Faith, yeah I know...

 I think some people confuse faith with what The Bible talks about when the word "faith" is used.  Believing is an important initial step toward faith, but if it's just something you know, it's just as irrelevant as knowing that Abraham Lincoln is the 16th president.  You have to be willing to bank on it.  Because if you truly grasp even a surface understanding of what God has done for people, you know that there's nothing to do but respond.  And you also know that no response - no matter how extreme - is ever going to be enough to make up for your sorry existence.   

People in the Calvinist camp tend to combine "faith is a gift" with "you were dead in your trespasses", and assume by "dead ", that God means incapable of anything good.  If a person is incapable of anything good, then God has no reason whatsoever to have mercy on them.  No person can come to father unless The Father draws him to Himself.  God has to see at least some inkling of potential in you in order to empower you for service to His kingdom.  To believe anything else is to assume there's some factor in God's decision making that we're completely clueless about, which I suppose is possible.  Granted, we should not assume that we know all of the ins and outs of God's decision making.  We don't know ourselves as well as we presumably should and so how can we know what exactly led God to show compassion on us?  More so, we should not take any credit for the good that is in us, because we didn't put it there.  Good comes from external influences.  We have the capacity to respond to those influences but without the influences, we are hopeless.   And even with a treasure trove of good influence we are still prone to amplify whatever negative influences come upon us.  We need Jesus' intercession.  Woe to those who reject it.

Happy New Year 2025 AD

 https://www.gotquestions.org/what-year-was-Jesus-born.html

Really don't know why people are so fixated on this question.  The calander that "Western" society uses is completely made up and has been traded so many times and I'm assuming didn't even exist when Adam & Eve were created.  The geneologies cited in Genesis are not there for us to try and figure out how old the world is and there is no promise God makes to include every person in any geneoloy list.  Maybe He has done that, but how do we know?  He does not owe us any such thing and we don't need any such thing.  Or maybe I don't need any such thing.  I can't imagine a person's soul longing to know how old the world is, but then again I'm kinda dulled to what my soul needs...

God's providence or luck?

 I've heard at least a couple different people scoff at the idea of luck because luck implies randomness and God has ordained every single molecule to operate exactly for a specific purpose.  I don't get that.  If I spill a glass of milk, I am not going to revel in God's providence in that.  I call that "bad luck" because it's bad and as far I can tell, there is no purpose in it.  Knowing that God works all things together for the purpose of Christians should temper the negative reaction that I have toward it, but the reality is a lot of things happen just because.  Why did God create mankind?  "to be glorified" Ok, so why is mankind not doing its job?  You can explain things like that from The Bible, but aside from these microcosmic explanations like "mankind was tempted", "God is glorified in His wrath", and bla bla bla, the fact of the matter is we're in a giant melting pot and we don't know why we're here.  We can to an extent explain it, but the explanations that God has provided only go so far.  We're at war on multiple fronts and we would not have chosen that path had we known what we were getting into.  And there's no going back.  Why?  There's no point in trying to wrap your mind around such things.  And there's even less of a point in trying to wrap your mind around a minuscule occurrence like the power going out or tripping over a log.  Those are bad things that DO NOT HAVE AN EXPLANATION.  God has one, somewhere in the incomprehensibly vast terrain of His mind, but He's, generally speaking, not going to provide it and we'd ultimately be wasting our time asking Him such things.  It's bad luck.  You can substitute it with a bunch of unnecessary words, or you can just say "it's bad luck" and move on.  Times when something truly awful or indescribably good happens might deserve an examination, but even those things, we ultimately usually don't know why they happen and God does not owe us, who cannot hear His voice and cannot fully comprehend the written documents He has provided us, an explanation.  If He gave us an explanation, we'd most likely be too dull of hearing/discerning to even be aware that He's talking to us, much less WHAT He's saying.

It was kindofa neat time in my life, but it also kinda sucked

Hold on my heart Spotify playlist

covering that crazy time in my life 1991-1995.

I'm vengeance 🤬

 Literally have no interest in watching the new Batman movie when ever the heck it finally comes out ..   At the rate it's going, by the time they get the trilogy finished Robert Pattinson will be as old as death.  And then there's this stupid Godfather Goes To Gotham City TV show... no telling how much of that is going to factor in to the movie which should be on home video by now.  I think they might have started filming it finally.  Warner Bros. is so obsessed with this "DC universe" nonsense.  They're not going to be Marvel.  It just ain't happening.  Just make the new Batman movie already!  

Anyway....  also really skeptical about the portrayal of The Joker at the end of the newest Batman movie.  It's like they were running out of time and just hired some dopey off the street and quickly wrote some half baked dialogue for him.  Maybe that's the direction they decided on.  I'll probably watch it eventually and might even be excited when the trailer gets put up, but this trajectory that Warner has been on with the Batman property over the past 10+/- years just ticks me off.  

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.