Today’s Our Daily Bread Bible verses:

     According the verse 7, if my interpretation is correct, if we do God’s will and allow Jesus to live in our hearts, then whatever we ask, it will be done for us.

     I’m doing my best to do this, but not good enough, I know.  There are times when I am asked to give but I am afraid to give because I’ve got debts and bills and doubts about having my own needs and those of my family met.  There are times when the experience I had in solitary confinement fades from my memory, and I begin to doubt God and my salvation and that of the world and lose all hope.  I want my faith to be absolute, to never forget that moment and carry it with me through the rest of my life, and that is my most urgent prayer to God.

     After that I ask for healing for my children that I’ve harmed and healing of our relationship and the capability and opportunity to express love properly, as God intended.

     And I have a selfish prayer, to be able to live in a home that the roof doesn’t leak, drive a car that doesn’t have a check engine light constantly on, and be able to pay down my debts so creditors aren’t constantly nipping at my tail.  And yes, I’m aware that there are people that don’t even have a roof, or a car, or even a bicycle, and I pray for them too.  I would like to be in a position to be able to materially help them but that seems impossible.

    I watched Jacque Fresco’s Great Speech after seeing people praise him for his great wisdom on a Facebook page.  The guy was 98 at the time he gave his speech, and while he was exceptionally lucid for someone 98 years old and physically functional, I didn’t find great wisdom in his speech.

     Rather, I found a cynical person who blamed God for man’s shortcomings and trivialized Christ’s sacrifice.  What great sacrifice is it to die if you’re only going to be dead for three days he asks?  I would challenge him to allow himself to be nailed to a cross let alone watch someone he loves, if he is capable of love, get nailed to a cross knowing the pain and suffering they will endure.

     But beyond that, Jacque lacks the wisdom to understand why God’s plan was necessary.  Love can only come if it is given of free will.  You can’t force someone to love you. (This is a lesson I had to learn the hard way and at great expense, but learn it I did.)  So God had to create us with free will knowing we would do evil things to each other.  And then he loved us by providing a plan for redemption at the expense of great suffering of Christ.  And Christ and the Father (and the Holy spirit) are closer to each other than we ever could be to our own children, because they are three persons in one God, they are intimately connected all of one accord in a way we can’t experience here on Earth.  That closeness insured that all aspects of God experienced that pain, and for us, because God loved us and wanted to make love possible for us.  Well, it isn’t entirely true that we could never be that close, Jesus does promise us that if we do his will that in time we will be in him as he is in the father, so if we do his will we can be that close.

     For someone who is 98 to have lived that long and not understood this seems to indicate a lack of wisdom in an area that is central to our lives.

     That said, all the things he said about language, it’s inexact nature, it’s misuse, and how ineffectively we communicate, often intentionally, is absolutely true.  If you look at how language has evolved since the constitution was created, and how that has allowed lawyers to abuse the constitution and deny us of our rights our countries founders had intended, you can see that what he is saying is absolutely dead spot on with respect to language.  We do need to learn how to be more precise and effective when we communicate.  Satan, the father of all lies, takes advantage of the lack of conciseness in our language to tell lies that sound true.  Direct effective concise communications would make those lies easier to spot.  So with respect to language and it’s misuse and outright abuse, I agree with Jacque Fresco.

      I agree with much but not all of what Jacque Fresco has to say about sustainability.  However, I don’t agree that there is just one path, and I also believe that if we did God’s will, sustainability would take care of itself when greed, war, and a general disrespect for God’s creation didn’t guide our lives.

     The suffering in this world, that rests squarely on our shoulders, not on God’s.  Even suffering due to natural disasters is mostly related to lack of preparedness.  Lack of preparedness often comes down to lack of resources.  Lack of resources is usually the result of greed, and squandering them on evil, bombs, wars, and the like.  So even most of the suffering that results from a natural disaster could be prevented if we lived God’s will for us and didn’t waste the resources he provides for us.

     When I was younger, I often had dreams of the Earth quite different than it is today, with lakes that are crystal clear and air that is clean and man living in harmony with nature instead of conquering nature, and in harmony with himself, and everything looking fresh and new and no signs of rot or decay anywhere and I wonder, was I privileged to get a glimpse of the same new Earth that John the Revelator was describing?

     I was shown this many times in dreams along with two visions of how the Earth was transformed from the old Earth to the new, and that transformation took two different extremes, one transition was peaceful and spared man of a great deal of death, destruction, and pain, the other was violent and destructive with many people dying, and many of those that died did so in lava streams from many volcanoes.  The difference between these two transitions was a function of man’s attitude.  If we were loving, kind, treated the Earth and all of it’s inhabitants, which are God’s creation, with the respect a creation of God deserves, then the transition was kind and loving to us.  If we continued with our greed, hate, and wars, and disrespect for God’s creation, then the transition was not going to go well for us.

     It was going to come whether we did God’s will and flowed peacefully with it, or opposed God’s will and got bowled over by it. Either way I’m looking forward to the end of death and decay. Even though I pray for understanding and direction, my role is still not clear to me.

The following is today’s Our Daily Bread verses:

I just pointed the camera up above the horizon to see how many stars it would capture (not many as it turns out), but there is an interesting object to the right. I think a plane flew through my exposure. How rude of it. Or maybe it’s aliens.

     This was a 30 second exposure, F5.6, 100 ASA, a couple of hours after sunset looking at Elliot Bay from a vantage point above and about a mile south of Golden Gardens.