"in other news:
a garbage truck
off east Colfax was
blown to shit today
by an anti-personel
weapon."
i turned off the sob
story and lit another cigarette
from the smoldering
metal.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Hello Kavita
I work with the lead singer/guitarist from this band and want to give them serious props.
http://www.myspace.com/hellokavita
i think those who read my site would find this music refreshing, melow, contemplative and variegated.
http://www.myspace.com/hellokavita
i think those who read my site would find this music refreshing, melow, contemplative and variegated.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Paul, oh Paul, from South Dakota
"I'll take you on the nickel tour, and maybe, if we're lucky, I will take you to the suburbs; Where hope goes to die" the invite to tour us around Denver
"Ive been choking on thier generational dust for too long" - On being born the official year after the Baby Boomers, 1967 in a small sheep town.
"He's like a little rat. I came out and saw him nibbling away at the cheese. He even had beady little eyes like a rat, peering up at me from under that ridiculous cap he wears. Then, after I got on his about it, he scampred off somberly like a pitiful rat would do if it didnt get what it wanted."
On a co-worker who eats all our cheese samples at Whole Foods.
"Ive been choking on thier generational dust for too long" - On being born the official year after the Baby Boomers, 1967 in a small sheep town.
"He's like a little rat. I came out and saw him nibbling away at the cheese. He even had beady little eyes like a rat, peering up at me from under that ridiculous cap he wears. Then, after I got on his about it, he scampred off somberly like a pitiful rat would do if it didnt get what it wanted."
On a co-worker who eats all our cheese samples at Whole Foods.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
My Warrioress
theres not a word thats fit
for a warrior woman
like you,
my love.
the one who folowed me into
an unknown land,
following my heart
you stand beside me and believe.
i cant express in words what
you are to me;
i love you so very deeply,
i cherish who you are
how you think &
percieve this life
+
i cant but relish in the fact
youre given to me to cherish.
for a warrior woman
like you,
my love.
the one who folowed me into
an unknown land,
following my heart
you stand beside me and believe.
i cant express in words what
you are to me;
i love you so very deeply,
i cherish who you are
how you think &
percieve this life
+
i cant but relish in the fact
youre given to me to cherish.
Homosexuality and Evangelical snobbery
I have known many men who were gay and loyal to their mates in covenant and many evangelical Christians who have not been to their wives. Yet one is cast into hell and the other rewarded. I have known those same men to have been devoutly lovers of Christ before they discovered their gayness and, once realizing their sexual orientation, threw over board their faith because it is not Godly or Holy. Is it merely an ethical issue?
I am not saying the practice of homosexuality is in anyway endurable before God. I put this question out: What is -endurable before God- anyway? Are we in anything virtuous on our own? Who in light of pure Christian theology could say yes? Isn’t it in Christ alone that our hope is found? Is it not His virtue and nature that covers us as a means to enter His rest?
Any sin is "missing the mark" (hamartia) and deserves death. This we know. The blood of Christ covers those very sins…as a result of what? Confession and repentance via Faith in the finished work of Christ. Therefore, the homosexual and the heterosexual both need the same renunciation of their sin. The homosexual his life style, -for it is obvious in scripture that this is not intended by God to be the best for us- and the heterosexual; because, despite mere sexual orientation, our very nature desrves death.
Now, the heterosexually married man who wrestles with pornography, or prostitution, or perhaps fraudulating finances - what ever the case- he, as the homosexual, needs to repent and move from those lifestyles.
Yet, is it as easy as that? SNAP! All allurement to those vices cease? Its ridiculous to believe that post-repentance means that our nature cannot still be enticed by those things.
My point is that we need to extend equal ammounts of grace and view our selves in the same light, for "all of us have become as one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment (lit. menstrual cloth, for an idea of how polluted); We all fade like a leaf, and our inequities, like the wind, take us away" Isa. 64:6. In working around homosexuals I yearn for their salvation, for their restoration, and hurt with them in seeing the unjust pangs evangelicals have given them. Anti-gay riots where evangelicals with banners scream: "sodomites burn! Repent or burn, faggots!", such are some of the heinous outcries I have witnessed. Sadly, this is the assumption the world has of the churches opinion of sin: one sided and virtue oreinted. If only we would level the ground at the cross and work through acceptence - again, not of life style, but as bearers of His image- we might see them embrace Christ and produce fruit for His Kingdom. What a testimony!
For a homosexual that became a lover of Christ see:
http://www.dennisjernigan.com/
p.s. I wrote this while listening to Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark"...humor for those who understand the moment that song came about.
I am not saying the practice of homosexuality is in anyway endurable before God. I put this question out: What is -endurable before God- anyway? Are we in anything virtuous on our own? Who in light of pure Christian theology could say yes? Isn’t it in Christ alone that our hope is found? Is it not His virtue and nature that covers us as a means to enter His rest?
