizations, and ministries, new lines of text were added to my script.

In the same way, every human being is scripted through their  upbringing, their surroundings, their culture, and their religious influences. Our scripting works unconsciously. We are usually unaware when the scripting is happening to us. Somewhere along the line, however, I became aware of the religious script that was given to me. As Christians, we can safely assume that some of the script we have been handed matches the heart and mind of our Master. But typically, much of it doesn't.

In such cases, we want those lines of script that are incompatible with the teachings of Jesus revised and re~visioned to match His heart and mind.

Transformation (spiritual formation) can be described as editing out that which is not Christ and revising that which is. Or to use Paul's metaphor in Ephesians, its a matter of "putting off the old" and "putting on the new."

Revising is a process. And it begins with opening ourselves up to the possibility that the script we have been given in life is not perfect. It's in need of regular evaluation and revaluation."

(Revise Us against. Frank Viola)

A Case For Silence &Solitude

"It is a good discipline to wonder in each new situation if people wouldn't be better served by our silence than by our words." Henri Nowen. The Way of the Heart)

"But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed" (Luke 5:16)

Eating Edible Wild Plants

"If you venture out of your nuclear-proof, earthquake-proof, asteroid-proof
bunker into the real world, you might be at risk. Yes, it's true! You may be hit by
a bus or get E coli or staphylococcus poisoning from a church potluck. If you kiss
someone, you may get herpes, mono, or worse—a tragic relationship. On the golf
course, you may be hit by lightning. If you go ice skating, you may break your
neck. If you go on a hike, you may trip on loose rocks, fall over a cliff, and die.
Or you might be in the World Trade Center at the wrong time.

Look, you can either curl up under your bed covers and live a safe, dull,
insulated life reading about other people doing things you wish you were doing.
Or you can join the real world. If you venture into the real world, you risk

living your life to its fullest.......... You risk getting exercise and breathing fresh air. You risk making life worth living.

So if you decide to venture into the world of wild foods, you'd better prepare
yourself for some fun, adventure, and risk. Yes, there are risks to eating new
foods that you've never tried before. You might make some mistakes or have
allergies to foods you haven't been exposed to yet."

(Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods From Dirt two Plate. John Kallas)

No Party On The Hill If You're Playing King Of The Hill With Your Religion

"Some of the most exciting and fruitful theology today is being described as the "turn
toward participation."^ Religion as participation is a rediscovery of the Perennial Tradition
that Plotinus, Gottfried Leibniz, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and so many saints and mystics
have spoken of in their own ways. It constantly recognizes that we are a part of something
more than we are observing something. The turn toward participation now sees that most of
religious and church history has been largely preoccupied with religious ideas, about which
you could be wrong or right. When it is all about ideas, you did not have to be a part of
you just needed to talk correctly about You never had to dive in and illustrate that
spiritual proof is only in the pudding. You never have to actually go to Russia; you just need
a correct map of Russia and the willingness to say, "My map is better than your map," or,
more commonly, "Mine is the only true map," without offering any corroborating evidence
that your map has in fact gotten you there.

The spiritual question is this: Does one's life give any evidence of an encounter with God?
Does this encounter bring about in you any of the things that Paul describes as the 'fruits" of
the Spirit: 'love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self
control" (Galatians 5:22)? Is the person or the group after this encounter different from its
surroundings, or does it reflect the predictable cultural values and biases of its group?

Or, even worse, does your religion spend much of its time defining and deciding who
cannot participate? When there is not much to enjoy from the inside, all you can do is keep
yourself above and apart from others. Many groups still "forbid under pain of sin"
worshiping God in another denominational space. Please. Such religion is nothing but
groupthink and boundary marking, and is not likely to lead you to any deep encounter with
God. Such smallness will never be ready or eager for true greatness.

If God is for you a tyrant, an eternal torturer, or with a smaller heart than most people
you know, why would you want to be intimate, spend time with, or even "participate" with
such a God? As Helen Keller once said, "I sometimes fear that much religion is man's despair
at not finding God." Most groups picked a few moral positions to give themselves a sense of
worthiness and discipline, or a few sacraments to "attend," but loving and even erotic divine
union still largely remained a secret or foolish to imagine. "I don't have time for the mystics;
we are running a church here," a bishop once told me. I'm not kidding. And he was not a
bad man or a bad bishop, but he was an outsider to the very Mystery that he talked about in
the church he was "running."

Playing king of the hill always overrides any actual party on the hill. Jesus makes
That very point in his several parables of the wedding party or the great banquet (see
Luke 14:7-24 or Matthew 22:1-10). Parties are about participation, not legislation. If
there is not room for one more at your party, you are a very poor host. And God is not
a poor host.

Participation has not been the strong suit or primary position in any of the three
monotheistic religions up to now, except among some subsets of Hasidic Jews,
Hesychastic Orthodox, the Sufi Muslims, lots of Catholic mystics, and the many
individuals who would have fit into any of these groups if they had known about
them. Protestantism as a whole seldom moved toward any notion of real or universal
participation, although many, many Protestant individuals did. As in Catholicism,
many learned to keep officially quiet and practiced their "generous orthodoxy" on the
sly and on the side. In the Franciscans, we always say, "It was easier to ask for
forgiveness than to ask for permission." Don't expect a lot of freedom or permission
from most religious people, but thank God, the Gospel requires them to give you
forgiveness."

(Richard Rohr. Immoral Diamond)

Without Commentary.....Tired of Commentary!

Sometime people talk too much. I always talk too much. I'm tired of my own voice and way too much commentary about things that need little commentary, where commentary actually becomes a distraction for the beauty at hand. Andy, just shut up more, will ya please!

"I take long walks. I stop thinking and even feeling, and I just look, and see, everything—in exact color, shape, texture, and all inside of utter gratitude and harmony. It is wide-eye seeing without commentary."
(Richard Rohr. Immortal Diamond)

Moralism Is Not Faith Transformation

" Moralism (as opposed to healthy morality} is our reliance on largely arbitrary purity codes, magic rituals, and "requirements" for our supposed enlightenment, "salvation," or any form of
superiority. Every group and individual relies on moralism in its early stages. We look for something behavioral to externally do or not do rather than undergo a radical transformation of our very mind and heart.... Mature religion is about change, not little changes.
(Immoral Diamond. Richard Rohr)

God Never Vacates His Place In Our Soul?

"The place which God takes in our soul he will never vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there... The soul who contemplates this is made like the one who is contemplated.
(Lady Julian of Norwich, Showings)

"On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you."
(John 14:20)

Preaching Free of Charge & Braging About it!

"I would rather die than lose my right to boast about preaching without charge"

 Read an interesting statement from the apostle Paul today. It stuck with me, it captivated me, and it stopped me up. It froze me in time for a few minutes. 

Considering I have opted to serve the kingdom as a self supported servant, this resonated with me. What many people view as a sad state of affairs in my life, Paul viewed as a bragging right to wear proudly. There probably are people who think I have abandoned ministry... By ministry they mean being a traditional Minister who leads a church and does what preacher types do as leader of a congregation. I no longer serve in that kind of community each week. 

As a Commercial fishing Captain with my own boat, and a Humanitarian NGO in Africa, I work for a living, and my "preaching" is done free of charge now, and I am liking the change. Frankly, I would never wish to go back to that structure again. It's too stifling, too small, too restrictive and controlling for my taste, even though I had a great experience in all my churches, Loved the people, they loved me (For the most part), and moved on in good terms too. So don't assume bitterness or bad feelings got me to where I am.

I have heard sermons on verse 14, justifying why we need to give money to the church to support ministries and ministers. I have also heard sermons on Verse 16, justifying why we need to preach the gospel, and how some just have that calling, and if they are silent... how bad it is to fall down on that calling. 

I have never head a sermon on Verse 15 about how good it is to preach free of charge, and how beneficial it is to rob some people of the ability of saying "I'm paying you for this". 

Right now I'm living it, and liking it. We are seeing more and more 'Clergy" stepping out of the stifling box that is killing their souls freedom, and learning to serve in a whole new way, freely, as they learn new skills to earn a living. We are liking it. Don't let ministry as a job, or income, keep you for doing what you know is right. The pay check is not worth the trade off on your soul, or the tension it creates in your family. God can move you to the place where you can serve free of charge. It's not easy, it calls for radical changes in our life. But I think they are worth it. Understand this, you don't need that structure to be a servant, nor need it to be a fruitful servant. There are lots of church planters out there self supporting now. I think It's a positive trend. You can do things you feel lead to do without some groups prior approval or permission. You can place yourself and serve in some dark places, with the kind of people, that most churches have a hard time absorbing and rubbing shoulders with. And you free up kingdom resources to invest in more critical things.

