No post this week

Sorry I don't have a post for this week, but I have updated my profile and blog template. Maybe I will give one later this week.

John James Friesen

Things that are real

It's amazing how God can change this pile of rags into a beautiful masterpiece. It's amazing that through all our faults God can still create something of worth. God has shown me a few of things I've traded. It is because of it that I am where I am. I've cut my looses and chosen certain dreams and gone for it for, ignoring other dreams. If asked the question would I change the past I would say I wouldn't change a thing. In reality we can't do everything we have to make a choice of what we want, and my choices have lead me here.

One important thing God has taught me is that we can't make ourselves truly happy which very near the top of my list. In Grade 12 we studied Ecclesiastes and I have tried and will continue to try to follow it's advice to us humans. It's advice I believe can be summed up in chapter 12
13 This is the end of the matter. All has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.
14 For God will bring every work into judgment, with every hidden thing, whether it is good, or whether it is evil.

Something God has taught me is that you can't make yourself follow this advice, you can't make yourself rules or structure that will make you follow this advice, because that is just another attempt to make us robots which doesn't work. The new testament plan involves hardly any rules and structure. I believe it involves wanting to truly listen to God and follow his guiding which will involve tons of mistacks on our behalf which is part of God's plan for us humans (you can point out tons of examples in the disciples). He longs to help us out. He longs to pick us up. He longs to save us from ourselves. If we would only ask.
So God I pray that you would save us.

Answer to Prayer

As always God gives a reply if you ask with all that you have.

Here are some of the answers that I believe God has given me.

Sometimes things can't be worked out, sometimes there is supposed to be strife. God himself has set rules that limit his and others the ability to control people so there is going to be trouble with us and God and us and other people, it should be expected.

Lots problems can't be fixed by you and have to be fixed by God. There is nothing that you can do other than to follow his will even if it is against what you think is right.

There are times when you mind and your heart say opposite things and you got to figure out what you are going to do.

Make mistacks regularly otherwise you will never learn how to deal with them when they really come. They also teach you so much more.

That all these things that we pretend keep us alive really don't and are really cheap substitutes to being carried by God.

God's understanding is so far and beyond our most complex ideas that we really have no clue of what is going on.

If you take your faith seriously for a whole year. Reading your bible daily, praying daily, asking God what he wants from you, start the process of giving up everything you want to give up, offering everything to God and asking everything from God you will have the most intense year of your life, and I believe I havn't even touched the surface of most of these things.

Between Me and God

The following rant is something that I have been struggling for the past year and it is no one's fault it is something that God is trying to teach me or something else I don't know. So why am I posting it hear if it is just between me a God well I don't know other than it might clear things up and or God might give me some advice, or maybe it will help someone else who is going through the same thing. It might be personal but you know what I am trying to teach myself not to care what other people think about me and maybe this is part of that.

Oh God how tough do you want me to be. This past year has been the hardest year of my life. What do you want me to do. What do you want to change in my mind. I can't understand this God give me understanding. All I have is yours and you know that because you have taken away everything else. There is nothing else that I can run to or distract myself with it, has all become useless to me. What do you want to say to me that I can't hear. I've tried to listen so many times. Oh God be on your servant and help him in ways only you can. Oh God be on your servant and change me in only ways you can. Oh God be on your servant and guide me on paths only you know. I need you more than ever Oh God. Thank you for carrying your servant through the hard times. In your holy precious name. Amen.

CPT article that I liked

CPTnet
28 December 2007
HEBRON REFLECTION: "It used to be normal"

by Donna Hicks

In 2001, my friend Sue Gilmurray wrote a song that started out, "It used to
be normal to buy and sell people--" and continued, "But some had the vision,
and some had the courage to work all their lives to put an end to that
trade."

I am struggling this year with The Occupation.  I have had it with The
Occupation to way up over my head.  I am beginning to wonder if in my
violence reduction work through CPT I am complicit in The Occupation.  Have
my colleagues and I become invisible to the Powers that be?  Does our
presence and our work make a difference?

"And then the tide turned--"

The tide may turn, but right now, I feel I'm in the water up to my neck and
the water is rising.

Is it normal for Palestinian school children to have to pass through a
checkpoint and metal detector, and to have their school bags searched by
Israeli border police or soldiers? Is it normal to see a five- year-old
cringe away from a soldier at a checkpoint because he doesn't know if the
soldier will yell at him, or take his bag to search it, or smile and wave
him on?

Is it normal to have Jewish-only roads?  Is it normal to have a segregated
public transportation system--one set of busses for Palestinians and another
set for Israelis?  Is it normal to ask a person if she is Christian, Jewish,
or Muslim to determine if she can walk below the walls of the Ibrahimi
Mosque/Cave of Machpelah?

The song goes on, "Today it is normal to justify warfare--.  We talk of a
vision of peace for our children, and who is to say that we are wasting our
breath?"

The visions of Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, celebrated this year
at the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the UK, the vision
of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela and the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission in South Africa--these visions made the tide turn.

Will the growing Palestinian nonviolent movement make the tide turn?

"Because the tide turns--although the change seems slow--as the tide turns
and peace can start to grow."

The water may come up over my head, as the Psalm says, but the tide will
turn and peace will start to grow.  It's got to.

Intensity

I've been told that I that I can be intense. It's one of those things in life that is part of me. It is because of it that I am where I am and it is because of it I am not any farther. There are times when I wish I could take it away, times don't know what I want and other times I'm glad it's there. I guess the best description that I like (C.S. Lewis) is all the things that make us us (emotions, physical body, mind ... ) are like keys on a piano and the trick to life is to combine those keys into a masterpiece but knowing us humans we tend to emphasize something to much and it ends up being a one note song that no one wants to hear. Only the Master really knows how to play the piano.

Psalms 31 (WEB)
23 Oh love Yahweh, all you his saints! Yahweh preserves the faithful, and fully recompenses him who behaves arrogantly.
24 Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who hope in Yahweh.