What God Knows

And then will I declare to them, I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. – Matthew 7:23

Reading Origen last night put me on this track.  He sees goodness and existence as being essential to one another – two sides of the same coin.  God knows only what is, and what God knows is.  God does not know evil; therefore, evil is equivalent to non-being.  Not too surprisingly, Satan lied when he said to Eve, You shall not surely die.  When Jesus told the rich young ruler that no one is good but God, He was simply saying what had been told to Moses and the prophets.  I AM THAT I AM.  I am, and there is no other. 

Evil does exist.  People do practice lawlessness.  There are tragedies.  Jesus was incarnated in this world and experienced, as man, the tests and fears and losses.  He wept at the tomb of Lazarus.  God sees evil and is aware of it.  We see dead leaves blowing about in the fall.  We see smoke hanging in the air, fog in the morning stillness, dust thrown up by the wind.  What we are seeing is an effect.  We know the wind is blowing or not blowing, that a fire is burning, that there is cold air above warm ground.  God sees the effects of evil, but the evil-doer, the instrument of evil has nothing in common with God.  There is no connection, no intimacy, and no communion. 

We read that the eyes of God are too pure to look upon evil.  This is offensive to the secular mind.  God is so judgmental, so sanctimonious.  Who does He think He is?  Yes, we really can be that stupid.  For God to know sin would be for everything to cease to exist.  It is not possible.  Nonetheless, as 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us:  He who knew no sin became sin for us in order that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ.  When we think about this in terms of existence it quickly becomes mind-boggling.  How could the sinless Son of God experience death at all?  How could He, who is God, be separated from the Holy One?  It’s not hard to see how the staggering incomprehensibility of such thoughts could lead to partial and heretical explanations. 

Somehow the Lord took upon Himself the burden and penalty of our sin, identifying so perfectly and fully with us in the Incarnation that He was able to partake of our death and taste non-being as we know it.  Jesus went all the way down into the lowest depths, the deepest darkness, and from there He rose because He is Good.  No one can ever say that God does not understand or that He does not know what we are going through.  Jesus knows better than you or I know.  It is the one who has fully resisted temptation and gone all the way through the trial that knows how hot it gets at its worst.  We say that we cannot stand anymore and give up.

To live is to be known by God; to be known by God is to live.  Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 6:9 make a little more sense to me now, … as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live.  In my unrighteousness, I was nothing.  It didn’t matter how successful I might have been.  I might have been acclaimed and celebrated by the world, but I was a non-being because I was unknown to the Lord.  The poorest, most worthless, most insignificant soul, from the world’s point of view, who is known by God is worth all the world. 

I was talking about the Pearl of Great Price a few weeks ago.  It occurs to me that there are two sides to that parable.  Certainly from the human side, what we give up to know God and be known of Him is nothing.  It is smoke, dust, vapor, and swirling leaves.  The other side is that God Himself sought such a Pearl.  He, too, gave up everything that He might know it as His own. 

 

War Machine

Blessed be the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle -- Psalms 144:1

Thought, memory, knowledge, and wisdom are not limited to the brain.  The brain is certainly a processing center for learning, but it is not the only or even in many cases the primary data storage center.  A wide receiver running a route and a quarterback throwing to him are not relying all that much on brain power to complete a pass on third and long.  Harvard and MIT are usually not playing for the NCAA championship.  The same is true on the side of the defenders, the pass rusher and the cornerback.  A lot is happening that has nothing to do with what we usually mean when we talk about thought.  Yet all of the actions are learned and the result of hours of practice and training as well as game experience.

Muscle memory is a term that has become popular in a lot of areas over the last couple of decades.  It has replaced, to some extent, the older term of hand-eye coordination.  Rhythm, timing, grace, all these are functions of knowledge that reside in the body.  No one can think fast enough to hit a 95-mph fastball.  No one can think fast enough to tap dance, or dance in general.  You can watch someone like me try to dance and realize that it is a long way from the brain to the foot. 