I am not suggesting all ministers need to step down from their churches. Not at all, we need people serving there too. 

However, if that is not working for you, if that is sucking the life out of your soul, and this concept sparks your interest, there is biblical support that this can work, and it can be very healthy for all involved too. 

Go while you can still serve. Don't wait until you are so crushed, that when you leave, you can't pick your head to serve anyone much. 

"In the same way, the Lord ordered that those who preach the Good News should be supported by those who benefit from it. ¹⁵ Yet I have never used any of these rights. And I am not writing this to suggest that I want to start now. In fact, I would rather die than lose my right to boast about preaching without charge." (1 Corinthians 9:14-15)

Freedom

"The True Self is not the perfect self. It merely participates in the One who
is. Holiness is not always wholeness; in fact, it never is. God alone is whole and "good," as Jesus says—when even he is called "good" (Mark 10:18). I hope that frees you to be less judgmental of others and more patient with yourself too."
(Richard Rohr. Immortal Diamond)

Knowing How To Return!

"It is very important that you know that the True Self is not moral perfection or even psychological wholeness. Many masochistic saints, eccentric prophets, and neurotic mystics are more than a bit strange, and they almost always have serious blind spots, but they knew who they were in God and they knew how to return there. That is their secret."
(Richard Rohr. Immortal Diamond)

Good Things For Wrong Reasons?

"Satan does not tempt you so much to the "hot sins" like greed, lust, and gross ambition. They are too obviously evil and will eventually show themselves as such. Instead Satan tempts you to do proper, defensible, and often admired things, but for cold, malicious, or self-centered
reasons." (Richard Rohr. Immortal Diamond)

The False Self

"Your False Self is how you define yourself outside of love, relationship, or divine union. After you have spent many years laboriously building this separate self, with all its labels and preoccupations, you are very attached to it. And why wouldn't you be? It's what you know and all you know. To move beyond it will always feel like losing or dying. Perhaps you have noticed
that master teachers like Jesus and the Buddha, St. Francis, all the "Teresas" (Avila, Lisieux, and Calcutta), Hafiz, Kabir, and Rumi talk about dying much more than we are comfortable with They all know that if you do not learn the art of dying and letting go early, you will hold onto your False Self far too long, until it kills you anyway."
(Immortal Diamond. Richard Rohr)

True Self Is not earned

'You do not create your True Self, or
earn it, or work up to it by any moral
or ritual behavior whatsoever. It is all
and forever mercy for all of us and all
the time, and there are no exceptions.
You do not climb up to your True Self.
You fall into it, so don't avoid all
falling."

(Immortal Diamond. Richard Rohr.)

No Longer Makes Sense To Your Soul.

"And you know what? Your soul is much larger than you! You are just along for the ride. When you learn to live there, you live with everyone and everything else too. Any language of exclusion or superiority no longer makes sense to you."

(Immortal Diamond. Richard Rohr.)

Prejudices

Towards a Nonjudgmental life

"One of the hardest spiritual tasks is to live without prejudices. Sometimes we aren't even aware how deeply rooted our prejudices are. We may think that we relate to people who are different from us in colour, religion, sexual orientation, or lifestyle as equals, but in concrete circumstances our spontaneous thoughts, uncensored words, and knee-jerk reactions often
reveal that our prejudices are still there.

Strangers, people different than we are, stir up fear, discomfort, suspicion, and hostility. They make us lose our sense of security just by being "other." Only when we fully claim that God loves
us in an unconditional way and look at "those other persons" as equally loved can we begin to discover that the great variety in being human is an expression of the immense richness of God's heart. Then the need to prejudge people can
gradually disappear." (Nouwen)

Laugh

"Oh Michael, you've got to learn to laugh. You take the wrong things too seriously, and the right ones too lightly." (The Bastard Tree. M.C. Lang)

Unsupervised!

"I am currently unsupervised I know, it freaks me out too. But the possibilities are endless!"

Church Buildings Steal Our Devotion.

"In Church 3.0, Neil mentions three consistent roadblocks to church multiplication and reproduction: buildings, budgets, and big shots.-

Buildings are not bad or wrong; they are simply not alive and therefore cannot reproduce. Buildings usually cost an exorbitant amount of money to purchase and even more to maintain. But perhaps the worst part about buildings is that they claim our love and ultimately our devotion. They anchor us in one place and become missional black holes."
(Church Transfusion. Neil Cole)

One Seed Will Feed The World.

