Thursday, 7/21/11. Post 1

9:30 AM: I have just finished re-reading the first chapter of the Gospel of John. What immediately "shown forth" to me was John 1:5 - The light shines in the darkness and the darkness can never extinguish it.

For what it's worth, that statement is consistent with science. The molecules of EVERYTHING vibrate(except, maybe, black holes). The energy involved in that vibration expresses itself as light. On some level, everything that exists glows, even in the dark. Soldiers wear night goggles in order to see the minute amounts of light released and/or reflected in the darkness.

Perhaps we all need night goggles to help our faith.

Wednesday, 7/20/11

I feel so pressured all the time, it is very difficult to keep a journal. I've been thinking about this entry all day, but I haven't been able to sit down and type. Now, it's 9:25 pm and I should be grading papers; instead, I am writing this assignment for CR (a journal entry a day), and I've just returned from church.

All day, I have been hungry to devour God's Word, the Bible. I am hungry, famished, starving. I tuned into LifeChurch.tv on the internet and got a teaching that made me even more hungry...in a good way. Understand, until today, I have never really wanted to read the Bible. I've read it, most of it, and in the last year I've been pretty good at reading some of the Bible everyday. But I don't LIKE it. Today, all that changed. I have wanted to do nothing other than read the Bible. This is such a radical change in my, I quite honestly don't know what to think!

As for examination of conscience, I don't think I've done anything wrong today, although yesterday I blew up at God for a trivial reason and said the forbidden word: GD. I hate myself for doing that. Today, however, there have been no such explosions...thank God.

Now, I must grade papers.

Personal Holiness

I just found out where personal holiness comes from!!!!!!

2 Cor 7:1 says it develops over time when we reverence God.

Reverencing God creates progressively more holiness. Cool!

Swimming

I have a problem with procrastinating. I have procrastinated for quite some time in writing this report of a very spiritual experience I had at church while we were doing praise and worship. No one knew; it was totally between me and God.

As we same praise songs, I suddenly became aware that I was swimming in an aquarium. Air bubles were coming out of my nose and rising up all the way to heaven. I knew the bubbles were my prayers, and that I was swimming in the Holy Spirit.

The experience was so cool. The experience has not happened again, but it is really neat to remember. Sometimes, I can put myself in that frame of mind and realise that I am swimming in God every minute. Through Him I live and move and have my being

God Makes His Saints Face Their Rejectors

I was just reading Acts 7:30-50. What jumped out at me was the story of how Moses was sent back to the very people who rejected him. So was Jesus: He was rejected by almost everyone, yet the Father sent him to his rejectors.

The same thing happened to me. As a kid, I was rejected by all my peers, but the people who treated me the worst, who actively persecuted me, were working-class and under-class Americans. Those are precisely the people I teach at my college, and I have no doubt that God put me in my job.

Isn't that interesting? I am beloved by my students, with very few exceptions. Yet, these are mostly members of the class of people who treated me so badly.

I have marvelled at this before, but today I read Acts and read that God seems to do this on a fairly regular basis: send his followers back to the people who rejected them.

Jan 1, 2010 Man created before Garden

Something I noticed for the first time was that man was created BEFORE the Garden of Eden. In fact, Genesis says God created man from the mud of the earth. THEN, God planted a Garden and put the man in it.

This accounts for how humans could have been created in Africa from the mud of the Earth and then TRANSFERRED to the Euphrates area.

Wow. Perhaps God led the migration from Africa. Adam wandered (led by God) into the Garden. There, the rest is (Bible) history.