I remember well my first quail hunts as I tried to think through all the pointers I had been given after the covey flushed.  Most of the time I never even got off a shot, and, when I did, it just gave the bird a little tail wind.  It wasn’t until I could stop thinking that I started hitting.  The same thing is true of skeet shooting or shooting a basketball, driving nails or driving a car.  Your brain knows quite well right from the start what needs to be done to ride a bicycle.  It’s your body that is not going along with the program.

Sometimes we can be disparaging of religious rituals, spiritual disciplines, kneeling in prayer, raising hands in worship, and other external forms.  Christianity, though, is more than mental assent.  Faith is more than thinking something is probably right.  Ritual, ceremony, and forms put knowledge into the body as well as the soul and spirit.  The body is passing away, to be sure, but it will be resurrected, saved and glorified.  We were talking about Elisha yesterday.  It might be well to remember that a dead man thrown into Elisha’s grave touched the prophet’s bones and was brought back to life (2 Kings 13:20-21). 

A body that is disciplined in righteousness helps us to live righteously in all areas and enables us to war more effectively against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 

Gathering Manna

The Lord GOD has given me 

the tongue of those who are taught,

that I may know how to sustain with a word 

him who is weary.

Morning by morning he awakens;

he awakens my ear

to hear as those who are taught.

The Lord GOD has opened my ear,

and I was not rebellious;

I turned not backward. 

— Isaiah 50:4-5

This is from Isaiah's revelation of Messiah as the Servant which crescendos in chapter 53.  It is easy to see how it applies to Jesus, and one might think that this particular passage was upon His mind often as He rose in the early hours of the day to pray alone with His Father.  Perhaps the last lines reverberated in His soul, too, during that last night in Gethsemane.  

For us, it is a call to hear.  Consider, though, that it says, "The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of those who are taught."  This is not a function of human knowledge, education, and intellectual capacity.  God simply pours His grace into His chosen vessels.  We can get in a position to receive, but we cannot claim an acquistion.  Knowing "how to sustain with a word him who is weary" does not come from obtaining a PhD in counseling or communications.  We often see family members, friends, and others close to us who are suffering, going astray, lost in mazes of their own making.  We want to help them, but we find much of the time that our best efforts fail.  Sometimes we even make matters worse.  There is only one Helper, one perfect Comforter.  It is His word the suffering and lost need to hear. 

My wife and I had gone over to the west side of the Metroplex one Sunday afternoon to visit our friends who pastored a church there.  Naturally we went to their service that evening and my friend preached.  At the end, he gave an invitation and a young couple came forward to the mourners' benches.  Pastor called for his wife and my wife to come down and pray with the young lady while I and one of his deacons went to pray with the man.  I had been taught the "Roman Road" from childhood as a standard, formulaic means of leading someone to "salvation". 

All have sinned and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23); the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ (Romans 6:23); God demonstrates His love for in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8);  whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved (Romans 10:13); and, finally, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved (Romans 10:9-10).  

 It was drilled in my head until I can do it in my sleep.  All that is true and good, but it should have been obvious to a blind hog that this couple, and especially the young man, was in serious and desperate pain.  It was one of those rare occasions where I was in the right place at the right time with a word for somebody, and I suddenly knew who it was.  Except that our beloved brother, the deacon, rushed in flapping his big Ryrie Study Bible, bound and determined to drag this poor boy down the Roman Road, regardless of what the Holy Spirit wanted.  After all, hadn't the same Spirit inspired Paul to write the book of Romans in the Original King James?

It is one of the beauties of the story of Christ as recorded in the Gospels that He always discerned the real need of the individual person to whom He ministered.  Now and then He would ask the person to state his or her need specifically, but I tend to think that was more to get the person focused than it was to inform Jesus.  The Lord does not need formulas.  He does not need education.  He needs emptiness, and through emptiness, He brings enlightenment. 

Sometimes I wake up with my head already buzzing with what needs to be done for the day, but most of the time, the morning can be a good time to be quiet.  If morning does not work then perhaps it is the late evening when all the day's work is done, and I can sleep on what I hear.  It is always, though, morning by morning, day by day. 