"A single shaft of wheat allowed to reproduce freely and multiply for several generations will have multiplied enough within only eight years to feed the entire world population for a year."

One seed can feed the whole world if we keep planting it.

Children Catch More Grasshoppers

When a Peace Corps worker was trying to impress on some Congolese men why having fewer children is better for them economically, one of the men in the group simply said,

"Catch a child a grasshopper to eat today and he'll catch you another grasshopper tomorrow."(Congolese Proverb)

Which is why they see great value in having many children.

Case for Volunteer Clergy!

"Among our own people also the church sorely needs clergy in close touch with the ordinary life of the laity, living the life of ordinary men, sharing their difficulties and understanding their trials by close personal experience.

Stipendiary clergy cut off by training and life from that common experience are constantly struggling to get close to the laity by wearing lay clothing, sharing in lay amusements, and organizing lay clubs; but they never quite succeed. To get close to men, it is necessary really to share their experience, and to share their experience is to share it by being in it, not merely to come as near to it as possible without being in it."

... Roland Allen (1869-1947), The Case for Voluntary Clergy

Unmotivated, Is Just That......!

"Your job is not to 'figure out' how to motivate unmotivated people. However, this is a common mentality driving most of our activity." (Andy Rayner)

Tragic Gaps Created By Church?

"Both the church's practice and its Platonic pronouncements create tragic gaps for any person with an operative head and a beating heart. But remember, even a little bit of God is well worth loving, and even a little bit of truth and love goes a long way."
(Richard Rohr. Falling Upward)

Bad Quotes?

"I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good." (Seneca)

Becoming a Lousy Follower!

Albert Einstein is reputed to have said,

"The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them."

Why would we follow the herds mindless thinking that brought us here, when all they ever offer is more and more cosmetic coverup, trivial tweaks and modifications, that amount to us doing the same thing, but "better", at the end of the day?

We need a whole new kind of thinking. Be ready, when you start thinking, you become some other "leaders" lousy follower. The fire gets stoked.

You Are A Bridge Kit

'You are sitting on your own bridge kit. Start building!"
(David Hayward. NakedPastor)

Do You Have Enough Anger, Tear, and Foolishness?

I don't, so praying for more........

"May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears
to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness
to believe that you can make a difference in the world so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

(Franciscan Benediction)

Community May Not Be Good Community

"The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd.
The one who walks alone, is likely to find himself in places no one has
ever been before."
(Albert Einstein)

Been thinking about that a lot lately. People go on about how we are made to live life out in community. I get that, and all the bible versus that go with that. I don't disagree in the least.

However, those saying it often imply YOU need to be in THIS community, that does community THIS way.

To not be part of that kind of " fixed image" of community, is highly criticized. There are (feel free to substitute the word leader with the word church) abusive leaders, mistaken leaders, bully leaders, self seeking leaders, mean leaders, angry leaders, comfortable leaders, lazy leaders, controlling leaders. Why does that surprise us? Why would we deny this or let expressing it make us upset?

Certainly, many groups are not like this. But, what if THIS community is?

If we were to become just like this spiritual "community", would we be doing what we should be? Would I be serving the world and my neighbors?Would I be thrown out to build kind and redemptive relationships? 

Are you free to follow Christ and his leading without being chocked most if the time? Is anyone really walking with you in community anyway, beyond sitting at, or maintaining the same events together? What do we have with people outside of that?

I personally do not want the crowd limiting were I serve, how I serve, when I serve. If I listened to them I would not be in a Muslim country, where almost evacuated three times because of Jehadists and Al-Qaedea activity (75% take over at one point) in forcing Sharia law.
The church crowd, will not let their church crowd, get that radical in what they do. This community most often makes decisions based on what's safe, comfortable, appealing, and will draw a crowd HERE. And criticize you for not
Being here with them immersed in their "safedom". Sure, they will send YOU off, but they don't want to have that kind of stuff talked about prayed about, or running around their building. 
Sorry, more people need to surpass the crowd, THIS crowd, even YOUR crowd. Cut some people loose.

This does not make me any better. Trust me, I am nothing special.

But my community is different people now. People who get this, and who can serve and encourage one another through this real world stuff of today, to be good Jesus followers, and nudge people of diverse religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups, to see the fingerprints of Jesus in their lives.