Vertigo Of The Soul...Johnny Cash - I See A Darkness...

Well, you're my friend, and can you see?
Many times, we've been out drinking;
Many times we shared our thoughts.
But did you ever, ever notice, the kind of thoughts I got?
Well, you know I have a love; a love for everyone I know.
And you know I have a drive, to live I won't let go.
But can you see its opposition, comes rising up sometimes?
That its dreadful imposition, comes blacking in my mind?

And then I see a darkness,
And then I see a darkness,
And then I see a darkness,
And then I see a darkness.
Did you know how much I love you?
Its a hope that somehow you,
Can save me from this darkness.

Well, I hope that someday buddy
We have peace in our lives;
Together or apart,
Alone or with our wives,
And we can stop our whoring,
And pull the smiles inside,
And light it up forever,
And never go to sleep.
My best unbeaten brother,
This isn't all I see.

Oh no, I see a darkness.
Oh no, I see a darkness.
(Oh) no, I see a darkness.
Oh no, I see a darkness.
Did you know how much I love you?
Its a hope that somehow you,
Can save me from this darkness.

Vertigo Of The Soul...Creed - What's This Life For...

Divine Milieu...The Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil...The Problem Of Evil...

A Warfare Worldview:

“A worldview that combines belief in the Trinity with a recognition of the war torn nature of this world.… is a view of the world that understands that there are good and bad spirits significantly involved in the affairs of the world.”
~Greg Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy



Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith

And I was 'round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game

I stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Czar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain

I rode a tank
Held a general's rank
When the Blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah
Ah, what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah

I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made

I shouted out,
"Who killed the Kennedys?"
When after all
It was you and me

Let me please introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
And I laid traps for troubadours
Who get killed before they reached Bombay

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah, get down, baby

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what's confusing you
Is just the nature of my game

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer
'Cause I'm in need of some restraint

So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, have some taste

Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste,
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name,

But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game…


With the response to Barry McGuire’s, Eve of Destruction - I thought through the use of the Rolling Stones, Sympathy For The Devil I would begin to address the Problem of Evil. I believe that the Rolling Stones profoundly hit on some truths in this song - as wars wage, cruelty and hatred is perpetuated, all in the name of political freedom the powers and principalities behind the systemic evil laugh and prod us humans on to engage in such madness and insanity.

As the Apostle Paul wrote, "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 6:12 TNIV).

The struggle is not against "flesh and blood" - if it has "flesh and blood" it is not our enemy. It is what is going on behind the scenes in the spiritual realms, what Mick Jaeggar is singing about, Lucifer being present at all the significant world events and behind all the evil.

“…we feel secure when we bracket off the complexity and ambiguity, and convince ourselves that the world unfolds according to a divine blueprint. We assume that everything can be explained by appealing to God’s will or the wills of people. This theology works only so long as we can in fact bracket off reality. But when reality in all its unfathomable complexity and war-torn horror encroaches on us….victims suffer and so does our theology.…we can and must know that our whole environment is under siege by forces that hate God and all that is good. By our own rebellion we are caught in the crossfire of a cosmic war, and we suffer accordingly.”
~Greg Boyd, Is God To Blame

“To have say-so means that the explanation for our choices lies within ourselves, and thus we are ultimately responsible for the effect these choices have on ourselves and others . Not everything happens because God wills it or specifically allows it. Agents will many things even though God doesn’t. God has a reason why he creates agents free, but he doesn’t have a reason for why agents freely make the particular decisions they make.
God is infinitely intelligent, of course, and thus is able to perfectly anticipate a response to each decision. In this sense he assigns a reason to each decision after the fact. What others intend for evil, God intends for good (Gen 50:20). But the reason why the decision was made in the first place ultimately lies within the agent, not God.”
~Greg Boyd, Is God To Blame

