Category: theology

Every space must have a governing dominator. This is a law of physics, firstly in gravity. The larger, denser mass will be the primary directing force within its range.

Of course all mass generates its own gravitational force, the smaller masses making impacts of their own. The moon changes Earth’s tides while Earth dictates the moon’s course around the sun. The greater forces are dominant. The moon is not greater than Earth, but it is greater than Earth’s oceans and thus makes it’s lesser—but nonetheless important—presence known on Earth.

We all make a difference, even in absence. When the loudest dominator doesn’t speak it creates loud silence. Absentee parents wreak passive destruction in their children’s lives. One of the handful of hard, vital lessons of life we each must learn is that everyone can and is dominated by something else in some way. Another lesson is that, while all factory workers are replaceable, no family member can ever be replaced. We only learn these vital life lessons through experience. Shareholders and employees of Apple learned the lessons of dominance and replacement twice.

If you don’t dominate your own space, in magnitude of your own capacity and strength, then you do injustice to the universe. Earth’s oceans need the moon as do the people of Earth need the tides to flow. Remember the riddle of the 500 pound gorilla: Where does he sit? Anywhere he wants.

Keep your space in order, your greaters in check, and your lessers in line. Don’t let your space dominate you.

The big, harry monster of the hill does whatever he wants whenever he wants. He generally doesn’t concern himself with matters of smaller critters inhabiting and roaming about. But, if squirrels quarrel and make a ruckus, he’ll have a thing or to to say about it. Thus the hairy monster’s prerogatives keep the peace of local squirreldom. If he abuses the squirrels, they will either flee and give him no company or they will gang up on him because squirrels have their own prerogatives too.

Never disrespect others in your space. Respect yourself as everyone else. Never oppress, but always dominate your own space at your own level.

Don’t be instantly put off by problems in the world. Jesus puts foolish companies and incompetent governments to oversee people who aren’t ready for more. Maybe the people don’t know enough or maybe they are too irresponsible. A few more Bible-based morals—not to be confused with religious institutions—among the masses would surely help their society improve faster. Trying to improve one’s self, do one’s best, keep learning, look out for others—those ideas began in God’s Word and are hard to argue with. But, even with plentiful Biblical morality in a society, Jesus may have reasons why he keeps a society oppressed by fools in government and big business.

Don’t get in Jesus’s way.

If you spite the fool in charge—and it doesn’t make sense to you that the people deserve that fool as their leader—you might be just like that fool. We often despise people who share our own problems; it’s the mirror we despise. Psychology calls it “projection”, like looking through rose-colored glasses where the red color we see everywhere actually comes from us and only exists in our altered view of the world.

Desire to overthrown the fool in charge basically presumes that Jesus won’t grant people a better leader if the people are ready for it. That leads to failed revolutions or “regime planning” in other nations by toppling foreign governments to mask under the table imperialism. It usually backfires. Don’t meddle in other people’s problems; those problems are well-deserved, no matter how much those problems’ people would have you believe otherwise.

A worthy revolution or overthrow of government only succeeds because the overall society is ready for more competent leadership, thus Jesus gives the nod for a regime change.

Jesus is already King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He appoints those leaders and he does so for a reason.

It can be difficult to fathom that a society deserves it’s leaders. But, think about laziness itself. Lazy people only wake from their slumber when they have enough problems. By having constant problems from bad leaders, people must think and ponder more, actually making them better people. We have what we deserve more often than not.

Being patient includes being misunderstood by otherwise and seemingly good people. They won’t know why you won’t jump to take action, so friends whom you thought to be the “most wonderful in the world” will jump to curse at you because they lack patience themselves.

The forgotten virtue of patience is one reason why so many people question God’s goodness, merely for not having eradicated evil. God is eradicating evil through us, being patient with us as we make up our own minds to stop giving into evil—including evil’s way of impatience.

The way of patience opens doors that open no other way. Some doors are only locked by a “slow hinge”—a hinge that turns so sluggishly that most people think the door is sealed shut. Keep pushing, ever so slightly, and the door locked by patience will open up.

The call to be patient applies especially when we don’t feel like it. God is infinitely more patient with us than we could ever be with anyone else. But, if you can be patient with God being patient with you then you can be patient with anyone.

Don’t be impatient about other people’s lack of progress; that’s their problem. Don’t care more about a student’s education than the student cares himself. Don’t get yourself worked up over whatever evil scheme evil Men have planned.

Those who are impatient are their own worst enemies. They don’t need any punitive intervention from you. Just patiently keep watch as God lets them mess themselves up, impatiently of course.

For the foolish who refuse to wise up, remember that they won’t affect your work. Impatient folly can’t harm the task God has for the patient and wise. If they manage to mess up some of your plans then those plans weren’t from God.

If someone makes you late, God is already orchestrating other events so that it won’t matter in the end. Keep your pace, but don’t become impatient.

Having patience is much like having inertia or momentum. Little flies won’t set you off course. Stability comes with patience and is well worth it. Yet, learning patience takes patience, which is always a problem. Just be patient.

Order does not necessarily look neat and tidy by our limited human standards. A stack of wheels may fit nicely into a corner, but it is not the correct order for allowing a cart to roll down the street. Order means having things in their proper place—according to function. The living, organic, thriving, moving, growing, flowing channels that allow things to function don’t fit into nifty boxes as we might like.

Boxes and niftiness make the world around us easier to understand, whether in actual living and work space or in a worldview. But, God and His Creation are bigger than we could ever fathom. As His order sprawls, it seems chaotic to us. Chaos has an order, but that order will never always make sense to us; we can only become familiar with its “personality”, as it were, like getting to know an area within a vast forest.

The currents of wealth are part of this ordered chaos, as is forgiveness and its law. When we forgive, the complex web of action and consequence triggers a cascade that spirals through channels in the chaos of both spirit and matter, eventually coming back around like a boomerang to exactly where the forgiveness originated. It’s a law because it is all part of chaos.

All too often, forgiving seems impossible. This is because we can only “forgiven” something that is actually wrong; chaos understands this. When you cannot forgive people for a dirty deed, it could be because you should be thanking them. Deeds may only seem dirty to us, but actually be well-cloaked blessings, such as being made to work too hard for too little in order to become strong enough to swim in the currents of wealth. Or, you may need to thank and forgive them all at the same time. Or, you may need to forgive them for the properly-labeled dirty deed. It is quite impossible to forgive even the right person if it is for the wrong thing.

Every part of life will only open up and break through into a healthy flow once everything is placed into proper order according to the thriving flow of chaos. Focus your energies there.