Complicit Christians Co-Create Arizona Legislation

Arizona legislators grant restaurants the right to refuse service to gay people as part of RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.
Misguidedly these folk think they are taking the moral high ground since so many Christian churches call out homosexuality as sinful. This teaching is complicit in this legislation. Paul when calling H unnatural had no idea how creatures in nature were and are homosexual. It is natural and good just like God said it was and is. It’s nature, God’s creation, just like heterosexuality is both good and natural. The real moral high ground is reforming and confirming to the truth as it is more clearly & explicitly being revealed to our hearts and minds. Churches are too lazy or cowardly to face the truth. So sad. People are committing suicide because they were born gay and are treated as unnatural.

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Inspired Moments

First I started out my day by gathering the throw around my back and shoulders so I could stay warm while I would meditate. Twenty-four minutes later, I was thankful for the quieted mind which was nice and emptied of anxiety, open to a non critical attitude.
Husband up and coffee consuming to prepare for the work to accomplish his assignment from Seminary. But the minutes shared were fellowship at its calmest and sweetest, we both love each other and are together on board for God’s patient adventure ride. He is 67 and approaching final graduate work for a Masters of Divinity. I am 65 and inspired.

My text message blessed me and my family with Be Inspired, from my first born, and what better inspiration than to have closed out a Sunday evening with a good phone call from the baby of the family, in his zone writing inspired music under inspired and expert tutelage, and to further awaken from sleep and morning meditation with the words of blessing from my elder son. Have an inspired Monday and a great week.

Before Bob went up to his study, he gave me his hand and I blessed him with a prayer. I had been touched by the strong call for patience from my pastor’s online sermon yesterday when I was too sick to hear it in person. So I indulged my newly encouraged patience with myself by grazing through Marc Chagall’s love filled prints on my iPad. Beauty. From a poor Russian home to inspired painter the artist renders life scenes as seen and felt from the heart and center of our whole being.

Going for more coffee to my beautiful small kitchen I looked out at the graying fence behind my chain linked fence. How silently but musically the shadows of the huge Blue Spruce branches play onto this fence. Without this plain fence I would never have caught the dance of the shadows. Through the other window I see from across my street large trunks of great spruces, a living Cezanne composition for me.

Inspired with the thought that my brother in the nursing home is content and pleased with the kind staff, each with a beautiful smile for the love they receive from Andy, he with a joyful smile as he receives their love. The magical growth in our bond of sister brother love is reflected in this place. Since age 18 he fought severe mental illness and now prayers from our family, alive and with The Lord, are spirited together with God’s prayer for him, a beautiful later in life scenario for him, has come to pass after all his deep continual suffering. There is nothing like his present day smile, that he should be receiving so much love, respect, good humor and connection.

I would say that all the encouragement I have received from six workshops on Sabbath Pause, has bolstered my faith in quiet solitude with God, opened my understanding to its purpose to make me one with him and his creation, make me perceive his nearness. It has helped me be happy and my happiness in this newness of life has helped form my brother, too, with whom I’ve been swept up into the sweetness of spiritual life.

Beauty, growth, renewal, my child sharing his life, my child blessing his family at the start of the week, a husband using his gifts to follow his call, my spiritual teachers coming from virtually nowhere to be where I needed to learn.
May my inspiration bear fruits of love that only God has designed and has in store. May I be so stretched out to receive them, but in calmness and surrender.
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Part Two

And all of this following a Spiritual Formation committee meeting last Monday that, now under new leadership, has said, what went on these past months under the former leader, a wonderfully inspired, impartial leader, is not what we will take up. We will move on from all this former dreaming and communicating, to our (their) way. So politics has a spirit. Our time with this group will be up. But who knows what we tried to do will not come to pass for everyone’s betterment, blessing and inspiration. Now, how can I say that? I have a history in this area of nurturing my local church.

At my California church, when I was 39, we Education elders and two associate pastors, had an overnite retreat in the Wine country, we talked and moved…we wanted a clergy couple 3/4 time each to take on the youth and the children, which would mean changes: our eldest pastor would be emeritus, our youth pastor should move on as he needed more educational foundation for a sustained career, (a good job would be found for him as a pastor favor) and we would no longer need the services of our children’s consultant. A town meeting occurred, people thought we had been possessed to make these changes.

