#1885 Shadow Boxing with Illusions

#1885

Shadow Boxing with Illusions

"Great is Thy Faithfulness" - Hymn

     Great is Thy faithfulness,” O God my Father,
     There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
     Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not
     As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.

It is much easier to clean up language than a sinful heart.  Facts are testy things.  Language which I hear everyday in the news, in polite conversation was never heard when I was a boy. 

Most of us just shadow box with illusions, we want to think that things are better than they are.  Anyone not Jewish-Muslim-Atheist or one of the world's minor religious groups will usually say that they are Christian.  Do you have any idea what you mean when you say, Christ-like?  One definition of Christian, the way you behave in a large city at MIDNIGHT, where nobody knows you, is the same behavior you have at MIDDAY in your hometown where everyone knows you.  We live in a desensitized world of illusions.  That talking box, your television set, has desensitized you to everything in your lifestyle.  Satan always pays off in counterfeit-compromise.  If you have morals, you feel very lonely even in a crowd, lonely in a room full of people, sometimes, even among family.  You find yourself really up against it, using discretion, a word mostly without meaning.  How do you internet-fraternize, hobnobbing among rich, white trash?

There are times I feel like Mark Twain when around "worldly" people...perhaps that ark with Noah and his crowd should have sunk.  I can well understand why God, after they got onto land and began to multiply and build the Tower of Babel, just gave them some type of brain transplant so they were all speaking different languages.  Some have evidently survived all these centuries because I still cannot understand their languages on the streets-in places of business-in bureaucratic offices-the neighborhood-even some pretenders at the church house.  This writer is sightless, but do you hear the same pretentions I hear? 

For those among us, who missed the boat or whose boat has never come in, they have the illusion that everything should be fair.  It certainly is not fair that some among us should be rich and famous, that some among us should be so handsome or pretty, that some among us should be so smart.  It certainly is not fair that a man should not be able to marry another man if they love each other.  It certainly is not fair that a woman should not be able to marry another woman because she is masculine and the other woman is feminine.  It certainly is not fair for women not to share a foxhole on the frontlines in war with a man.  It certainly is not fair that boys and girls should not be able to use the same shower-same locker room.  It certainly is not fair that a mother can get rid of a baby if the baby is not perfect...according to some sociologist, even a few weeks after birth.  Besides, who wants an ugly baby anyway-certainly not one that is redheaded, deformed, or retarded.

Before a house falls, there are always signs of termites, cracks in the walls, or sink holes.  Before a civilization falls, like Roman-Greek-Egyptian there are always signs of decline or slow death.  Every individual heading for the chasm of self destruction...alcoholism-addictions-crime saw many road signs on his way down.

We know what has happened to most universities, no longer education institutions but centers for liberal-atheist indoctrination.  Because of government largesse and the wringing of more and more tax dollars from a docile public, most universities and colleges have become a hotbed of Godless communism...after all, all a large school needs is a winning ball team.

When this poor country boy was at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, I felt so privileged just to be there.  At very low pay, I worked my way through school.  Perhaps there was a gay-socialistic-atheistic agenda there, even then, but I was not aware.  Just as a soldier, I was willing to risk everything for the privilege of study or defending.  My life was based on facts not feelings: that others might not be honest and genuine did not give me any excuse for not being a man of integrity. 

I say this without fear of contradiction, I know, I have studied the problem, even at so called ivy league schools, the "hasp" for notoriety huge funds for the athletic program, unprepared students, especially minorities wooed and cooed, great money spent for brawn not brain on the sports field.  Most of these "lettermen" do not even attend classes, have someone else to do their work, graduate as ignorant or worse than before they entered.  Scoreboard headlines are more important than skylines.  Higher education matriculation has always been rotten, an illusion.  When I was a student at UNC-CH, not so in grad school where smarts count, at university expense "nannies" checked on prize athletes, prize sons of legislators-judges-business leader alumni to make sure these sons of the elite did not have any troubles financial or otherwise.  The poor peons for whom the university was granted a charter, to educate the masses, were on their own. 

The trouble most people have with temptation, they never want to resist it completely.  The writer Oscar Wilde, a famous-gay-addictive-soiled personality said, "I can resist anything except temptation."  On the outskirts of eternity, you may have time to think about the temptations you should have resisted. 

Life is real, not an illusion.  Made in the image of God, realness means responsibility.  I am responsible to do the best I can with what I have.  There is nothing in the Bible that speaks of socialism.  When our Blessed Lord's feet massaged the sands around the Sea of Galilee (he never owned any method of conveyance, never ventured fifty miles from where he was born) most of the civilized world was enslaved.  We are told that different people were given different talents; we are told that there were blind people, sick people.  God showed us how easy it is to feed a large crowd (one lunch that a loving mother had prepared for a small boy).  God could have furnished a fiery chariot to deliver every one of the three million Jewish slaves from Egypt to the Promised Land if he had so desired. 

It has passed so quickly, all my  life I have known sorrow and loss...perhaps nothing like the loss of eyesight.  The eyes are truly the windows of the soul, but what would I have changed?  My soul has a certainty not an illusion of the eternal.