And when the dew had gone up, there was on the face of the wilderness a fine, flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground.  When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?”  For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.  This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Gather of it, each one of you, as much as he can eat. You shall each take an omer, according to the number of the persons that each of you has in his tent.’”  And the people of Israel did so. They gathered, some more, some less.  But when they measured it with an omer, whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack. ... Each of them gathered as much as he could eat. Morning by morning they gathered it, each as much as he could eat; but when the sun grew hot, it melted  (Exodus 16:14-21).

What sustained me yesterday may not be what I need for tomorrow.  Jesus told us to ask today for the bread we need this day.  We can trust that there will be a fresh inflow of exactly what we need for our challenges.  We may not know where it comes from or exactly what is it.  Its name is a question, yet we know it when we see it.  The Bible is a good place to start and even in the years when I don't plan to read through the Bible, I try to start the day with a verse or two or a chapter or two.  We may find je ne sais quoi in a painting, in a photograph, in music, in literature, or up a tree stand.  Up and down my sidebar and the sidebars of those in the sidebars, a person may find manna on any given day.  It is always somewhere.  If one will look.

Where there is inflow there must be outflow.  Acceptance implies surrender.  To do otherwise is to stagnate, to become a backwater of decay and corruption.   And Moses said to them, “Let no one leave any of it over till the morning.”  But they did not listen to Moses. Some left part of it till the morning, and it bred worms and stank. ... (Exodus 16:19-20).  Freely we have received, so freely we give.  As freely as we give, we will freely receive.  No matter what happens in the material world, no matter how chaotic or dire the circumstances, the same spiritual principles will always apply and succeed. 

But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. (1 John 2:20)

Fuzz

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. – Ecclesiastes 3:11

In a way it’s reassuring. I don’t know all the answers, can’t know all the answers. Even Jesus deferred: It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority (Acts 1:7).

Time and space are related, tied together in the great equation of existence with light and dark, energy and matter. Time is a function of space. When we say “everything is beautiful in its time”, it is the same as saying everything is as it is supposed to be in this material existence. That which is beautiful is that which is right. The only things that are ugly are those things that have been twisted away from God’s purposes, and sometimes even those are hard for us to judge.

Fortunately, God has given us a plumb line by which we can ascertain true beauty. He has put the absolute rightness of eternity in our hearts, accessible by us should we seek it. Of course we are the descendents of those who ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and, as such, we are prone to follow our own judgment and chose a standard of measure independent of the straightedge of eternity. Even if we are wise enough to not judge by our own standards, the world system disorients us. There is nothing perfectly straight by which we may measure goodness and beauty. We are apt to work like the foolish carpenter who cuts his first rafter, then uses the first as a pattern for his second, the second to cut the third and so on until his first mistake is multiplied tenfold and he’s wonders why his roof is going downhill.

It’s hard enough to build using the measure of the eternal the Lord gives to us. I want to do what is right but the urge to protect myself, to feed my ego, to do things my way are strong and pull me off the mark. It is the beauty of holiness that, as we are seeking God, even our errors become beauty marks. As we see our sins for what they are, they move us closer to the truth. I was working on with an oddball program the other day which inserted an image of the user’s signature into a form letter. When a new person took the position, a new signature image was created and inserted but the location was off. I was working with one of our QA engineers to fix it. I changed the code, and he gave me feedback as to how that changed the printed letter. I kept changing parameters until the new signature aligned perfectly. Each attempt was a “mistake” until the last bullseye.

I have no idea what God is doing “from beginning to end”. I should probably stop pretending that I have any idea what He is doing with me. Paul said we need to be careful as “knowledge puffs up” – or “blows us up real good” as they used to say on the Farm Film Report. Here’s how Eugene Peterson translates part of First Corinthians 8:1-3:

We sometimes tend to think we know all we need to know to answer these kinds of questions—but sometimes our humble hearts can help us more than our proud minds. We never really know enough until we recognize that God alone knows it all.

Even when we are plumb with God, the nights get dark and sometimes cold and lonely. If we would admit it, we are a little scared, perhaps wanting to hide under the covers where it seems the world is smaller and protected and more under our control. Don’t give in to the temptation. If we call on God and trust Him, we will find that He will give us something warm and fuzzy to ease our fears. Embrace it. It is still a mystery – a fuzzy mystery, but that’s Him.

