I am free

This morning's sunrise

10/13/10 Wednesday
Another day. Every day I wake up is a gift, no matter what difficulties we face. There is so much I want to do that I don’t have time to write. There is also so much I want to write. The book of the miracle of my life needs to be worked on. That might be two books as just the restoration of our marriage and subsequent move to West Texas is a book in and of itself. There is so much we’ve experienced since moving here. Good, Bad, Ugly, and Beautiful things have happened. Wonderful people and terrible hypocrisy paint a picture of the battles we all face and what I see here locally is a mirror of what is happening throughout the world.

It’s the classic good versus evil with all the intricacies of the personal battles we face inside. Those battles involve the self deceptions caused by pride, self righteousness, greed, lust for things, the desire to impress others create an image that isn’t the truth. Against that is the desire to please God, to be pure and good, to love those who are hard to love, to be a Christian in truth, not just in outward appearance.
The corn is doing well. Just hope we beat the freeze

We live in a age where good has become evil and what was evil is now called good and to resist that and maintain a standard of true righteousness means you are now looked on with disdain, bearing the label of a religious kook. There has crept into the church a poison, a corruption of all that is called “Holy”. With it comes an acceptance of sin, a doctrine of grace that says you can do what you want and not worry about consequences. It’s those who practice that which they know God does not approve of who are the quickest to say “Judge Not”, switching attention off of their life and onto anyone who dares point out what is wrong. Now the one who bears a standard of righteousness is the bad guy and the one who lives carnally the victim of their “excessive religiosity”.

Acceptance and tolerance of evil is quickly becoming the law of the land, where expressing your opinion can land you in jail. That acceptance and tolerance thing is a tool being used by Islamist against us to allow them further footholds as they continue to encroach into our society. The irony is that Islam does not accept nor tolerate anything that does not bow to it or conform to the Sharia law they desire to impose on the world. While I might not think much of certain activities or life styles, and desire to maintain a standard of morality in my life, I have no compunction to impose that on anyone.
(Click to enlarge) I carved this in St Louise, after the wreck. Read it and you will see the creed I live by still to this day

My desire is to show by my life that Jesus Christ died to set me free of all that once enslaved me and that He truly loves you and the rest of the world. I’m far from perfect and make many mistakes, the difference is that I acknowledge my mistakes and work to correct them. Difference? “Why did I write it that way” I’m asking myself as I review what I just said. I guess that would refer to those who do not acknowledge doing any wrong or just fluff over it. When you don’t, or refuse to, recognize errors in your life, and choose to continue doing what you know is wrong, then your heart hardens and soon you become unable to even see yourself or your sin. When you head down this road you seek others who are also on the same road, that way it becomes a happy company of people all heading down the broad and easy way to destruction. In the process you find and develop doctrines and belief systems that help you justify and rationalize your life, you make what is wrong right, not only for you but for the crowd of company you keep.

James 5:16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. There is power in confession. This way the secret sin you hid away comes to the light and is exposed. Thus it is no longer a “secret sin”. This principle is so powerful you find it in AA and other programs where the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. James follows that statement with this one a few lines down “19 My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, 20 remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.”

I know that I’ve become preachy lately. If that offends you I’m sorry, not for telling what I believe is the truth but for offending. Maybe I’m not sorry. As you can tell I think as I write. I guess I don’t want to offend or drive people away but at the same time if the truth offends you then the problem is yours, not mine. To close I’ll quote these words of Jesus. I quote them all the time because in their simplicity is great truth. It’s found in John chapter 3, a few lines down from the well known John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life”. A few lines down Jesus says this 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God."

I’ve lived a hard life, I’ve seen and done things that are beyond what some of you can imagine. I’ve been rich, I’ve been poor, I’ve been enslaved to drugs, drinking, lusts of the flesh, I've gone to prison, and now I’m free of all of it, and have been forgiven. I don’t have the money and possessions I once did, and I no longer have the acclaim of being a successful businessman, but I have more now than I did then, I have life. All that I lost, all that I destroyed through the decisions I made has been restored through the grace and love of God. I was dead, yet now I live.
The big wonder, my wife. After twenty years separation we were miraculously reunited when ABC featured me on Toledo TV. I was wandering lost, homeless on the streets with my memory gone, when they asked the public for help, calling me "Toledo's John Doe". What a wonder that is still to me.