Any sin is "missing the mark" (hamartia) and deserves death. This we know. The blood of Christ covers those very sins…as a result of what? Confession and repentance via Faith in the finished work of Christ. Therefore, the homosexual and the heterosexual both need the same renunciation of their sin. The homosexual his life style, -for it is obvious in scripture that this is not intended by God to be the best for us- and the heterosexual; because, despite mere sexual orientation, our very nature desrves death.
Now, the heterosexually married man who wrestles with pornography, or prostitution, or perhaps fraudulating finances - what ever the case- he, as the homosexual, needs to repent and move from those lifestyles.
Yet, is it as easy as that? SNAP! All allurement to those vices cease? Its ridiculous to believe that post-repentance means that our nature cannot still be enticed by those things.
My point is that we need to extend equal ammounts of grace and view our selves in the same light, for "all of us have become as one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment (lit. menstrual cloth, for an idea of how polluted); We all fade like a leaf, and our inequities, like the wind, take us away" Isa. 64:6. In working around homosexuals I yearn for their salvation, for their restoration, and hurt with them in seeing the unjust pangs evangelicals have given them. Anti-gay riots where evangelicals with banners scream: "sodomites burn! Repent or burn, faggots!", such are some of the heinous outcries I have witnessed. Sadly, this is the assumption the world has of the churches opinion of sin: one sided and virtue oreinted. If only we would level the ground at the cross and work through acceptence - again, not of life style, but as bearers of His image- we might see them embrace Christ and produce fruit for His Kingdom. What a testimony!
For a homosexual that became a lover of Christ see:
http://www.dennisjernigan.com/
p.s. I wrote this while listening to Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark"...humor for those who understand the moment that song came about.
Reality & Hell
It seems that in no time at all the topic of faith comes up at work. Some where in the hustle and bustle of task lists and action steps there is enough down time to probe into your co-workers soul and find out the lenses through which they see this world. As usual, I am the first to be found out: "God Damn it!" One says, then slowly looks toward the new guy and asks "are you offended by such vulgarities?" After nodding, I am labled: Conservative Baptist. If I had merely shrugged and said "not really" I would then be emergent and liberal. Either way, I am at one end of the awkward boat of Christiantity sailing on the breast of allegorical waters being blown by subjective imagination.
Regardless of the label, I am known to have a specific way in which I see the world around me. This was precisely the case the other day at work with one of my two co-workers. Paul, a tall lanky man in his early fourties with a lingering drawl from the South Dakota sheep ranch he grew up on and a hummus dry hummor. Just down to earth.
He unabashedly told me that he renounced Christianity on one basis: Eternal Damnation. He couldnt swallow that concept and hated what the concept did to divide peoples and cultures. My own soul beats in unison with those sentiments. Its very true what eternal damnation does to section off groups and societies.
We talked a lot about what lead him to that, I asked if that was all, or did he jettison Christ as well? Was it just this pont he wrestled with or was there more? We came to the crux: Hes homo-sexual and knows this cannot be as a proffessed Christian. I agreed.
I left work rather heavy hearted- one might sympathize with me here. I wrestled with the idea of hell, or, actually, the reality of it. Like Soloman says, "God has put eternity in the heart of man" and I cant deny that my own soul speaks of these grim realities. We all know it and it cant be denied. Psychologists have done a mighty fine job at rationalizing the fable of heaven and hell and making it a purely psychological issue. Yet they themselves have the same soul I do with the same inclinations; they just have sharper wits to create thier own fables that make the issue palatable, more sensable to our "developed faculties". How do I respond to the issue of hell? As a Christian, like the Peter says, I should be able to answer this with a sound conscience. I have to deal with it myself! I often believe I am destined for hell. Thats when I look merely at my hand that holds Christ and not His that holds me.
I began stumbiling through explanations, allegories, illusions etc on why hell exists and what to do about it. They all skirt the issue. Its sin. Thats what Sin is, Sin is Hell and thats that. A better vision of what sin is, imagine the rent body of Christ, that in essence is the image of Sin that God desires we see. What else, though, is there to Hell and Sin?
Apart from the graphic explanation Christ gives about gnashing teeth and perpetual burning, there is something I think is magnificently worse, boiling down to one thing: The absence of Christ Himself. I cant imagine a worse place to be. "Remember that you were at that time sperated from Christ, allienated from the commonwealth of Isreal and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and with out God in the world" (Eph. 2:12) is a verse that I think - along with Christs depiction - explains the essence of Hell.