All in All

For He has put everything under His feet. But when He says “everything” is put under Him, it is obvious that He who puts everything under Him is the exception. And when everything is subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who subjected everything to Him, so that God may be all in all. – 1 Corinthians 15:27-28

That’s a lot of third person singular pronouns to figure out, but look at the very last phrase that God may be all in all. Let’s go back a few chapters in this same book: [Y]et for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through Him (1 Corinthians 8:6). All things are from God and all of it comes through Christ Jesus. There’s no pantheism in this statement since God is not the universe, rather the universe is that secondary reality that came from Him. We are included in that, not as an accident or afterthought but as co-creators. He is the Vine; we are the branches. Though the life comes through the Vine, fruit is borne only on the branch. We are of Him, as is everything from archangels to atomic particles. We begin to realize that everything is from the One, of the One and through the One.

I pray not only for these, but also for those who believe in Me through their message. May they all be one, just as You, Father, are in Me and I am in You. May they also be one in Us, so that the world may believe You have sent Me (John 17:20-21).

An illusion is something that appears real and is not, yet the illusion must be created from something that is real. An illusionist using smoke and mirrors fools us. We do not see the mirrors only the illusion they create; the mirrors are real. We see the multiplicity of physical existence; the unity of the Spirit is real.

As we often say, though, we don’t like to even use the word illusion since it connotes our material existence being something we might safely ignore or manipulate. This is not the case, so we say rather that the universe is derived, and material existence is a secondary reality, a function of the primary reality. Anaxagoras said, “Appearances are a glimpse of what is hidden.” Again the material world differs from a magician’s effort in that there is no intent to deceive us. We can know something about the primary reality by studying the secondary. There are correlations between the surface and the depths. Yet we cannot know it fully apart from revelation. God has been gracious to reveal Himself to us at various times and in various ways – most completely in the Incarnation of the Son (Hebrews 1:1-2).

We can know that we have a purpose, that history has a direction, a point to which it sprirals. We can know that we are at peace with God. We can know that we are one with the Creator of all that exists. We can know death is not an end but a transition. There are things we have to resist, and things we have to embrace. We should not resist in a way that further mires us in the quicksand of delusion; we should not embrace in a way that is clinging and anchors us in the material.

Batteries Not Included

Then the kingdom of heaven will be like 10 virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the groom. Five of them were foolish and five were sensible. When the foolish ones took their lamps, they didn’t take oil with them. But the sensible ones took oil in their flasks with their lamps. Since the groom was delayed, they all became drowsy and fell asleep.

In the middle of the night [at the midnight hour -- traditional] there was a shout: ‘Here’s the groom! Come out to meet him!’ – Matthew 25:1-6

Oil, we were always reminded, is a type of the Holy Spirit. But the story isn’t just about oil, it is about fire and light. As long as the sun is up and everything is evident and exposed to the natural eye, oil, to the mind of the foolish, is superfluous.

I used to read this story and picture in my mind the coal oil lamps that all of us country folks had sitting around for those quite frequent times when the power failed. They are antiques now, but we had to use them any time there was lightning, high winds, heavy rain, or, sometimes, for no apparent reason. Electricity was considerably less reliable in our part of the country fifty years ago. Our lamps, of course, had a big reservoir from which the wick drew kerosene, as well as a tall, very fragile chimney that bellied around the flame to both protect and feed it. The lamps of the virgins were not like that. They might have been terra cotta vessels about two inches deep and four inches across – the width of a man’s palm. Those lamps had one larger center opening an inch or so across in which to pour the oil, with a smaller opening at the nose of the lamp for the wick. Some were even less elaborate – simply an open, clamshell-shaped dish with a narrow, elevated slot to hold the wick. These were not lamps with a long burning time. The first five virgins were foolish, not because they had only a little oil, but because they had none. Without batteries even a Surefire M6 isn’t illuminating.

We should do our work in the day, preparing for the coming, inevitable night. Part of that preparation is to provision ourselves with light for those long dark hours when the sun is as far away as it can get, when life reaches the nadir, when natural perception faces the blackness of incomprehension.