The Aftershocks occurred: one of our pastors left ministry to become a full time counselor, one left our church a bit later, and we elders, two men and myself all were shaken, but mostly me. They were, after all, businessmen and used to the hurdles of leadership. For me, it was cataclysmic to be shunned and reviled by good folks whose lovely company I’d enjoyed so much. But, I was asked to return to session to serve a second term as an elder, a back to back term, a huge honor. I was too weakened to accept. But that they asked me to get back in the saddle again, that made all the difference. A decade or so later, what happened? Their brand new associate pastor’s wife was an ordained minister, and eventually they became the head pastors of this church. Our clergy couple idea was planted and bore fruit. No more mysogyny from the pulpit. More Life, revelation and reality, and my suffering helped nurture this growth. So I am hopeful the good work Bob and I tried to do on our present church’s behest, will also be fruitful eventually in nurturing this church to fullness of life.

The patience sermon was for me, because all my work wasn’t even put on the back burner. But patience was the word because my past has shown me, God will do the follow through, if all my sincerity and being believes and trusts that a vision has been had and will come to pass because God is in it. I wish my suffering mom of great faith, had been availed of the workshops on meditation that I had experienced. It would have saved her life. Maybe a sermon can create patience in us, but teaching and mirroring the benefits of contemplative living would give me a whole different life.

Inspired Monday. I pray for life. I give thanks for the wonderful men God surrounded me with and I pray your inspiration on them provides fruit for your people.
I felt like painting, but instead I’ve written, just like I chose literature over art for my major. A girl of the word. I have Anthony Mascherin, my English teacher, to thank for that. May I create and may all the earth create in the numberless ways you open for them, unheard of ways until they all speak with voice, hands, feet, and prayer and keep listening, to be inspired every moment after.

When morning guilds the skies my heart awaking cries:
May Jesus Christ be praised!

Why Worship?

Why Worship?

Worship is family life, but a family that includes the whole world, living and dead, note the oxymoron. Family life that includes the dead.

Which is what Christianity is all about on many levels. Including at a cost, celebrating that cost, measuring how we have helped in our daily living participate in relieving or paying that cost, following Jesus’s example, motivated by his love filled sacrifice to live to help, to live to include in the family, the presence of all for one and one for all, sharing our individual happiness with each and with all, paying the price of others’ rejection, judgement, scorn , ridicule, disbelief or apathy.

Places In The Heart was a movie which illustrated this idea in its final scene, as the communion plate was passed around down each row, filled with the characters of the movie, both those who were alive and those who died during the course of the story.

Worship is the real reality time and fits precisely to the purposes of God just as he modeled them in Jesus Christ. Calling out those who wanted to exclude or ignore as a sermon does, and raising up those who believed in our connection with the holy and the whole and the whole world, as worshipful singing or music does.

He made the living and the dead have a new meaning, the includers and excluders, respectively, were the only living and dead and are the only living and dead. Worship enacts and upholds his model life as our reality. Soak in it, soak it in, be challenged by its claims and messages, sing or listen for its joy, glorify the creator and Lord of it all, the only reality is his. Worship refits us for this family living.

Our Doing and Being come Judgement Day

Mathew 16:27 …he will repay everyone for what has been done. NRSV
HOW DOES THIS FIGURE IN WITH THE WISDOM THAT IT IS BEING NOT DOING THAT IS IMPORTANT TO GOD?
Mathew proclaims that it is not one’s set of beliefs that matter to God so much as what has been done that’s attributable to one. Your prayers and actions and team effort in works of change and help for one or many other people is to all one day be repaid by God at the Judgement.

Yet, that which moves you, not only becomes your actions, but also becomes you, and becomes your being, your being being expressed, your movement within the I AM BEING BEING, God.

That movement within you and through you is participation in God’s life, your action of relating to him, and finally your relationship with him. Participating in his life, which is in reality both physical and spiritual, is in the end your knowing him and his knowing you.

By doing we are made part of I AM when we allow his being to motivate our deepest self, our soul, to do and to be. The connection is payment enough!