April 20, 2015
Condolences
My brother-in-law passed away
Saturday and his Facebook page, although currently active, will soon be closed.
It’s been interesting to read the short RIP posts and see Ray through the eyes
of others. Shelly, Ray’s step-daughter from a marriage that ended in divorce
many years ago, wrote, “Enjoy Heaven. Glad you were my dad for a few years.” In
today’s society where fathers go in and out of the lives of children, it’s
touching to know that even if a man is not a “forever dad,” he can still impact
a child’s life. The fifth
Commandment, “Honor your father
and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is
giving you” (Ex 20:12 NIV).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----I’m beginning to believe how important it is to be intimate with God. He is intimate with us. It isn’t just that we should mix oil with oil or vinegar with vinegar, therefore intimacy with intimacy. It is that God lives and moves in the intimate. If we truly desire to know and experience Him, then we will need to do that where He is, and He is intimate.
-----Maybe we like to talk about getting close to God because “intimacy” has some metaphorical connotations needing our caution. So there’s my caution. Intimacy has vastly more connotations belonging to relationship itself. It characterizes one’s deepest nature. Think about your deepest nature - everything about you that makes you unique as well as human like everyone else. Of course, don’t do that too long, because there’s so very much in the way of memories and attitudes about memories and held principles and all of their “why’s” and “how’s” and “about’s” and desires, ambitions, fears, concepts of comfort, etc. is not even a beginning of what composes our deepest natures. We have more intricate parts than the world’s beaches have sand. Break down one strand of DNA into its component parts and then realize every cell of your body has its strand of DNA and is itself more complex in biomechanical parts than is any 747. And your body has trillions of cells made of as many parts. Moreover, not only is your brain made of billions of cells, all of its cells have individual relationships with neighboring cells which vary according to sets of relationships each has with others, thus composing patterns of neurological activity in it in multiples of multiples of multiples of the number of its cells, altogether raising up meanings we perceive as consciousness and even interactions with other people.
-----So attach this concept of intricate to the “deepest nature” part of intimacy’s connotation. For God knows not only every thought and feeling you’ve ever had, He knows the precise placement and reason for that placement of every cell, molecule, atom, neutron, proton, electron, etc. of your body, individually, and He knows every human ever having lived , living, or to live just as deeply. Of course, we can not achieve anywhere near such a degree of intricately detailed knowledge or experience; we can hardly imagine it. Our knowledge and experience caps off in generality long, long before even beginning to reach such detailed perception. But in that God knows all, He knows intimately.
-----In that we know generally, situations can become units of intimacy. How blessed must your brother-in-law’s moments been with that step-daughter for her to relate to him as a dad in that short lived situation. Our intimacies get chopped up by this awful wickedness we live in, this world’s incessant neglect and denial of the Creator, its own all blessing, giving, and sustaining God. So, living in the giant bacon slicer the mistakes and tragedies of our lives are, we need to be earthworms, able to be sliced into smaller units which each live on in their own goodness relative to God and the situation of their making. We need to experience Him intimately, even into the moments of our wandering thoughts. We need to be intimate with God about all the moments and units of our lives.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment