A very classic old fave song

Having trouble with cut and paste so look up the lyrics on www.sing365.com to Boston's "Don't Look Back."

It just rocks through the ages and too bad many who sing it and love it don't actually just DO IT as it advises.

Understanding God-quick thought on heavy topic

I've had a thought regarding a quick and simple way to understand one of the heaviest topics about God, that being his All Knowingness. I know that's hard for people to understand the way it ought to be understood, which is that God is more than just a complete walking encyclopedia. So I thought of an analogy that would really relate to you parents out there, and also to those of you who cared for younger brothers and sisters.

One of the things people don't understand about God is how he can be All Knowing, and yet interact with people moment by moment, day by day, and be active in world events, for example. People think that if God knows "how the movie ends" about everything in life, why and how does he interact with people, if at all. Well, it is really simple to understand on what level if you think of it this way.

When you are with your young child, or any young child that you care for, you will play with them, and let them "help" you, by speaking and interacting with them at their own level. Further, you help your child discover the world (and what they are going to do in it) just as if you didn't know the answer either.

For example, when toddlers are learning about the world, you will often take your toddler to something new, like a picture book, or a drawer in a cabinet, and make a big fuss about opening it for the first time, creating excitement in the child as you say things like "Oh, what is this! It's a booooook. Let's open the book!" And then you oooh and aaah along with the child as if you are experiencing the wonder of discovering the book right along with the child.

God is the ultimate expert, of course, in pacing himself along with humans, for their benefit, not his, although he has that parental pleasure, even though he "knows" in advance, of course, what is in the book he is showing you, how many times you will read books in your life, what you will think of them, how you will use the knowledge, etc.

So every time that you pray to God, or are in comfortable silence with him, God is responding to you in exactly in the "here and now," just as he would in the example I've given as a loving parent with a learning toddler.

For example, God does not minimize his spiritual interaction with you even if he knows that you are going to do this many bad things, or waste these many opportunities... or that there are "better" people he could "invest" his time (which is infinite anyway) with. Every second of time that God spends with you is truly "one on one" of the type of "loving parent paces himself with the toddler," no matter what the future, which God knows all of, holds.

Think of the wonder of how different God is from humans. If you, as a parent, knew in advance that your little toddler would grow up and deliver in the future terrible disappointments to you, any parent, being flawed and human, would emotionally invest "less" in that toddler. This is one reason, by the way, that false arts such as fortune telling is so strictly forbidden in the Bible. It closes rather than opens the heart to great spirituality and Christ like charity. It's human nature. If you knew that your bright eyed blond toddler would grow up to be a hard core and ungrateful thief, no human could resist modifying their behavior with that child, since the burden of that knowledge is too heavy for any human to be untouched by. But God is not like that at all.

God does not remove one iota of his constancy of availability and attention from any human, even though he knows every bitter thought and deed and disappointment that human will render in the future.

So that is how God is able to be All Knowing on the one hand, and yet interact (as you see in the Bible) with humans in a moment by moment way, just as if he is in the moment and does not already know "how it will all turn out."

Think about it. When God is walking in the Garden of Eden, and calls for Adam and Eve, knowing that they had already eaten the forbidden fruit, he calls them just as if he doesn't know. But God is interacting with them on the level that they can handle and is truly "in the moment" with them, even though he, of course "already knows" 1) what they had done 2) what will happen to them for the rest of their lives, 3) what will happen to every other human being for all of time 4) when he will send Jesus Christ 5) which people of which faiths will choose salvation and 6) when will be the End of Times. So God, like a parent, is able to have continual "in the moment" conversation and interaction with humans (for their benefit, not his) even as he at the same time knows everything there is to know and ever will be in the future to know (and God even knows, of course, all the what-ifs that never happen!)

Thus God is genuinely speaking to and interacting with Adam and Eve exactly in the moments, shaping with them, according to their exercise of their God given free will (and then his reaction to it) the present and thus the step by step moments of life into the future.

That is what should be marveled about, wondered about and loved about God, that he does know all there is to know, and at the same time, is genuinely in each moment with each person, and does not ever rob a person of any of his (God's) availability just because God already "knows" whether his attention is a "good investment" or "not." God is fully there and present for each person, whenever they reach out to him, and even when they do not (in his form of the Holy Spirit, which strives to reach even the hardest and most distant of hearts).

I hope that you have found this helpful! Loving hello and wave, as usual, to the young people who follow my blogging :-)

Football analogy to help understand "end of times"

I’ve written about proper understanding of Biblical “end of times” references before, and continue to focus on this topic because of the high interest in it and also to continue to help people toward a proper understanding. Rather than write long and comprehensive postings I like to take one aspect at a time to explore.

The point I would like to make is that God has not mapped out the specific set of events that takes humans to the “end of times.” God is all knowing, but that does not mean he is all manipulating. There is a huge difference. I’d like to use, since this is Superbowl season, American football and coaching analogies. In the Superbowl the winners of the two leagues compete and one team wins the game, making that team the Superbowl champion. God can be thought of as the overall sponsor of sports in general. God has encouraged humans to enjoy sports and recreation in addition to their devotions, their work and their family. So God likes seeing all the football teams compete and kind of cheers for both leagues and all the players. If it were up to God there would someday be Superbowl One Thousand. (It is Superbowl 42 that is going to be played this Sunday). In fact, if it were up to God, he’d be thrilled if someday people played Superbowl Ten Thousand, or Superbowl One Hundred Thousand!

God is all about life and being fruitful. If one was going to try to summarize God’s “agenda” it would be to be “fruitful and multiply.” This does not mean just numerically having babies. It means stewarding a world that humans did not create but have day to day responsibility for so that people stimulate life and increase in goodness, since that is what “fruitful” really means. Think about a fruit tree. It could yield tons of sour and inedible apples, for example. You could call that a “fruitful” tree but that is not the spirit of the meaning of the term. Fruitful means an abundance of goodness that is passed along to one’s children, children that are encouraged and welcomed into the world.

So God is not interested in humans having children who are then made to suffer in an increasingly sour world. That is only half the spirit of the words “fruitful and multiple.” That is the “multiply” without the joy of sweet “fruitfulness.” God does not want humans to be “mean SOB’s and multiply.” God does not want humans to “prune away babies so you can have unlimited sex and then multiply just enough to provide low income workers or as accessory babies.” God wants sweetness and goodness to be produced by humans along with and FOR their children. Therefore, God would be thrilled if the humans kept multiplying in children and in goodness until they could see Superbowl 100, 1000, 10,000 or more! So long as people are pious and in fear of God (by fear I mean the proper definition which is to respect God’s place and fear the consequences of losing him) and they bear and love children, and work toward making a flawed species and their flawed world as good as possible, the “end of times” will not come.

However, God understands the nature of humans all too well, and he knows everything about everything. Like a coach God knows the strength and weaknesses of his team, of each of the players, and of the circumstances they are playing under (weather, injuries, home or away, etc.) God knows that there is only one winner of the Superbowl each year. Likewise God knows human weakness. Someone could be a great football player but a rotten human being, for example. God knows about drug use, about gambling, about throwing games, about poor refereeing and bad breaks. (I’m mixing my analogy a little bit because I’m more of a baseball fan than a football fan!) But God continues to coach and cheer all of the individual team players, coaches, fans and support staff, whether they are 0-18 or 18-0 for the year. That is because it is the enjoyment of sport, the family focus of sport events, the providing of jobs, the gathering of community and the stimulating of the honest economy that is the fruitfulness of the football season and the Superbowl. It’s not the winning team, it is the annual season of coming together in good natured sport crowned in the Superbowl, and then the anticipation of second chances in the next season, and the next, and the next, and so forth. Therefore why would God decide that humans will live until Superbowl Number (imagine some number) and say, well, this is enough, time for the Second Coming? God would not want that because so long as each year and each generation is fruitful and multiplying, it is “Good.” God will not destroy what is good. That is the temptation of humans, to destroy what is good for others in order to achieve power and control. A related temptation is to define what is good and force people to conform to societal dictatorships of vices that are now defined as being “good.”

So God knows that it is inevitable that at some point in human’s future they will make choices that will take them to the brink where they are no longer being “fruitful and multiplying” in the way that God wills and plans for humans to live. When the fruit of humans is predominately sour apples you can expect the Second Coming. But just because an awful lot of sour apples are being made today, does that mean one should throw up one’s hands and say, “Ah ha, time for the Second Coming, I’m ‘covered’ in my ‘faith’ and now I’m going to dump the world in the Lord’s lap?” You better not think that lest you be one of the ones who cries “Lord, Lord!” and yet find thou art judged to be chaff instead of wheat. Remember chaff is the indigestible part of the wheat. People who gleefully point to the sorrow of the sour apples and hope that it is a counter toward the Second Coming at the “end of times” are useless, since they are not working to put off the ill deeds that could reckon with the end of times. Those who gloat for the end of times as being comeuppance for others of different faith have made themselves into chaff rather than wheat.

So would God give up on a franchise that has a 0-18 record and say, “Well, football is no good, let’s cancel this team altogether?” No, of course he would not. If God had a team full of immoral people, would he cancel the entire sport for all the rest of the teams and end the Superbowl? Obviously not, he would get a coach to reform and/or replace the players on that team. Would he not crown with laurel leaf crown the coach who is like a role model for the team, and who brings a team that lacks character into honorable, if not winning play? Yes he would.

So long as humans are working to have children in a moral society and be sweet in their fruitfulness people have nothing to fear about imminent end of times. That should be good news to everyone. If you are thinking, “Aw shucks, everyone is not going to die and be judged soon” you better start rethinking your culture of retribution, self satisfaction and death orientation lest it take you down too. Who hopes that the entire sport of football will be canceled by God because many of the teams are doing poorly and perhaps have serious moral flaws? That is not God’s way. If it was he would have canceled human’s football season, so to speak, a long time ago. And if you read your Bible and understand you will know that God had his moments when he thought “it was time.” But God gave the second chance and good men and women brought the world back from the brink before.

Make no mistake; understand that the world is in dire and abysmal moral condition. People have actively worked to make as much sour and rotten fruit as possible and they have succeeded on a scale that should surprise even them. But for the love of God, that should make people roll of their sleeves and work to bring back the sweetness and combat the sourness more than ever! Rather than gloating or becoming another boring media depressive everyone ought to recapture the memory of what a land flowing in milk and honey is like.

I understand devout people who think only Jesus Christ (and/or the Mahdi if you are a Twelver in belief) can fix the world. And they are correct to the extent that only in the faith is the way shown for goodness on earth under God and hopefully anticipation of eternal reward in heaven. But like the coach, this does not mean that the person who first wrote the football rule book has to attend every game. Imagine how the sport would go if no one knew how to play a game of football properly unless the one and only football rule book author had to be physically present at every game and shout out instructions, and call each play? Jesus Christ taught what people need to do in the Gospels. The Old Testament preserves the words of God through the prophets, including in good living advice in the Book of Proverbs! And the Prophet (PBUH) received from God’s angel the way to live in virtue and with strength and fidelity to the one God. Every time humanity gets itself into an awful situation people should not sit back and let their children (and the children of their global neighbors) to suffer while waiting for Jesus to arrive with his iron rod of final judgment.

Here is one final point with the analogy. Notice that I started with the observation that God would like to see “Superbowl” seasons for many, many years to come. I didn’t say each football season must be higher scoring, more talented, more exciting or more profitable than the season before or God will “cancel the sport for lack of progress.” To the contrary! It is “good” the way it is, just as the basic nature of humanity, if it lives by God’s rules and in the family unit is “good” already. It is maintaining the goodness that is humanity’s problem. But to use this example, every ten years of football, another generation of schoolchildren are born, learn about football, watch it on TV or attend games with their family. Later they grow up and become players, spectators, or part of the football economy (they at least wear a jersey!) Each child, each adult gains the benefit of football. It is not a cumulative success thing, just as the goodness of humanity is measured one person at a time in the goodness of their life and not by which team of humans won the Superbowl that season. If God fathered humans to be good and to live good lives, is not a thousand years of billions of humans being good even better? And is not ten thousand years of billions of humans being good better yet? Each person who lives in goodness and provides it to others is their own justification for life and for humanity continuing. So God wants to see the already “good” football sport continue to the Superbowl each year for season after season after season for as many as humans can muster and manage so long as the “goodness” is maintained. Likewise God wants to be a fan and coach of humanity, not be the one who has to turn out the lights and do the firings because humans stopped being good and gave up on the season.

I hope this helps.