Choices

#1772

“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness." - Victor Hugo

 

            William Butler Yeats said, "The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time." It is hard to imagine that we can not imagine. It is hard not to believe in the laws of nature, the rules of mathematics, what happiness and misery can do to a human being.

 

            When I had sight, I often thought the most marvelous thing in the world was to be born as a good looking man, or a beautiful woman and yet, we all know, that know one escapes the age scars from ones own history. The greatest cause of the death of human being, around the world, abortion, the killing of the most innocent. Only human beings abort their young, lesser animals do not AND those of us chosen for life know how quickly innocence fades. Ever since our first parents Adam and Eve, chose the spirit of death instead of the spirit of life, the sin nature has been born in all of us. It is not necessary to teach a child to sin.

 

            The older I get, the less I understand why people make the choices they do involving the only life they have to live. In visiting by phone with church friends around the nation, I hear the same lament, empty churches. Churches are empty because we have reduced Jesus in order to accommodate the world. Most church members have a self-imposed purgatory, wanting to hold onto Jesus with one hand and the world with the other. "Ye that love the Lord, hate evil: he preserveth the souls of his saints; he delivereth them out of the hand of the wicked." (Psalms 97:10)

 

            This writer was never a member of a social fraternity, not even a fraternal organization such as masons, moose, woodmen, etc. Once, one of my friends, an elk, invited me to go into his elks club with him. I will never forgot the sign hanging in that fraternal-secretive-social group's building. "What you see or hear here, stays here." Then, I knew why the members of the fraternal groups have their closeness to one another, their protection of one another, their knowing the sins of one another, secreted in a building away from the prying eyes of those who might not agree with their alcohol-gambling-pornography. I now know why, so many of us were never asked to pledge college social fraternities. I now know why, young Christian men, fresh from Christian homes, were stupefied when invited to a fraternity house where alcohol, drugs, pornographic films were shown so that shock or failing to "fit in" could be observed. After all, sinners have never felt comfortable in their sinful actions around those who have principles and character. The sinner does not fit in, feel comfortable, in places with the purpose of decadence. Christianity is not difficult, just tough... choice making. God chose you before the foundation of the world and he expects you to make certain choices.

 

            Many of us were raised in churches of negativity. "We do not smoke, drink or chew. Do not chase girls who do." We were raised in churches of "checklist" redemption, may have read Charles Shelton's, "In His Steps," but in clothing, in language, in interests, we were not very different from those who never darkened a church house door. This writer was in church houses, not that much different from fraternal houses... "what you see or hear here, stays here." In many of the great cities of the world, indeed in my own city, cold-icy mornings, homeless people hovered at locked church house doors.

 

            The world has a great problem in separating morality from Christianity. Someone asked Burton Russell what excuse he would give when God asked him why he lived his life as an atheist, an "unbeliever." The famed philosopher said, "you did not give me enough evidence." The universe is filled with evidence, everything of beauty, everything of goodness, everything of truthfulness, straight from the heart and mind of God.

 

            It is the universal law that an object in motion will stay in motion until stopped by an external force. There is a big elephant sitting in the room while everyone talks about a small mouse. The great choice of Christianity, birthed twice, death once ( clinical death.) The greatest comfort of Christianity, we will have a longer time to spend with children and believers who died early, than unbelievers who lived long lives. God give us the grace, your mercy to spare to introduce choices to a lost and dying world intent on observing very insignificant things.