‘Personhood’ effort still alive after Miss. defeat #OneNewsNow.com#
09 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
‘Personhood’ effort still alive after Miss. defeat #OneNewsNow.com#.
Calling God “Father” in Times of Anguish-by Mark D. Roberts
09 Nov 2011 2 Comments
“Father, if you are willing, please take this cup of suffering away from me.
Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”
In our last two reflections, 11/7 and 11/8, we considered the agony with which Jesus prayed in the
Garden of Gethsemane on the eve of his crucifixion. Today, we begin to focus on
the substance of his prayer.
Jesus begins by addressing God simply as “Father,” suggesting deep intimacy
and love, as well as respect. The Aramaic word Jesus used in his prayer,
Abba, could mean “Daddy” or “Papa” as well as a more respectful
“Father.” In his moment of anguish, Jesus knew that he could bare his heart to
his Father in heaven. He was sure that his Father would listen to him and have
compassion upon him.
Given the fact that Jews in the time of Jesus and before did not speak to the
Lord this way, it is stunning to hear “Father” on the lips of Jesus. But, we
might chalk this up to an implication of his unique identity as the Son of God.
So, in some ways, it is even more surprising that Jesus invites us to speak to
God as our Father. In Luke, for example, Jesus says to his disciples, “This is
how you should pray: ‘Father, may your name be kept holy… (11:2).’ “
Sometimes, when we are experiencing unbearable pain or soul-wrenching
sadness, we have a hard time calling out to God, let alone addressing him as
Father. God seems distant, uncaring, uninvolved. These feelings are very real
and very common. I have certainly felt them. Yet, the example of Jesus
encourages us to continue to speak openly to our Heavenly Father, bearing our
souls to him. Even though we cannot be sure how he will act in response to our
prayers, we can know that he is there for us, that his love for us can never be
broken.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER REFLECTION: Do you ever speak to God
as Father? Why or why not? In your times of anguish, are you able to keep on
praying? Do you believe that God is your loving Father, even when it’s hard to
sense his love?
PRAYER: Father, how wonderful to be able to address you in
this way. How I thank you, both for the example of Jesus, and for the specific
invitation to address you with a term of intimacy and familial love.
Help me, Father, especially in times of anguish, to keep on calling out to
you. May I have confidence in your love for me. May I keep the channel of
communication between us open.
I pray today for those who have a hard time thinking of you as Father because
of their experiences of their earthly fathers. For some, Lord, the word “father”
is laden with pain. I ask that you make your love for them tangible and that you
heal their emotional wounds so that they might feel free to experience your
fatherly love and to speak to you as Father.
Amen.
http://www.thehighcalling.org/reflection/calling-god-father-times-anguish
Tozer Devotional-God at Work or Just Me?
09 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
in A. W. Tozer
God at Work or Just Me?
To apply pressure, a person projects himself or herself into the minds and consciences of people made in the image of God and forces them psychologically to do something they have no particular reason for wanting to do. They are not basically interested in it and have no satisfactory reason for doing it, but they are under pressure. If they do not have a reason for doing what they are going to do, they will not know why they are invovled. Then when they get out they will not be sure that they were in, and so the whole process makes for weak, spineless religion. This violates the law of human nature, which dictates that all valid acts must arise from a natural urge or from a convinced mind. An example of a natural urge is when you are hungry. You may be very hungry, but your hunger does not have a high intellectual content in it. Nobody needs to stand up and say, “Now, all you who are hungry raise your hands.” You know you are hungry, and you just go out to eat. Hunger is a natural urge. Another legimate reason for an act is a convinced mind. I am convinced that I ought to do something, and I do it because I have a conviction that it ought to be done. Those are the only two reasons for doing anything. If I force people under psychological pressure and steamroll them into doing something because they are too weak to resist, I have violated their nature. Our approach to getting people out of the rut, then, must not be to pressure them to do something they don’t want to do. Instead, we must present the truth and let the Holy Spirit prompt them to want to escape.
Searching For a Moral to Story of Immorality
09 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
in TownHall.com
Halloween came and went, but Marion Salmon Hedges wasn’t able to hand out the hundreds of dollars worth of candy she purchased for the underprivileged children who annually visit her Manhattan neighborhood.
Instead, she has spent the past 10 days in a medically induced coma at New York’s Harlem Hospital Center.
Mrs. Hedges was the victim of a “prank” by two 12-year-old boys who apparently thought it would be funny to drop a shopping cart from a fourth-story walkway connecting a parking garage to the East River Plaza shopping center.
On Friday in family court, the boys pleaded not guilty to first-degree felony assault charges. The attorney for one of the boys argued for his release to his family pending trial on the grounds that he didn’t mean to harm anyone when he pushed the cart off the skyway. Unmoved, the judge remanded both boys to juvenile custody and ordered them to appear again on Nov. 18.
This is a story seeking a moral.
By all accounts, Mrs. Hedges is truly a remarkable woman. A wife and mother of two teens (her 13-year-old son was with her when she was hit by the cart), she is widely known for her energetic service to her community. She sits on numerous boards and committees, is a leader in the Junior League of New York and works as a real estate agent.
Michael Hedges, her husband, when asked whether he is angry with the boys responsible for his wife’s near-fatal injuries, is quoted as saying, “They’re not adults. They’re children, and children who have been left on their own without supervision.”
The inexplicably compassionate Mr. Hedges apparently believes the boys themselves are victims and therefore are not responsible for their actions.
So is the moral of the story: Children cannot be expected to know right from wrong? Or is it that children living in difficult socioeconomic circumstances are typically unsupervised and therefore not taught right from wrong?
Surveillance tapes reveal that a 14-year-old passer-by stopped the boys’ initial attempt to toss a cart over the walkway, telling them not to do it. But after they relinquished the cart to him and he ran away, the boys found another one and successfully pitched it onto the unsuspecting Mrs. Hedges.
So perhaps the moral of the story has to do with defining some magic age for moral discernment. If 12 is too young, maybe 14 is reasonable.
Mrs. Hedges‘ attackers, known in court documents as Jeovanni R. and Raymond H. because of their ages, live in the very neighborhoods Mrs. Hedges tries to help through her volunteer efforts.
At least one report quotes a neighbor as saying Jeovanni is the “baddest boy” in his public housing building, which might explain why he was able to sneak out of the house and go to the mall without permission.
But Jeovanni’s grandmother, Ana Cespedes, 89, told the Daily News that the boy’s mother is a good mom who does supervise him. Ms. Cespedes said her grandson should stay in juvenile detention because “he doesn’t obey when someone tells him to do the right thing.”
Perhaps the moral is something like: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
Many child advocates have opined that 12-year-old children in search of a thrill should not experience long-term consequences for a “prank” that wasn’t intended to cause what may be a lifelong traumatic brain injury.
This is what happens when we lose our moral compass. We look for explanations for what essentially is a story about immorality.
We’re a society that is loath to label children good or bad, and which opts not to focus on right and wrong.
Ultimately, then, we’ll likely get this conclusion: The city of New York clearly should require private developers to put up higher barriers on walkways so this sort of thing cannot happen again.
//
Marybeth Hicks
Marybeth Hicks is the author of Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left’s Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom (Regnery Publishers, 2011).