“…God could have created a world in which his will is always done. Had he chosen to do so, however, a world in which his will is possibly not done would have been ruled out. Thus he would of ruled out a world in which other agents make free choices….this means he would of ruled out a world where love is possible.
…if God decided to create a world where love is possible, he thereby ruled out a world in which his will is always done. If he chooses to create this kind of world, he can’t guarantee that his will is always done, not because he lacks the power but because of the kind of world he created. Just as a triangle can’t be round, so too a world that includes love can’t guarantee that God’s will always comes to pass.
There is no reason to avoid saying God can’t do something so long as we are clear that this ‘can’t’ is the logical consequence of decisions God made.”
~Greg Boyd, Is God To Blame

“Scripture says we suffer under the tyranny of a ‘ruler’ or ‘god’ or ‘power’ of this world (Jn 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; 2 Cor 4:4; Eph 2:2; 1 Jn 5:19).
~Greg Boyd, Is God To Blame

Divine Milieu...Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball...

Yeah we know that come tomorrow, none of this will be here
So hold tight on your anger Hold tight on your anger
Hold tight to your anger, and don't fall to your fear
Now when all this steel and these stories, they drift away to rust
And all our youth and beauty, it's been given to the dust
And your game has been decided, and you're burning the clock down
And all our little victories and glories, have turned into parking lots
When your best hopes and desires, are scattered through the wind
And hard times come, hard times go
Hard times come, hard times go
And hard times come, hard times go
Hard times come, hard times go Hard times come, hard times go
Yeah just to come again
Bring on your wrecking ball
Bring on your wrecking ball
Come on and take your best shot, let me see what you've got

Divine Milieu...Bruce Springsteen - Brilliant Disguise...

"God have mercy on the man,
Who doubts what he's sure of..."

Divine Milieu...Bon Jovi...One Step Closer...

I've seen the heart of darkness
Let's just say I crossed over that line
Held hands with the hopeless
In too deep on that ride
Went around one more time
When you're standing on the edge
You don't look down
Till you're ready and willing to fly...

And I'm willing to try this time
I hitched a ride with forgiveness
In that river of emotion
I went down a third time
I spent the night with the living
Took a chance looked inside
Didn't know who I'd find
Standing on the corner of hello and goodbye
All alone it's there I made up my mind

Thought..."Blue Moon" and Community....

"Once in a blue moon...you spend an amazing moment in time with those who mean the world to you...but be careful, they may be lost to you tomorrow...so cherish it and hold it close to your heart...it may be the only thing that keeps you from complete sadness..."
~k.e.

The Journey...The Story...How It May Appear...

“In terms of the world’s sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he (or she) can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.” ~Frederick Buechner




"Then he took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd's bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine" (1Samuel 17:40 TNIV).

“…God’s will for us is less about our comfort than it is about our contribution. God would never choose for us safety at the cost of significance. God created you so that your life would count, not so that you could count the days of your life.” ~ Erwin McManus

“If Jesus would not avoid the ‘place of the skull,’ then we should not be surprised where He might lead us. If even He found Himself sweating blood at Gethsemane, then we should be certain we will stand at crisis moments where all we can do after asking for relieve is declare, ‘Not my will, but Yours.’ In those moments you may find very few who stand by you to provide you comfort and strength, and strangely enough, you may find far too many trying to reason with you that God would never require so much of anyone. Yet even with all the noise pounding inside your head, you will still clearly hear the voice of Christ and His barbarian call if you listen carefully enough." ~Erwin McManus

“We are called to join the barbarian tribe and to embrace our call as mystical warriors. Although you can learn important things about God from others, in the end to know the barbarian way you must receive your instructions from God Himself. If this isn’t enough to drive you crazy, I don’t know what is. Which I guess leads me to the point: there’s a level of insanity that comes with the barbarian way.” ~Erwin McManus

“When you join the barbarian tribe, you begin to live your life with your eyes and your heart wide open. When the Spirit of God envelopes your soul, your spirit comes alive, and everything changes for you. You are no longer the same. And to those who cannot see the invisible, to those who refuse to believe it exists, the path you choose, the life you live, may lead them to conclude that you are not simply different but insane. People who are fully alive look out of their minds to those who simply exist.” ~ Erwin McManus

