Discipline the Righteous: Hebrews 12.

Why the night time God?

Remove darkness from home God.

Why the night time God?

Joy--an haiku by rje

There's no greater joy
than when life requires a man
to tend to his wife.

Humans and Perfection

The Great Adultery              a poem by rick elgersma

We thought we'd control life

But discovered our willed life

Doesn't tell the entire story.

Our light isn't our own light.

The truth says,

At the moment of discovery

Human’s desperate attempt

To cover up in front of their beloved

Remains constant.

Life, randomly beautiful

Because desperate measures

Most often loiter in our dreams

A titillating  environment untouched

By reality and yet provides 

The dreadful fuel 

To our very real temptations.

Is it cheating to remain quiet

About our fears and temptations?

Is it unfaithful to oblige modesty

In the wake of guilt?

It was one day long ago

That man hid from his beloved

The first great adultery

And they covered themselves

The moment of discovery

Desperately covered up

The unrequited irony

Uncovered to the whore

And modest before the beloved

Their faces pierce the darkness

Of our dreams and enticement

The want of good and evil

And controlling neither of them

Even the whisper of a thought

Is heard by the beloved

Because the beloved knows

Their heart unsown.

Guilt stares

Fury wails

Sadness burns

And only struggle and blood

Stitches and yet no blank, no space,

No emptiness and no void

Are filled without love unconditionally tender.

Even rivers dry up sometimes.

And fists pop the music grows loud

The fire grows and Lucifer

Satan screams into the microphone

Like fuel venom flows the flair of 

Delicious pleasure teems onto the heads

Of the adulterer

I feel so sure of myself

But ask the dust to which 

We must return and you’ll

Find the consequence of guilt

The great adultery

For in every grain of dust,

Adam.

Except for One drop of blood

The river flows

The abyss find the ground

The darkness lithely lighted…

It has always been that

At the moment of discovery

Human’s desperate attempt

To cover up in front of their beloved

Remains constant.

The curse of good and evil unanswered

By human minds except that we are saved

With the knowledge that God was witness

To the Great adultery.

A play we rewrite each day

A touch we re-enact

And God remains witness

And our eyes always look to the hills

Avoiding the dust that are my bones

Because the Hill's rivers, blood

That shed, rushes like mountain rivers,
Washes, fills our souls

Glory that was never housed nor hid

And the help we’re not desperate for

Because our souls have not been ours

For such a long time

The battle on my desert heart

and still but one I am forbid to fight.

My one punishment for the great adultery

Is that I, man am restricted from my own power

Someone else’s blood drips, flows onto my heart

And creates the soul that turns my desert into oasis.

Adultery—deception’s creative history

We thought we could control life

But life turned and discovered

It was not all it should control

Every word spoken 

After the great adultery

Was an attempt to gain more from life

Or give it away.

Impossible dreams

Everything we dreamed

Became frenetically unrestrained

And it has always been that.

The truth says,

At the moment of discovery

Human’s desperate attempt

To cover up in front of their beloved

Remains constant.

The moment of discovery

Desperately covered up

The unrequited irony

Uncovered to the whore

And modest before the beloved

I yearn for the day when I might finally

Be uncovered before my love

And hidden to the whore.

I want to see the garden.

Riders

She's a wind of a different sort, my wife is.  I don't gear up and she's dragging me to the road, rubbing my face into the asphalt and selling my bike on Craigslist.  She's no blowhard, no flash of hot air, no; she's wind.  She calls Iowa a "natural selection state" meaning one doesn't wear gear, they're closer to the front of the line with those waiting for Grim Reaper's signature.  Gear spelled looks like this "r-i-d-e-r", from another point of view looks like, "f-r-e-e-d-o-m" and from her side looks like "l-o-v-e."

She settles in unavoidable, and carries through me like Spring storms; forever Spring.

Wind dashed against my helmet, blurred the world, roads like bent trees.  Relentless breath as unending as the motor beneath me, and the love behind me.

Four-hundred and two miles ridden yesterday.  Gear does not make a motorcyclist, but it does help maintain them.  Motorcyclists are lovers and fighters; the entire package.  The wind is their joy and the other's lives their freedom.  They're one giant cumulous cloud rising stratospherically, and only a friendly wave away. They've the power to yank another from their docker's and polo lives, turn the heavenly fan to "high" and send them out.

She's a different kind of wind, my wife is.  She pats my helmeted head and says, "let's ride baby."  My gloved hands pull the clutch, release the brake, and turn the throttle; the shifter receives a quick tap and we're off. The road rises up to meet us, the wide open envelopes us, and my loving wind, my graceful yet firm freedom, my blessed wife, pats me on the helmet and blows me down yonder.

Generosity

     Thought for the day:  So many people criticize, illegitimize or disparage another's church, life, career choices or habits to justify their own existence.  They can't seem to enjoy, glean or understand another's church, life, career choices, habits or hurts.  When a person does enjoy another, they're offered opportunity for generosity, showing respect for a friend, connecting each other's existence, and quite possibly growing from the experience and/or joyfully enhance or improve someone else's environment.  


     Furthermore, when someone ails, there is not a single support method.  Excellent and varied ways exist that unconditionally uphold and support another.  So many believe they deserve to be seen, deserve reward for their action or generosity--Better are those ways you joyfully serve them without being seen, without asserting merit for an action--I assure you believer, your reward will be in Heaven.  


     Better would be to more broadly define servanthood as the opportunity to take joy of someone in their own environment according to their own needs and to take joy in that experience.  Find and then take advantage of the opportunity to be generous.

Seasonal Dress-Up

Seasonal Dress-Up           an haiku by richard elgersma
Summer's torrid dust
blows spryly in Autumn gale
Melted ice re-formed

Best Intentions: an haiku by rick e.

Smokin' chrome and wind

motorcycles and sunlight
damned deliberate.

Land of the Unlikely

I live in the land of the unlikely, always striving to live my own life, to accomplish my own accomplishments, create my own success and to establish my identity; and most efforts against profound odds.  Uniquely and paradoxically, I become predictably unpredictable, meaning the more I work to establish my own unique identity, the more there is to understand about me.


I live the the land of the unlikely.  My wife's family lives in the land of the unlikely.  My dad-in-law chased his future wife from the Netherlands to the United States and well before even being awarded citizenship, he was drafted into the American Army to go to Viet Nam, fought and lived, and was again denied citizenship.  It was eventually awarded.  My mom-in-law's family moved to the U.S., some moved back to the Netherlands, than moved back to the U.S. again.  All suffered searing anxiety and stress.  I'm not sure that my wife's Grandma ever truly found her identity in the U.S.


My in-laws have spent a total of about 32 years in Europe, many as American citizens, meaning they went "home" as foreigners.  We live in the land of the unlikely.


It seems there's so much that separates us, drives us apart.  It seems we get hung up on our presuppositions or ideas about any one thing, and many deem petty.


Even Oma K. has lived uniquely.  And yet when we were there, on one of her surfaces set a silver teapot, the kind of teapot that graces many Dutch homes.  I felt connected and familiar.  Familiar things, familiar foods and familiar activities connect many who live unlikely days.


Christ himself lived uniquely.  Despite his unique life, and despite my unlikely days, his people were never meant to separate one from another.  We're called a "body" and the body, no matter what might seem to separate one part from another, the body continues in support of the rest of the body.  Each unique body part, full of their own needs, their own ways and their own identities, exists in tandem, in connection to the rest.


I, like many of you, live an unlikely life living in unlikely days, always striving to live uniquely, to accomplish my own accomplishments, and to establish my identity. 


But I am not an island; I am familiar.  And I am...we are connected.