My daughter gave birth to a healthy, normal baby -- on Lincoln’s birthday. Given her age and the problems she has had over the past few years – including foolishly totaling a perfectly good car shortly after she became pregnant, this is miraculous. On the other hand, there is my niece. She is younger than my daughter and in better health. She had two previous pregnancies with no problems at all. She has a stable life, a loving husband, and no bad habits of which I am aware. My niece is as beautiful, intelligent, kind, and loving a person as you are ever likely to meet. Yet, the same day that my new grandson arrived, my niece learned that the child she is carrying will likely not be born alive, and, if by some wondrous chance he is, he would require immediate surgery. The prospects are not good. For her, it is midnight. I believe, though, my niece and her husband are numbered among the wise. They can trim their lamps and go on knowing the light they have will not fail even in the darkness of sorrow, grief, loss, and disappointment.

As long as the good are rewarded and the bad are punished, I’m OK. The mind of modern man tends to think his judgment is less fallible than that of his predecessors, perhaps less fallible even than the relatively primitive mind of Christ. We are more evolved and enlightened. We are better able to judge right and wrong. Some of us think ourselves capable of judging God and calling His actions into question. Call me a stop sign, but that is a bad road, if a sure one, to Midnight itself.

The odd thing is that the midnight hour is supposed to be a joyous occasion, a celebration, not because it is dark, but because of our being reunited with the Groom. If we are ready, if we have prepared ourselves, built up our reserve ahead of the times of darkness, we will welcome Him and come to know Him in a greater and more intimate way. Otherwise, we will flee in shame. I cannot speak where others are concerned, but, for myself, I know that God always gives me grace to prepare. I may allow myself to be distracted, to become foolish in my thinking, to be turned aside to other things and neglect the filling of my flask, but I can never say that I had no opportunity to be ready. In a moment’s time really, I can have all the oil I need to feed the flame of truth all through the darkest of nights.

Get ready.

Because You Know

Children, it is the last hour. And as you have heard, "Antichrist is coming," even now many antichrists have come. We know from this that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. However, they went out so that it might be made clear that none of them belongs to us.

But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. I have not written to you because you don't know the truth, but because you do know it, and because no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar, if not the one who denies that Jesus is the Messiah? He is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son can have the Father; he who confesses the Son has the Father as well.

What you have heard from the beginning must remain in you. If what you have heard from the beginning remains in you, then you will remain in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that He Himself made to us: eternal life. I have written these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you.

The anointing you received from Him remains in you, and you don't need anyone to teach you. Instead, His anointing teaches you about all things, and is true and is not a lie; just as it has taught you, remain in Him. --1 John 2:18-27

This is a rather long passage compared to what we usually do, but it is tied together by the words “anointing” and “knowledge”.

Even as John speaks of the antichrist, he is speaking of anointing, for not only is an antichrist one opposed to Christ, but it is often one who functions as a false Christ – that is a false “anointed one”. We’re not talking politics today, but we’re all certainly more familiar with that idea after the last couple of years worth of saturation obama-ing.

When this passage first grabbed my attention many years ago I saw it strictly in a religious context of false teachers and charismatic cult leaders drawing people away from Jesus as Messiah. Only later did it occur to me that it was applicable in other areas of life. What is pop culture except the fascination with a celebrity’s false anointing? I’m sure one of the reasons Oprah left Reverend Wright’s church before Obama is that the false anointing of Wright was stepping on Winfrey’s antichrist tendencies.

I suppose there is a question as to whether Oprah really sees herself as anointed or whether she is seen as an anointed one by her fans. It is clearer in the case of one of Gagdad Bob’s favorite targets, Deepak, who, if he is capable of understanding at all, thinks that he is anointed. Consider, too, someone like Jim Jones who may well have started off as an anointed person, but abandoned the true for the false.

Jesus is the Lord’s Anointed One, the Messiah or Christ. John says, though, we have an anointing from the Holy One as well. Our anointing is a function of the presence of the Spirit in our lives. Just as oil was poured on the priest or king, the Holy Spirit is poured out on us. And, just as with the king or priest, the purpose of the anointing is to set us apart to carry out the Lord’s will. We cannot anoint ourselves, nor can we use the anointing to gratify or glorify self. With the anointing comes knowledge that enables us to reject the false and deceptive. As the song says, “I was blind but now I see.” It truly remains amazing to us how such eye-opening grace is given.