“He (Jesus) has no ambition to make you normal. The healthier you become, the freer you are to simply be yourself. The more your identity is rooted in God’s value for you, the less you are controlled and limited by what others think of you.” ~Erwin McManus

“For the civilized disciple, religion provides stability and certainty; for the barbarian, a life in God is one of risk and mystery. And maybe even a little insanity. There’s no way to escape that barbarian’s can appear out of their minds. No reasonable person would fully follow God everywhere He calls. God is simply unreasonable.” ~ Erwin McManus

“Anyone who ever risks listening to God and following His voice knows that to everyone else who is deaf to His voice, your actions will seem as if you’ve gone crazy.” ~Erwin McManus

“But maybe the most insulting thing that Jesus said or did was to become the friend of sinners. He focused His ministry on women and men who were despised by those in spiritual authority. The path God chose for Himself was far too common for their sensibility. They couldn’t imagine that God would choose that kind of life for Himself, God would be above such things.” ~Erwin McManus

Luke 5: 27-32 for example:

‘After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. "Follow me," Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him. Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?" Jesus answered them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."’

“…we need to find the courage and freedom to be ourselves. We need to let ourselves become the unique individuals that God created us to be. We need to stop trying to be what everyone else wants us to be and stop worrying about what everyone else thinks. Civilized people measure one another by their robes and signet rings. The barbarians measure only the heart and actions. Barbarians live as if they are naked before God and naked before men. They have nothing to hide; they do not waste their energy pretending to be someone they’re not.” ~Erwin McManus

The Journey...The Story.."The Broken....The Beaten and the Damned"

“So David got away and escaped to the Cave of Adullam. When his brothers and others associated with his family heard where he was, they came down and joined him. Not only that, but all who were down on their luck came around--losers and vagrants and misfits of all sorts. David became their leader. There were about four hundred in all” (1 Samuel 22:1-2 The Message).

The Place of The Rock...

Life...Messy...and Real..."The River"

“Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse that sends me down to the river
Though I know the river is dry
That sends me down to the river tonight…”

Life...Messy...and Real..."Spare Parts"

She sighed Ma sometimes my whole life feels like one big mistake
She settled in in a back room time passed on
Later that winter a son came along
Spare parts
And broken hearts
Keep a dirty world turnin' around and around

The Journey...The Story..."The Broken...The Beaten and the Damned..."

“I prefer to think that the difference between the Samaritan and the other two (the priest and the Levite) was not just that he was more morally sensitive than they were but that he had, as they had not, the eye of a poet or a child or a saint – an eye that was to look at the man in the ditch and see in all its extraordinary unexpectedness the truth itself, which was that at the deepest level of their being, he and that other one there were not entirely separate selves at all. Not really at all.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace and joy or freedom for me. To see reality – not as we expect it to be but as it is – is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily: that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love. This is not just the way things ought to be. Most of the time it is not the way we want things to be. It is the way things are. And not for one instant do I believe that it is by accident that it is the way things are. That would be quite an accident.”
~ Frederick Buechner

The Journey...The Story..."The Broken...The Beaten and the Damned" - con't...

He said, "Son when you grow up,
would you be the savior of the broken,
the beaten and the damned?"
He said "Will you defeat them,
your demons, and all the non-believers,
the plans that they have made?"
"Because one day I'll leave you,
A phantom to lead you in the summer,
To join The Black Parade."

The Journey...The Story..."The Broken...The Beaten and the Damned" - con't...

The Journey...The Story...The Broken...The Beaten and the Damned" - con't...

