#1824 Homecoming

Home Coming

(Abortion has many victims beyond the child who is destroyed. Were all the abortions to stop tomorrow, the Church's work of healing these other victims will have only begun)

            There is no hill for the self possessed victim to climb. God loves you as you are, wherever you are , but he refuses to leave you there. We all had a starting point, before the foundation of the world, God chose each of us for life (Psalms 139) Marvelously created, one sperm cell of a father, one of millions fertilizing the cell of our mother, producing an individual unlike any other person who has ever lived on this earth. Each of us have 64 trillion cells in the body, each cell capable of producing 100's of pages of data detailing ones ancestry. Life has no guarantees, many innocent babies actually aborted. On one of this world travelers trips to communist China, my guide told me that his sister had produced five baby girls, each of which were strangled by her husband. In that communist, godless society, one child law to a couple, the husband wanted a boy but, this old blind veteran cringes to think that America is heading in the same way as communist China...57 million babies aborted in America since the Supreme Court decision of 1973... the most innocent life, they had never done anything bad to anyone. And yet, we have the nerve to talk about terrorism in other places. Just think, and how could anyone not believe in the omnipotence of the creator of the universe when you consider that like every snowflake that has ever fallen- every grain of sand on a seashore- every person possesses a personhood, finger print, voice and even flex in the iris of the eye, different from any other person who has ever lived. We wonder why 72% of the children from church-going homes leave the church after they enter college. They have seen their parents and church members base their "supposed" faith on feeling, not fact. Christianity is not complicated, just difficult. Christianity is fact not feeling. Even at the old country church (built by my great grand parents in 1874) as a child, I saw everyone base their redemption on a bellhop type salvation, they just called on God when he was needed.

            Even the thousands of different denominations, each thinking it has the true message, believes that God needs them rather then they needing God. In my lifetime, 85 years, with the world completely changed, I have seen organized religion turn into a Madison Ave. type fantasy. Who needs the Grace of God when you have government largess, when you have welfare handouts instead of hard work, when you have politics instead of prayer?

            The one message I have had great difficulty getting across, speaking in pull pits, before groups of every type, the supernatural redemption gift of God when the old man of sin and redemption is replaced with the new creation, salvation experience of being born again by the holy spirit of God. You have within you something which only you can understand, which your family, friends, and no one else can comprehend unless they too have been filled with the holy spirit of God. When you have this new creation, Christ in you, when God looks at you he sees Jesus.

            Perhaps I can explain patriotism on very much the same level. Church members like to fight the battle against Satin from air condition fox holes, they really don't believe, they really don't believe in the mission of the church. The warrior , on the front line, having within himself the spirit of love for God, family, Country will risk his very life. Only the true warrior; true soldier knows the inner conflict of seeing his fellow soldiers dead bodies (in Korea) stacked up like cord wood. ... in the middle east, from Islamic; radical; terrorist comrades must pick up the pieces of their friends. This is what the inner neurology of mankind endures.  With much of the same emotion, the child loves his home. In this writer's prayer life every day, I pray for the refugees, migrants, hungry children all over the world, displaced by the warfare of mankind. They do not have a home. I have written about it before. What I saw on the border of Pakistan... refugees from Afghanistan carrying everything they owned in big sacks on their backs...small children, barefooted in rags, clinging to the only thing they had regarding a home, their parents.  

            The home place where I was raised, in my family for many generations, the first thing my old uncles would do when they arrived at our home, go to the old well (hand pump), a clean glass for my mother and start drinking the water. King David of the old testament wanted water from his home place in Bethlehem (2 Samuel 23:15, 23:16) even Jesus taught us about a drink of water. No water like the clean water from the country home place (the tragedy of modern city living, water poisoned by chloride and floride)...the lie of the century, drinking poisoned water top prevent tooth decay.

            Down the road, up a path from the farm where I was raised, the old Hinnant homestead, one Saturday, each summer, the large beautiful cars would pass our house headed for the long deserted house in a big grove of trees where the family would still have their homecoming. The land had stayed in the family...no one lived in the old house but a family member kept the grounds in order, the old hand pump in working condition. God helps people who have no memories; no love affair with parents, family who have gone on. They would bring their lunch, would take flowers out to the graveyard where parents; grandparents were buried and have a good time rejoicing in the memories of their childhood...their heritage. They were all people of wealth, but not to "stuck up" to remember.

            Likewise, in the woods, not far from my home, on the land of another relative, an old black church ...just crewed benches one Saturday to the year, wealthy black people from town, driving large cars would park up and down the highway, make their way with food baskets and fold up tables to sing and praise God for his blessings, then and now.

            As a child, I never could understand the homecoming at our old country church. when old people, some living far away would show up for that day. Only in recent years, as an old person myself, can I understand their tears as they would enter the church hearing the old hymns that they knew as a child. It is mans possession of a soul, that gives him these emotions, separating man from his fellow lower animals.