Self-Hypnosis, God’s Profits and Sheep

It has been much too long for a journal to go without anything written on it, I didn’t feel I had anything to say and even now I really don’t have a specific topic to discuss, so you have the thrill of listening to my gears turn and my fingers tap out the thoughts that come to my head.

Michael Jackson
My partner is all a ga-ga over the MJ memorial that is going on, started watching it at 9 am and will probably continue to watch it up until 3pm. However I was never much of a celebrity rubber-necker and find them all kind of interesting at best. Frankly, I have more interest in the struggle that Farrah Fawcett went through in dealing with her cancer than the memorializing of MJ. Sure his music was fun, good lyrics (not great) and his dancing was original, but I’m just not interested in the hoopla… I guess if he died when he was 80 his memorial would be more my style, a bit more quiet and civil.

A Lost Sheep
Luke 15:3-7 /
Then Jesus told them this parable: “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

Thinking of the above verse it makes me feel special that heaven rejoices over a lost sheep that finds itself back in the fold – I know I have wandered off many, many times and when God seeks me out and I hear the voice calling to me from a far and go running to it, it warms my heart to think of the rejoicing that goes one when I return. I feel loved and I feel I belong.

God’s Profits
I’m reading God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters by Sarah Posner and there are two sides of me that are reading this book. The sinner side of me is amazed and a bit jealous of the money that these people make by being a preacher of religion/politics and the God fearing side of me is disgusted by the greed and innocence that is taken all in the name of God.

The book is both telling of the televangelist/politician and even myself. I’m only 36 and I have a lot to learn to become a better person in the eyes of man and God and yet I also see the fight I have with myself because I could view this book as a learning tool to taking advantage of others. However, I have faith that I won’t let myself go that far down the rabbit hole and just simply peer in.

Self-Hypnosis Diet
While I was growing up, self hypnosis was considered playing with fire as it opened you up to evil or demons because you were allowing the power of suggestion to control your action. But as I have grown up even more I have seen so much that can be both good and evil:
A gun can be used to kill hundreds of people or to save hundreds of people
A fire can set a house a blaze or keep a house of people warm
A rope can tie up food high in a tree away from bears or tie up a man for torture
A bucket of water can save a life from dehydration or take away that life by drowning

All simple things that can be use for both good and bad and I am learning that God has created all and said it was good and it has been man that has taken it and made it evil. I am going to try this self-hypnosis with the idea that good will come of it and that with God in my heart, we will be strong enough to fight any unknown evil that may come.

Truthfully, I am more afraid of the evil I see around me in the world than the evil that may or may not lay in wait for me within the voice of a hypnotist.

Philip & The Ethiopian Eunuch and Gays

I was reading through this wonderful post over at Queermergent by Nadia Bolz-Weber and a couple things jumped out at me that I hadn’t considered when reading this in the book of Acts 8:

….I was always told that the message of this text was that we should tell everyone we meet about Jesus because in doing so we might save them. We might convert them. We might change them into being us.

….But when Phillip joined this person who sought to worship God despite his exclusion form the tent, maybe it was Phillip himself who was converted to the faith.

….The only commands came from God and the command was go and join. Go and join the other. What we don’t know is if the Spirit also gave the Eunuch a command to invite. Invite this nice Jewish boy – representative of all that clings to the law and rejects you from God’s house. Invite him to sit by you. Go…join…invite…ask questions. Perhaps Phillip in his encounter with this gender transgressive foreigner learned what seeking the Lord looks like.

A lot of what I read is from what I was told to read and how to view those scriptures, never was there an alternative perspective that was looked upon with respect toward the individual who was giving it. However, as I have gotten older I have come to realize that the world isn’t picture that my parents portrayed and neither is the spiritual world that my pastors and teachers taught about. Instead when we read the bible we should look at the verse not from just the writer’s POV or the primary actors POV but also and in many cases, from the POV of the person who is looked down on,humiliated or considered a second-class person.

So many times those that are not the primary actors in the story are invisible to us, the ones we don’t like are ignored and so on. The same is true for gays, we are either invisible or ignored and yet our love for God is there in spite of this disrespect. Occasionally someone will notice the struggle that we are overcoming and be converted to God again and again. That is why it is so important that no matter our rights in this world, we need to continue living as a citizen of God’s world, where we know we are called “children of God.”

The Dawn of Desperation

When some Christians bleat about the persecution they receive here in the U.S, I roll my eyes because whatever persecution they believe they are feeling is nothing in comparison to other countries. And when their forced cries of persecution are not heard then action is the next step – an aggressive action.

It looks like things might be taking a step toward that end, not only is there an increased amount of gays that are hurt or killed, but many right wing politicals and evangelical fundies seem to be seeing themselves pushed into a corner and the only way to get out is to lash out physically and with hate speech we haven’t seen in a long time. Dr. Tiller’s murder was hatred that concluded in a final act . Sadly, the murderer of Dr. Tiller is only the loudest news item that people hear about.

President Obama may be a threat to white supremacists, Pro-choice doctors may be a threat to the picket weary anti-choice protestors and now it would seem that “persecuted U.S christians” are threatened by the social denigration of society around them and see it as a threat to their pearly white demeanor.

A man by the name of Lou Engle has started a group that are willing to show “acts of Christian martyrdom”. It would seem that if prayer is not enough to change the country than action is the next step. Basically he seems to be tired of waiting on God to change to his standards and is going to change them himself because he believes the spirit calls him too. Check out this video below: (More info about the video at Talk to Action)

I do not fear this type of hatred manifested as spiritual warrior attitude – however, I do want to be aware of the world that is changing around me and prepared to take a stand for Jesus who called ALL people to him, without pre -conditions