caring

 And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fattened steer will be together;
And a little boy will lead them.
Also the cow and the bear will graze,
Their young will lie down together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea.

 

Unfortunately that is not the reality we live in now.  The world is cursed because of Adam's disobedience.  The logic of that I honestly don't understand, but that's the explanation The Bible provides.  My pastor talked about the Old Testament sacrifices and how the altar was a bloodbath day and night.  He said it was supposed to give people a hint; SIN IS REALLY BAD!  And we're all guilty of something, even those few of us who have clung to righteousness for dear life from the very moment that the light of God's special revelation began to awaken the soul onward, we all have something in our past that is worthy of condemnation.  Maybe not the utmost condemnation, I don't presume to know how God deals with people who haven't been consciously delivered the knowledge of the requirements of God (Romans 5:14 [specifically the reference in the center of the verse]) but we all deserve condemnation.  THE GOOD NEWS is ultimately that God offers a way out.  The unfortunate reality is that so many people are going to refuse and find all kinds of excuses for doing so.  They'll cite the supposed scientific inaccuracy of The Bible, they'll cite the lack of perfection of Christians as supposedly proof that The Bible isn't trustworthy, they'll cite the myriad of disagreements that Christians have over various subpoints that scripture speaks of, and most of all, they'll cite the fact that so many Christians just aren't much to speak of, despite the statement that Jesus made to Nicodemus -- you must be born again!.  I touched on that in my most recent post (btw)...
Ultimately, if you really don't want to do something, you'll find a reason not to do it.  You might even find 8 or 9 different reasons.  But if you don't want to do it, that's really the reason.  And I can understand that; self denial is a hard difficult road and at this juncture in my life, I'm having difficulty imaging that my long standing sin patterns will NEVER EVER EVER rear their ugly head again and defile this clay jar that God The Father has sealed with The Holy Spirit until the day of redemption.  Honestly, that's not what kept me back for so long.  I spent many years just not wanting to believe in Yahweh because believing that God, as described in The Bible, IS real, would mean believing that Hell is real and that everything God says about Hell is true.  And I just could not find peace with that.  Ultimately, I realized I was being pretty darn stupid, and I simply acknowledged that maybe there was just something I wasn't getting.  My mom was asking me shortly after I gave up fighting Him how I feel about God commanding the annihilation of the amorites.  I told her at the time - It doesn't matter how I feel about it.  I'm going to have to find a way to make peace with it.
So, ultimately, I can say with pretty darn near certainty, just from what I know within me to be the truth, that I myself don't see sin the way that I should.  How I feel about sin cannot compare to the agony that Jesus faced on the cross.  The life that most Christians live in the US, even the most zealously faithful ones, the "persecution", the rejection, the scoffing, the various trials and testings, they don't compare with what Jesus faced.  But even if they did, it is only temporary.  It may be what seems like a "long time", BUT -- it is only temporary.  Honestly, I'm glad Jesus loved us enough to die for our sins, but I would be unable to live with myself if His death was ongoing and permanent.  I'm glad God didn't leave him to hang that way.  Realistically, that's just not feasible.  God staying dead, if that's even possible, would be unnecessary and, quite simply, NOT on His agenda, nor part of His obligation toward us.  Some people insist God has no obligation toward us.  In a manner of speaking that is true.  We certainly haven't earned anything FROM God, other than His wrath.  BUT -- God, being rich in love and abounding in mercy, is personally invested in us.  He's even invested in the animals of the earth (Matthew 10:29).  IF God wanted to be callous and flippant, we certainly would not be able to hang anything over His head, but that's not the God we worship.

a static

 My confidant confronted me head on with something that had occurred to me from time to time, and had actually gone through my mind a couple days before we met up.  He emphasized that Christians are to be born again.  I of course recall this being spoken of by Jesus in the Gospel of John (chapter 3) and being a bit perplexed by that because I often feel like a lump of fat and not much else.  I don't recall ever feeling different except on brief moments where I'm pumped up about something.  I don't ever recall being overwhelmed with grief or its flipside, gratitude.  I don't recall my state of being ever changing.  My mom said she could see a difference after I accepted Christ's calling and was saved, but I never did.
While discussing this, he pointed out some verse that "should scare me".  And I finally got down to it -- "OK, so what if it does scare me.  What am I supposed to do about it?!"  He said to ask Christ to save me from this deadness.  As far as I know, He hasn't done that, but if He had, I don't even know if I would be able to identify it.  He makes a good point, although I'm honestly a little confused as to how to being scared for my life fits into it.  He said I should "tell Him" that I'm "tired of" living in sin, and ask for Him to deliver me from it.  Which is a bit different than "I'm scared, please help me".
Anyway...  to be continued....

