whimsy

Heaven

Heaven is
The place where
Happiness is
Everywhere.

Animals
And birds sing --
as does
Everything.

To each stone
"How-do-you-do?"
Stone answers back,
"Well! And you?"

-Langston Hughes

beautiful excerpt

paul, one who repeatedly argued his case for Christ, experienced this after giving his farewell to the ephesian elders--

When he had said this, he knelt down with all of them and prayed. They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him. What grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again. Then they accompanied him to the ship.

Acts 20:36-38

what makes this beautiful is the dearness of his heart for God's people, and subsequently, so is their response to his hard work for the gospel.

1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:

"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory."

4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

5 "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."

6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for."

8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?"
And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"

Isaiah 6:1-8

LORD, I come before you with fear and trembling, for I am a sinner and unworthy of your blessing and grace. The world is your footstool and You are sovereign over all. Under your Word, the righteous prevail. When we encounter your blessing, we can only fall on our knees and give you glory. You are faithful, and great are You, LORD of the universe. Whatever the LORD does, He does it bigger and better than me.

" He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."(John 1:10-13)

...help me to understand this more and more

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one post-industrial city to the next
detroit was a very hard city to love. i think its condition is unique to the rest in that most of the housing and business isn't even liveable/sustainable. how can it be when most of it has been burned down by the city's own residents? i eventually did come to love it. now, my time in the area is up as i'm moving along the great lakes to another post-industrial city, cleveland, that has it's own set of problems. however, i don't think i can ever forget the first time i was exposed to poverty and inequality in my hometown of rochester during flower city work camp (city-wide church youth group mission). it's just hard to think about going home though, when there seems to be so much to do in detroit and cleveland. it's also just hard to have the emotional capacity to think about another depressed, mid-sized city, even if it is my hometown.

thanks to sophia--an article in the nytimes about rochester:

"ROCHESTER, N.Y., May 23 — Two years ago, this city of 190,000 people — with more per-capita murders, high school dropouts and children living in poverty than any other in the state — paid $32 million for a high-speed ferry. It was considered a way to help revive the local economy by shuttling thousands of passengers a day to and from Canada, across Lake Ontario."

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"...what is perhaps Rochester’s greatest challenge: unifying a community where restored historic homes and cozy cafes sit a few blocks from boarded-up houses and streets where heroin is sold in broad daylight.

The city has six universities, yet fewer than half of the ninth graders in Rochester’s public schools go on to earn their diplomas. Rochester has a thriving high-tech industry — and the number of patents its companies and residents have been granted is among the highest per capita in the nation — but one-quarter of its residents live in poverty.

“What you have in Rochester are people who are quite well-educated, wealthy and white living alongside people who have none of these attributes,” said John M. Klofas, a professor of criminal justice at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “The result is a growing culture of separation.”

Rochester, which has lost 40 percent of its population in the past three decades, now has about 80,000 white residents and 80,000 black residents, according to United States Census Bureau statistics. But of the 50,000 people living below the poverty line, 32,000 of them are black."

weep weep weep!

a thought

a thought that needs to be interpreted and analyzed:

"The civil religion is obviously involved in the most pressing moral and political issues of the day. But it is also caught in another kind of crisis, theoretical and theological, of which it is at the moment largely unaware. “God” has clearly been a central symbol in the civil religion from the beginning and remains so today. This symbol is just as central to the civil religion as it is to Judaism or Christianity. In the late eighteenth century this posed no problem; even Tom Paine, contrary to his detractors, was not an atheist. From left to right and regardless of church or sect, all could accept the idea of God. But today, as even Time has recognized, the meaning of “God” is by no means so clear or so obvious. There is no formal creed in the civil religion. We have had a Catholic President; it is conceivable that we could have a Jewish one. But could we have an agnostic president? Could a man with conscientious scruples about using the word “God” the way Kennedy and Johnson have used it be elected chief magistrate of our country? If the whole God symbolism requires reformulation, there will be obvious consequences for the civil religion, consequences perhaps of liberal alienation and of fundamentalist ossification that have not so far been prominent in this realm. The civil religion has been a point of articulation between the profoundest commitments of Western religious and philosophical tradition and the common beliefs of ordinary Americans. It is not too soon to consider how the deepening theological crisis may affect the future of this articulation. " - Robert N. Bellah