I began to think about that, mulling over what makes hell so gnarly. I hate excessive heat, I hate it when people gnash thier teeth at me (it happens a lot in Denver) and I hate worms and bile. But, would all that be so bad if I had a hope for something better? Or, if in the dusk of humanity I knew a glorious twilight was coming? I think it would be at least bareable. As a matter of a fact, I think thats where all humanity sits right now. Truly. Heres an excerpt that might clear up what I am trying to say from Lewis' "The Great Divorce". Its in the middle of a dialogue with the person writing and George MacDonald (a Scottish writer and theologian) in talking about the concept of Heaven and Hell, it reads:
"They (mortals) say of some temporal suffering, "no future bliss can make up for it" not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "let me but have this and I'll take the consequences": Little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both proceses begin even before death. The good mans past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad mans past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things...the Blessed will say, 'we have never lived anywhere but Heaven' , and the Lost ' we were always in Hell', and both will speak truly..."
They go on and discuss in greater depth how to wrestle with this. I wont bore with those details because they prove to be confusing and perhaps, misleading. Nevertheless, I find this excerpt to speak poignantly.
I am not writing this to give answers or produce explanations or better ways of talking about Hell. It would be unbearably hard to live knowing in our souls of a finality to life, and to not have hope, living in the dreary dusk of humanity. The expression we often use for ehpemeral pain "this is hell on earth" would be best used here. What hope is it that we as shining stars in the dark hold out to humanity?
Regardless of the label, I am known to have a specific way in which I see the world around me. This was precisely the case the other day at work with one of my two co-workers. Paul, a tall lanky man in his early fourties with a lingering drawl from the South Dakota sheep ranch he grew up on and a hummus dry hummor. Just down to earth.
He unabashedly told me that he renounced Christianity on one basis: Eternal Damnation. He couldnt swallow that concept and hated what the concept did to divide peoples and cultures. My own soul beats in unison with those sentiments. Its very true what eternal damnation does to section off groups and societies.
We talked a lot about what lead him to that, I asked if that was all, or did he jettison Christ as well? Was it just this pont he wrestled with or was there more? We came to the crux: Hes homo-sexual and knows this cannot be as a proffessed Christian. I agreed.
I left work rather heavy hearted- one might sympathize with me here. I wrestled with the idea of hell, or, actually, the reality of it. Like Soloman says, "God has put eternity in the heart of man" and I cant deny that my own soul speaks of these grim realities. We all know it and it cant be denied. Psychologists have done a mighty fine job at rationalizing the fable of heaven and hell and making it a purely psychological issue. Yet they themselves have the same soul I do with the same inclinations; they just have sharper wits to create thier own fables that make the issue palatable, more sensable to our "developed faculties". How do I respond to the issue of hell? As a Christian, like the Peter says, I should be able to answer this with a sound conscience. I have to deal with it myself! I often believe I am destined for hell. Thats when I look merely at my hand that holds Christ and not His that holds me.
I began stumbiling through explanations, allegories, illusions etc on why hell exists and what to do about it. They all skirt the issue. Its sin. Thats what Sin is, Sin is Hell and thats that. A better vision of what sin is, imagine the rent body of Christ, that in essence is the image of Sin that God desires we see. What else, though, is there to Hell and Sin?
Apart from the graphic explanation Christ gives about gnashing teeth and perpetual burning, there is something I think is magnificently worse, boiling down to one thing: The absence of Christ Himself. I cant imagine a worse place to be. "Remember that you were at that time sperated from Christ, allienated from the commonwealth of Isreal and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and with out God in the world" (Eph. 2:12) is a verse that I think - along with Christs depiction - explains the essence of Hell.
I began to think about that, mulling over what makes hell so gnarly. I hate excessive heat, I hate it when people gnash thier teeth at me (it happens a lot in Denver) and I hate worms and bile. But, would all that be so bad if I had a hope for something better? Or, if in the dusk of humanity I knew a glorious twilight was coming? I think it would be at least bareable. As a matter of a fact, I think thats where all humanity sits right now. Truly. Heres an excerpt that might clear up what I am trying to say from Lewis' "The Great Divorce". Its in the middle of a dialogue with the person writing and George MacDonald (a Scottish writer and theologian) in talking about the concept of Heaven and Hell, it reads:
"They (mortals) say of some temporal suffering, "no future bliss can make up for it" not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "let me but have this and I'll take the consequences": Little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both proceses begin even before death. The good mans past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad mans past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things...the Blessed will say, 'we have never lived anywhere but Heaven' , and the Lost ' we were always in Hell', and both will speak truly..."
They go on and discuss in greater depth how to wrestle with this. I wont bore with those details because they prove to be confusing and perhaps, misleading. Nevertheless, I find this excerpt to speak poignantly.
I am not writing this to give answers or produce explanations or better ways of talking about Hell. It would be unbearably hard to live knowing in our souls of a finality to life, and to not have hope, living in the dreary dusk of humanity. The expression we often use for ehpemeral pain "this is hell on earth" would be best used here. What hope is it that we as shining stars in the dark hold out to humanity?
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