#1895 Tip Toeing Around the GPS

#1895

Tip Toeing Around the GPS

"Your Love Never Fails" - Jesus Culture

     And when the oceans rage
     I don't have to be afraid
     Because I know that You love me
     Your love never fails

It is not a perfect world, very few perfect people...everyone attempting to appear "non-fragile".  Grasping with our own ideal images, it is hard to tolerate disappointment in self or disappointment with others. 

Your writer, born in poverty on a dirt road in "plagued" Eastern North Carolina, no power, water, or phone lines...refuses to be identified as a victim but feels he did the very best he could with what he was given: hardworking, God-fearing, taxpaying parents, deprived country school.  Working through eight years of university education BUT why, why, why did I not invent wheels on a suitcase, the way to fold plastic for the opening of a milk carton, the discoveries-developments that have led to riches for so many people?  Why could I have not been the one to package tobacco into cigarettes, as did the Duke and Reynolds families?  (Philanthropy of Duke and Wake Forest Universities)  I was raised on a tobacco farm, knew all about tobacco, why did I not promote the toughness found in the materials, structure of the corn "shuck"?  The oil found in the seed of cotton?  I was raised growing corn and cotton, I studied chemistry at the university, knew about equations, even know about my IQ, why, why, why in the council chambers of eternity, before the foundation of the world, when God was designing his GPS for me, was I not blessed with the ability to create something, write something, paint something that would have made me "rich and famous"?  Anyone can paint by numbers on a canvas, anyone can stir a can of paint and paint a building, anyone can pick cotton-harvest corn but, let's face it, whether just plain luck or very special wiring in the brain, a very few have been blessed to come up with things that separate them from the rest of us, giving them the prestige and money of inventors-developers-discovers-or entrepreneurs AND, it is all in presentation every idea, development, discovery must be presented correctly. 

Faith is more caught than taught; more mere mortals are won to Christ by seeing a sermon than by hearing one.  No matter how much you tap dance, tip toe around the GPS of going in the right direction, ancestry-education-your own energy there are still absolutes-axioms-antecedents which we are wise to follow.  Prisons have been filled, reputations have been ruined, and families have been broken by those who took shortcuts.  There is no shortcut to honesty-integrity.  There is no shortcut around the building of character.  There is no abbreviation about one's soul salvation.  I don't want to go to a doctor who does not believe in absolutes.  From one end of the world to the other, no matter what language-nation the notes in the music score are always the same.  The Russian piano plays the same as an American piano. 

Mystery of the ages, the hardest part of your life: essence of Christianity: fanfare of the common man, anti-provocateur or warfare "to love one another" (John 13:34).  This world traveler, from one side of the world to the other (I attended a Rotarian meeting in Hong Kong, Salvation Army meeting in London) there are the "do-gooders", philanthropist, religionist, who have a sincere desire to make the world better.  America sends out more Christian missionaries to the rest of the world than all the other civilized nations together, there are more Anglican churches in the African country of Nigeria than Episcopal churches in the United States of America.  American philanthropic largesse from rich people and foundations have impregnated the world.  So, I ask you, why are family members so hateful to one another...have so much trouble just getting along?  Why, why, why would a Christian, one who stands in church and sings about "others Lord yes others" is perfectly willing to see members of his own family, people on the streets where he lives or works with everyday, die and go to hell without ever saying or doing one thing to prevent it?  We often say we have a right to certain things, we do not have a right to anything, we have responsibilities for everything.  All my life, childhood upward, I have had a destination in mind, even fingers on my pulse...for years, one day at a time nothing spectacular a very ordinary existence.  Then, I awakened, my future was extraordinary..."welded" to the GPS of Creator God...willing to stand out from the crowd...willing to point out the inequities-frailties of OUR existence.

Perhaps, it was when I attended the annual Hazel Scott Piano Concert at Memorial Hall in Chapel Hill, this stately black woman, concert pianist, was the wife of Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York City, a member of Congress and Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.  Yet, when Scott's annual performance at Chapel Hill she was not permitted to even stay at the Carolina Inn (a spectacular hotel owned by the university where dignitaries stayed) because of her skin color, she stayed with a black family on the edge of town.  When Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of a president, lectured at Memorial Hall, she was feted at the Carolina inn.

There is a constant war of the flesh...lusting of the flesh, noone escapes, even though we were designed in the image of God.  The warp and woof of religion, the greatest epic in this democratic republic which we call America, our GPS pathway, with its many twists and turns...maybe we will get there, in spite of lust, in spite of shortcuts, in spite of our being mere mortals.