I know when the subject of Antichrist comes up it can get a little freaky. The Lord seems to be saying here that, though there may be an ultimate Antichrist, there are many who operate in opposition to the Christ of God on a lesser scale -- lesser only in terms of quantity, for the eternal destiny of a soul is often at stake in the battle. This led, in John’s day, to an apostasy, a falling away of those who were not truly of Christ, indicating it was the time of the last hour.

The warning remains for us. We must hang onto truth and thus remain in the Son. There is a falling away from truth right now, a phenomenon that seems to be accelerating. The antichrists among us will claim this is because the truth is not true, or that it might have been at one time but it is no longer applicable. The lies will have an appealing sound for they offer us ease – not peace but ease. Yet there is no reason for us to be deceived. We all have understanding and discernment through the anointing we have been given. We can trust the Spirit who teaches us and leads us into all truth. Sometimes He uses human teachers to instruct, but even then we do not trust in the person. We trust His anointing upon the person.

Finally, we all know there is no point to explaining to those who don’t know. We only know because we know already. I suppose it seems unfair to some, but I don’t believe anyone who wants to know will be lacking. It’s not just the militant atheists that don’t want to know, either. From my experience I’d say the majority of Christ-deniers might even be church members, who, having a form of godliness, deny the power thereof.

Squirrels, Acorns, and Oaks

Love never ends.
But as for prophecies, they will come to an end;
As for languages, they will cease;
As for knowledge, it will come to an end.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part,
But when the perfect comes, the partial will come to an end.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child,
I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put aside childish things.
For, now, we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face.
Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, as I am fully known.
-- 1 Corinthians 13:8-12

I agree with atheists on one thing. I don’t believe in the god they don’t believe in either. The typical non-theist troll over on One Cosmos has what might be described as a “Sunday School” conception of the Divine, but, to be fair, that is also the concept of many who sit in churches three times a week. Neither the atheist nor the average fundamentalist appears able to recognize a simile, a metaphor or a semaphore when it eats their lunch.

Give the religious leaders of the Jesus’ time this much credit: they knew no one could look upon God, i.e., comprehend Him and live. To understand God was death to fallen man. To think that Jesus could actually be the Son of God in the fullest sense, that He had invaded humanity, was, and is, shocking. As a Muslim once said to me, with astonished, if hopeful indignation, “How can a man be the Great God?” Just because we have gotten used to the idea of the Incarnation doesn’t mean it is not still a scandalous terror.

We have probably all heard, if we haven’t thought or said something along the lines of: “When I get to heaven, I’m going to have a long talk with the Lord. I’ve got some questions about how He did things down here, and why things happened this way.” You know, at the Big Wrap Party, we catch the Director passing by, offer Him a cocktail (non-alcoholic, of course), then pull Him aside to ask why He shot a certain scene the way He did.

In order to understand God at all, we have to think of Him symbolically, so it is easy and natural that we would sometimes fall into our own meaning traps, get entangled in the very word nets we are using to draw up the comprehensible from the dark depths.

Most of us aren’t poets.

All I really meant to quote today was that last line: Now I know in part; but then I shall know, as I am also fully known.

And might I add: What a long, strange trip it’s been.

A hound knows its way home, no matter where or how far it runs because it has something like an internal compass to lead it back to where it belongs. The reason I get lost on the surface of this planet is because the pull of my internal compass is not to some earthly abode but to a heavenly one. It is unerring. You can put me down anywhere on the globe, or anywhere in the cosmos, for that matter, and I will get home.

When I get home, I will not be as the seed that I am today -- the part you put down -- any more than a seven-foot green corn stalk is the little yellow kernel that was planted, or a sixty-foot oak is the acorn a long-gone squirrel carried, hid, and forgot. I will know then, as I am known now. I will see, not reflections and shadows, but face to face.

There will be no explanations for there will be no questions.