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blogging, bullies, Christianity, cranky people, faith, frustration, justice
Sometimes I am so starved for justice it just becomes a dull and hungry ache, a desperate longing to catch just a glimpse of the good guys winning and the bad guys reaping their just rewards, just once, and yet those moments so seldom come.
There’s some bits of scripture that speak of God hardening hearts, and sometimes I can feel the mercy even in that, the kindness behind shutting someone’s heart off to the reality of who and what they are, to the horror of the misery and the pain and the suffering they have inflicted on others, to the harm they have done in the world. Please Lord, don’t ever let them feel it all, because it would absolutely crush them. I have felt just a hint of the pain they have left behind for others, and it has nearly crushed me many times.
What is must be like to be you..
Often we walk in the world blissfully unaware of the wrong we do, of how we pass that off to others, how we make a mess of our own lives and then just walk away, oblivious to the fact that somebody else now has to come along behind you and clean up your wake of destruction. It is a crime all by itself to lay waste your own life, to never find your potential, to fail to ever catch a glimpse of who you were meant to be, but no one ever does that crime all alone, they always manage to snatch bits of collateral damage to take down with them. No man is an island.
It’s not just the havoc you wreck in the world, but also the dreams you shatter, dreams that haven’t even been dreamed yet, all the potential unrealized that you lay waste to, killing hope and draining the world of beauty.
“When I knew better, I did better,” but some do not even care about the knowing. Oblivious, blissfully unaware. Harden their hearts, Lord because the moment they feel it all, they will annihilate their own selves in a horrific act of spontaneous combustion.
Sometimes I am accused of condemning people to hell but it isn’t true at all because I know some people are already there. We die as we live, we condemn our own selves or avail ourselves of salvation. It isn’t my choice at all, it is each of ours.
Perfect justice is assured and salvation is assured too, and forgiveness and mercy is available to all, it is not that which troubles me, but rather the making of amends. Peter do you Love me? Peter do you Love me? Peter do you love me? Three times He denied Christ and three times he got to make it right. That making amends, that opportunity to repair some of the damage you have done, to give back some good in equal measure, is such a critical part of the equation and so often forgotten.
Forgotten by the beautiful people who sometimes sit in fancy churches claiming to be saved.
Reblogged this on Nevada State Personnel Watch.
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Thank you for the reblog, much appreciated.
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To never find your potential you said is really a crime I believe.
About others and their injustice, well I can´t save the world. I can save myself and do little contributions to others here and there, but I stopped looking for justice long time ago. Nobody helped me when I was homeless, doesn´t mean I should not help others, but is not in my number one priority. Family and a few close friends and me are my priorities. Saving the world….to me is a fruitless crusade. Humans will be humans and when you change human nature….well then we might see a miracle. Injustice is what i saw long time ago in some screwed up countries, and there we gave them their dossis of justice. And that is more than enough for me when it gets to saving the world.
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Words of wisdom there, Charly. We can’t change the world, only ourselves.
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You really are burdened for people who are lost, aren’t you IB? Such a neat thing to see.
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I am often burdened for the lost, quite true, Wally. There’s just so darn many of them 😉
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Too many. ..sigh
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And that is your calling…to pray for them, to hurt for them. I too feel the burden, but I have also found that FATHER does answer prayers, unexpectedly. Praying for peace and comfort to you!
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The hinkiness in our fallen human nature is that even when we do good, or think we do good, or do the best we can, the seeds of some sort of tragedy are nevertheless sown.
The ancient Greeks and Hebrews grappled with that irremediable flaw in human nature through their literature, plays and spirituality.
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That’s interesting, Silence. They say there’s nothing new under the son and that is somewhat comforting to me. It can be reassuring to go and read the ancient Greeks and be amazing by the fact that wow, people were thinking these precise things eons ago. These are the questions that have stumped mankind for centuries and continue to stump us.
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“That making amends, that opportunity to repair some of the damage you have done, to give back some good in equal measure, is such a critical part of the equation and so often forgotten.
Forgotten by the beautiful people who sometimes sit in fancy churches claiming to be saved.”
Ho! PREACH it SISTA.
Sadly I think the reason for much of why that is, has to do with most of the folks in fancy churches not thinking they HAVE caused much in the way of “collateral damage”, no major casualties lying in their wake… I lived in that delusion for a long time myself, alongside my fellow peers with the same kind of “prayed the prayer when I was six” kind of “testimonies”. You don’t see yourself as doing much destruction or evil by the age of six, and so, yeah, many people basically have this mindset that if they were never injecting drugs in an alley somewhere, or beating their wife after drinking a fifth of whiskey, then they’ve really never DONE anything to hurt anyone else all that much…
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LOL, you’re awesome truth. Actually when I was younger, I used to say those very things, well I haven’t killed anybody, haven’t been an iv drug user, haven’t robbed any banks, so it’s all good. Grading on a curve, I call it. At some point God decided to reveal some truths to me and I realized there was hardly a sin I hadn’t committed in some form or another. When I really saw it all laid out before me, it was pretty horrifying, but a good lesson on why we all need grace so badly.
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Totally, the only curve God grades us on is the one where we are held up in comparison to the standard of His absolute holiness, something we usually forget when we get caught up in the heat of wishing He would hurry up and dole out justice on everyone else out there we perceive to be the real “baddies”….
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Amen to that, truth! We’re quick to try and come up with a good plea bargain, aren’t we? Just the same, there are a number of lunkheads that could benefit from a good throttling 😉
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So it is not so very bad if I start using drugs?
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This is what I have tried to convey to the Remnant (the called out ones/folks who have come out of the institutional church). One may leave spiritual babylon, only to have some babylon junk inside their souls, topped off with your very own sins. When did we ever think that killing someone physically was worse than killing someone spiritually or verbally? Pride lurks around in corners we don’t even know we have!
I’ll tell you what’s really hard and that is to love the unlovable. To love as an act of your will, going against vain thoughts. ERgh! To treat all as a blank slate and trust FATHER knows best. I am so not there….
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Great comment, Deirdre. “When did we ever think that killing someone physically was worse than killing someone spiritually or verbally?” Oh, amen to that! It’s really nice to know there are others who can recognize that, too.
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Lost and hypocritical, some are. Sad. But it does eventually get revealed, our wrongs. And when it’s God telling us, it can’t be wrong.
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Reblogged this on saboteur365.
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Thank you for the reblog.
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Pingback: Crying out for Justice | Christians Anonymous
Can I “like” this 1,000 times? No?! 😭
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So true , we are blissfuly unaware of the lil crimes that we commit , like telling a kid even simply that he aint gud fr anything !! Those words are etched in their minds destroying their self confidence …..
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I feel addressed. I have had moments where I didn’t heat to Gods calling. But I know I should.
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Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I have had some of those episodes of self-awareness, realization of some of the bad things I’d done. Disobeying my father was a huge one, and often the episodes arose when I realized that he had been right all along, that he had set up his rules in good faith, love, and protection, and thinking how painful it must have been for him each time to see me tripping myself over in meaningless defiance. He has a great temper, but he has a big heart beneath it all and he gets upset when people ruin themselves or ruin others; too often I mistook his grieving anger for hatred rather than love. He’s saved me more times than I ever deserved.
But even though those times of self-reflection were painful, I think they kept me from straying too far from that first moment of faith when I heard the gospel from an elementary school friend. No doubt I would still be far away from grace if I hadn’t been hit several times with the grief over some of my bad decisions. That grief, as devastating as it, gives way for repentance, for being able to get better and do better next time around. Ironically, it is those moments of heartache over my life that I am most thankful for.
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Oh, amen Ada, well put!
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