HELLRAISER (1987) & its marketing

 The poster graphics are appropriate for the film.  The tagline is absolutely stupid.  Pinhead, as he's known colloquially (he never had a name in the actual movie) was not THE villain.  It's debatable as to weather he's even the LEAD villain.  He seemed to be the spokesperson for the group of 'cenobites' that were seen in the movie.  It's not even clear if the movie features ALL of the 'cenobites' that exist in the set-up that Clive Barker conjured up.  Of course, it's possible that even Clive Barker would not be able to answer that, but usually a well made movie is the result of rather immersive understanding of the content within the movie, and that usually includes details that are not explicitly stated in the script and / or the movie itself.  But that only goes so far.  Someone was asking the writer of FALLEN DOWN (1993) as to weather the main character would have voted for Trump.  The writer of that movie didn't seem to have a definitive answer.  There's just some things that are left up in the air like that.  Characters in a movie I suppose can live on in the writers' imagination to where the writer can pinpoint exactly how they may have changed and where they would be in their life if they were in fact real people, but I can't imagine that being the norm for a writer.  Especially writers who write about people other than themselves...  SPOILER AHEAD: Of course, the writer of FALLEN DOWN may have just had difficulty answering the question because you have to wonder given the trajectory of the character and his downfall how it would have played out differently...  Aside from the cops just letting him be...  which is a question I ask about myself sometimes and never am able to answer.  Given my influences and personality etc., what about my life could have really been different, realistically?

 Anyway....

The film (HELLRAISER) will tear your soul apart.  "Pinhead" will not.  He's not even going to tear apart the soul of anyone in the movie.  The tagline really should have been IT'LL TEAR YOUR SOUL APART, not HE'LL TEAR YOUR SOUL APART.  I guess they were trying to reel in people who were conditioned to thinking a horror movie had to have a mascot type villain.  Even "Leatherface" from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is often thought of as "the villain" in that movie, although he, like "pinhead", was only a piece of the terror that ensued in that movie.  I think somehow the barrage of FRIDAY THE 13TH and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequels pretty much cemented that mentality of there being one central bad guy in the movie.  I think that's largely what made the ending for SCREAM (1996) so surprising, originally.  The identity of the killer was otherwise pretty obvious from the beginning and never stopped being obvious.

progrrrrrrrrrrr

 Been overall much better behaved the past couple weeks.  Still all too frequently stumbling and falling.
....   Here's to the future ;

Expulsion , almost (.../)

I have SO much more grace than I deserve.  Grace of course is never "deserved"....  That's actually an oxymoron.  We don't deserve to have God Almighty ruling over us, but that's how it is.  We don't deserve to exist.  We don't deserve to be treated with respect, we also don't even deserve the suffering that comes upon us in some cases.  Children who grew up in abusive households can attest to this.  Even an adult doesn't usually deserve the kind of crap kids sometimes put up with.  I, however, deserve that.  I have not been engaging in the conduct that caused the amorites to be spewed from the land, but I have laid eyes upon it numerous times by choice.  I had read Leviticus 18 but I apparently failed to meditate on it and somehow it just got tucked into some incredibly foggy section of my mind.

Granted, even watching a heterosexual married couple's homemade recordings would still be questionable at the very least.  The Bible isn't very specific about what constitutes a violation of Jesus' expounding of Exodus 20:14.  I'm fairly certain I've been guilty of that more times than I can count, not always or exclusively during my demonic internet dabblings.

Hoping I can KEEP all of this in view.  More importantly, I'm hoping my sensitivity to it will increase exponentially and that I can at some point have the affection for Jesus that has been dulled incredibly over the years.