LOVE
William Penn said love is the hardest lesson in
Christianity. The first and great commandment was to love
God (with all your heart, all your soul, and all your
mind). The second was like unto it: Love your neighbor as
yourself. Martin Luther said, “Love God and do as you
please.” Our shortcoming, as humans, is that we don’t
understand what love is. But we have the grandest example
right before us all the time: Look at any mother with her
child, and any child with his mother. Even though I have
written about how swept away I have been with the tidal
wave of love for my daughters, a father’s love is less the
model than the mother-child bond. (And I don’t love my son
any less – it was an essay on DAUGHTERS that I referred to.)
A mother will do absolutely anything to meet the needs of
her child. (I mean needs, and I mean child, both in the
most literal sense. When child becomes a little adult and
needs become material demands, the meaning is lost.) As a
child acquires abilities, he first uses them to satisfy his
mother. When you have achieved this level of love, all you
want to do is please the other person. Hence, love God and
do as you please, because what you will want to do is to
please the other.
Also, from Frederich Spanheim: “They are the true disciples
of Christ, not who know most, but who love most.”
PURPOSE
Seeing these things as I do, and not being officially
educated in the ways of any denomination but merely
subjected to decades of readings and sermons, I understand
that my duty is to help those who are seeking to find
truth, (and then to urge them to continue the pursuit, for
all truth and all wisdom are not found at the first rest
stop), and to reassure those who have apprehended the
mystery and have arrived at certain discoveries that they
are not crazy and that there is infinitely more to be
discovered. I also believe it is my purpose to illuminate
that which matters, chiefly the great commandments, and to
be, in whatever inadequate way I am capable, an example,
take it or leave it. I fancy my expression of faith
non-threatening. I cannot remain silent in the face of so
great a mystery.
FEARING GOD
The King James Bible uses the word “fear” where
the original word in Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew was
something not so clearly meant to mean fear. Awe and
respect are two more meanings, especially in the manner one
would be in awe or have respect for something of so great a
power as to be inconceivable. You would be in fear of some
goon standing before you with a menacing look and a weapon
that could vaporize you in an instant. You would be in awe
of yet a higher power standing behind him with the power to
vaporize him before he can vaporize you.
Oswald Chambers wrote: “The remarkable thing about fearing
God is that when you fear God you fear nothing else,
whereas if you do not fear God you fear everything else.”
2002
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