dar334

It’s Christmas Day at 1:30 in the afternoon.  I’m still in my pajamas but I haven’t been unproductive.  Jim and I frosted the cookies I baked yesterday and I’ve washed dishes twice, even scouring the mess on the stove top.  While trying to catch up on my daily bible readings, I’ve watched an array of birds entering the squirrel feeder Jim made last week and hooked to the porch railing outside the kitchen window.  I’ve contemplated whether or not the squirrel would find it and wondered if he’s still living on our little piece of earth the Lord has provided.  It’s a good day.  The house is warm and Jim is feeling pretty good.  If I could, I would make this day last forever.

I’m blocking out the sound of Gunsmoke by listening to Pandora through earbuds, Instrumentals for Study.  I’m still in Revelation and have stopped on the study note for chapter 12, verse 12.  The verse reads:  “Therefore, rejoice, O heavens!  And you who live in the heavens, rejoice!  But terror will come on the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you in great anger, knowing that he has little time.”  The study note reads:  one of the reasons God allows Satan to work evil and bring temptation is so that those who pretend to be Christ’s followers will be weeded out from Christ’s true believers.  Knowing that the last great confrontation with Jesus is near, Satan is desperately trying to recruit as great an enemy force as possible for this final battle.

Now I sure don’t think it suggests that the end is near as in months or years, like so many thought was going to happen in Y2K, but compared to eternity any amount of secular time would qualify as “near”.  And whenever I hear or speak the word “secular”, it causes me to ponder the changes I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.  Just to be clear, (which is a saying I hear all to often at work and usually causes anger), secular is defined as “denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis.”  Recently I heard the word “evolved” when it came to attitudes and beliefs of the secular society of today.  I do not believe God has “evolved”, I think it’s the way mankind can justify their actions in order to live the way they want and not the way God wants.

I am far from perfect.  Really far.  Short of murder, I’ve committed the remaining nine commandments in one degree or another.  Everyone has.  Thankfully God sent his only son to be the ultimate sacrifice for our sins.  I thank him often for that because I seem to continue to sin in one form or another on a daily basis.  But I’m trying, and although I’ve never read “practice makes perfect” in the Bible, I think it holds some merit.

In closing, I feel we have caused all the problems down here by doing too much justifying and not enough obeying.  Now I ask that if you want to defend the changes made by our secular selves, let me know the book, the chapter, and the verse in the instruction manual that tells us it’s okay to do it.  For those of you that don’t believe in the instruction book, if I’m wrong I have nothing to lose.  But if you’re wrong, you everything to lose.

Always pondering,

dar