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ok so its 4am (Korea time) and im wide awake thanks to jet lag, jet lag is an amazing thing, gets us early risers going even earlier!! been reading and thinking about the kingdom of God… Willard (The Divine Conspiracy) puts it this way

“Now God’s own ‘kingdom,’ or ‘rule,’ is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature ar by choice, is within his kingdom.” (p.25)

This is a great starting definition… I must think about this in the greater context of life and kingdom travelin… I would love to find fellow travellers to converse about this…

I love goin out in the winter and walkin in the quiet… hearing little more than the crunch below my feet… in the neighborhood is a paved path, much of it this morning was clear but there was a long section next to a pond which was covered in icy accumulation… this morning as i left the house I thought to take along a walking stick… this stick provided me with much stability, helping steady me better than I could have walked on the icy path without it… I was glad for the steadying effect of the stick… I noticed something too about walking on ice, to keep from slipping, I kept my focus on the ice at my feet, I was not lookin behind me, and only occasionally did I look way down the path… I wanted to know what was on the ground right in front of me, I did not want to slip, so I looked at where I would place my foot, and my stick… there is a lesson here about life, we need to look up sometimes to give us the big picture, the wider angle on how we are going in life… sometimes, when life is on a really slippery path that may mean stopping, taking a deep breath of the cold air and looking around us to see where we are, from where we have come, and where we are going… then, with a caught up perspective we continue… so during the holiday, be sure to stop and get some perspective…

from my reading this morning, Spurgeon says: “Come unto me.” –Matthew 11:28

The cry of the Christian religion is the gentle word, “Come.” The Jewish law harshly said, “Go, take heed unto thy steps as to the path in which thou shalt walk. Break the commandments, and thou shalt perish; keep them, and thou shalt live.” The law was a dispensation of terror, which drove men before it as with a scourge; the gospel draws with bands of love. Jesus is the good Shepherd going before His sheep, bidding them follow Him, and ever leading them onwards with the sweet word, “Come.” The law repels, the gospel attracts. The law shows the distance which there is between God and man; the gospel bridges that awful chasm, and brings the sinner across it.

At about seven tonight we lost power, so the scramble was on to find and light candles. After lighting candles, we finished our word game. Then we decided to watch a movie on my laptop, aren’t dvds great? Then everyone went to bed, it was about 1030, but I wasn’t at all tired, so using a candle I sat to read. I was struck by the quiet… there are no residual sounds from music in the house, no refrigerator humming, the heat pump wasn’t running… so it was just quiet… a quiet house, light to type this from a single candle… simple… this is solitude… for me it gives a greater meaning to the old saying, “silence is golden”, there is more good news on the phone, school is closed tomorrow, Christmas break has begun, the state truck comes by scraping the road, the sound if far clearer than usual because the machinery of this house is not working without electricity… I have not enjoyed such quiet in a good while…

so we get snow, then sleet and finally rain… school is closed and that’s is always welcome, and as I drive around giving the family rides, I notice that there is very little traffic… I also notice how many stores are closed… our car-driven culture shuts down with freezing weather (because the TV forecasters scared everyone – but that’s another blog)… so I got to thinking back to February in Ukraine… how those folks are so used to ice everywhere. I remembered this little old lady whose job it was to remove the snow from the steps leading down to the subway… it is so cold that the snow doesn’t melt and so as thousands of people track snow on to the steps, she moves it out to the street… and then I remember another time when the snow was melting and a little lady was keeping a gutter clear of ice so that the water can head down the drain… so this afternoon while driving around, I noticed that the drains were clogged with ice, the rain had no where to go but in a huge pond in the middle of the intersection… so the little ladys with shovels could sure help here in our technology and machine driven culture…

At a funeral I attended today, the preacher said something like this –

we need to learn to face that which is real and not drug away the pain of life

– it’s a paraphrase, not exact, but I think the message is accurate and I know it is powerful.

I felt anger today as I contemplated this death, why does this generation (obviously not everyone in it) live in such emptiness? Why do they try to drug away reality… I’m not talking about any one person, but when I look across our culture I am saddened… At the emptiness in the lives of the twenty-somethings, not all of them, certainly not all, but WAY TOO MANY!

why don’t they get it? why don’t they see that He wants lives of fullness for them? why can’t they become as passionate about Him as they become about their desire to mask their emptiness with the seeking of pleasure and status?

no wonder Jesus wept… no wonder Jesus came…

I am so sorry… it is so sad to see this pain and death, and the pain that pervades such empty lives. Oh, and by the way, my generation was no better… we all are struggling with the war we are in, Jesus weeps at the war, Jesus came to bring us a peace that pleasure and status cannot provide… I am not angry at the people, I am angry at the war we are in where the Enemy seeks to direct us to ourselves as the center of the world… the solution to this emptiness must be shown…

this generation must be shown the love of God is unconditional, unlike ours – the NFL banner verse (John 3:16-17) tell us Jesus did not come to condemn but to save… a good friend said this recently “we must be in the business of showing people we love them, not in making projects out of them”

the problem is that we are trying to make projects out of people to change their behavior, this is treating the symptom, the disease is an empty heart… Jesus came to give them meaning… to fill the heart…