I am attempting to create, to paint pictures from my story onto the canvas of this blog so as to in some limited way record my life and in so doing maybe find out who I am. Through writing, images, songs, videos, poetry…or whatever means try and tell my story…only grace makes my existence worthwhile, or sustainable, and maybe being real will help someone else. I don’t know though…recently I was accused of being phony and all “…the cup of grace stuff…” being phony as well, as if what I write and post here is not real or not who I really am.

Hmmmm…

Not sure how to respond to that – I am a sinner, I fuck up a lot, I swear, I drink, hang out at bars, go to church, believe Jesus lived, died and rose again for me, that he loves me and his grace is sufficient…

I am in solidarity with Paul, in that, “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life”
(1Timothy 1:15-16 TNIV).

And…

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin” (Romans 7:15-25).

And this from John,

“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us” (1John 1:5-10).

What do you do with that…being human…still in “the deceptive state of being” – o.k. maybe I am a phony, a hypocrite, a sinner, but I ask who isn’t or who has not been other than Jesus? Isn’t that the point – why Jesus came? To save, “…the broken, the beaten and the damned…” isn’t that why he hung out with the misfits, the failures, the phonies, the sinners, the broken people? He is the Savior! It doesn’t matter how fucked up we are – he saves! He loves! He knows! He is compassion!

So yes, I am a phony, as phony as Peter when he denied Jesus, as phony as Thomas when he doubted, as phony as Paul when he failed, as phony as any follower of Jesus as we all are on a journey that none of us has arrived at the end of yet…we are stumbling along…and it is only through the grace of God and the sacrifice of Jesus that we can even begin to be in any sense not phony.

So what else can I say? I am what I am…and is that not why there is grace…?

The Journey...The Story...The Broken...The Beaten and the Damned" - con't...

The Journey...The Story...The Broken...The Beaten and the Damned" - con't...

Op-Ed Contributor - Many Faiths, One Truth - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor - Many Faiths, One Truth - NYTimes.com

Divine Milieu...Barry McGuire - Eve Of Destruction...

Woke up this morning and had a New York Times breaking news e-mail on my Blackberry saying that, “North Korea is severing all ties with South Korea as tensions mount…” and yesterday the United States stated it was going to increase covert ops in the Middle East. All this with the backdrop of Afghanistan and Iraq wars still ongoing and the words of Barry McGuire started playing in my head. Even though the song, Eve of Destruction was first released in 1965 it asks questions that are just as or even more valid today.

Barry McGuire's song along with Courtney Love’s, Letter to God I believe ought to be getting a lot of air time on “Christian” radio stations as both songs in their lyrics ask existentially fundamental, authentic, real questions of what it means to be human and be in co-existence with ourselves, our neighbors and with God…unfortunately neither song will be on “Christian” radio as the “deceptive state of being” is to comfortable. Jesus is preferred as a domesticated “caged” deity and the god of nationalism and prosperity is worshipped with sword in hand as opposed to the God with a towel in his hand and dying on the cross.

As Ghandi said, “I like your Christ, but not you’re Christians” – grace…grace…grace… hmmmm…

The eastern world, it is exploding
Violence flarin', bullets loadin'
You're old enough to kill, but not for votin'
You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin'

But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We're on the eve
of destruction.

Don't you understand what I'm tryin' to say
Can't you feel the fears I'm feelin' today?
If the button is pushed, there's no runnin' away
There'll be no one to save, with the world in a grave
[Take a look around ya boy, it's bound to scare ya boy]

And you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We're on the eve
of destruction.

Yeah, my blood's so mad feels like coagulatin'
I'm sitting here just contemplatin'
I can't twist the truth, it knows no regulation.
Handful of senators don't pass legislation
And marches alone can't bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin'
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin'

And you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We're on the eve
of destruction.

Think of all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama
You may leave here for 4 days in space
But when you return, it's the same old place
The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead, but don't leave a trace
Hate your next-door neighbor, but don't forget to say grace
And… tell me over and over and over and over again, my friend
You don't believe
We're on the eve
Of destruction
Mm, no no, you don't believe
We're on the eve
of destruction.