Mower is better?

     Just yesterday I needed to mow again.  There was a time when I enjoyed mowing-then I got old.  Don't get me wrong-I still like to see a neatly coiffed landscape.  However, I no longer have the energy I had when I was 20-or 30-or even forty or fifty.  Using the push mower to trim about wears me out because my strength has decreased.  Sitting on the riding mower is no picnic either.
     I suppose that the big problem is the size of the yard.  My lawn in town is approximately 1 acre in size-which is more than adequate.  However, my country lawn is well over 1 acre-possibly approaching 2 acres.  And I still mow both of them.
     And the new one is so rough.  Eventually I hope to get it smoothed out somewhat, but we have not yet had a good lawn growing season out here in the country.  And I really hate to actually use boughten water to get the grass to grow.  So I been hoping for a good growing season-maybe this year.
     Another problem is actually getting the mower from one site to the other.  I have not purchased a trailer, so I have to load the mower on the back of the pickup and haul it back and forth between lawns.  And the pickup is old and has issues-like every time I run the pickup the battery runs down due to an expensive electrical problem.  Not to mention the rider.  It has electrical problems also-and it is only 2 years old.
     The logical solution would be to sell the one house, but easier said than done.  Then we could just let the grass grow out in the country.  No laws about weed control out there.
     The other issue is the cost of gasoline...and the cost to the environment of carbon emissions.  So being green, I suppose I should rebel and refuse to mow both lawns.  Course, that would get me in trouble with both the law, the wife, and the neighbors.  What to do?  I suspect I will continue to mow both lawns until such a time as I get rid of one house.

Glorifying God

     How do I even talk about this subject?  Moses lived a life, at least the last 40 years of a lifespan of 120 years, becoming the humblest servant of an Almighty God that he could be.  Oh, to attain to such humility!  To be open to every desire of God for my own life.  To be used as He sees fit-each and every event, every second, to be so attuned to God, that I would always be getting the utmost out of that moment.
     I have wasted way too many years doing my own thing.  What could God have accomplished for His kingdom work with a servant who was fully obedient to His wishes?  I had a friend who lost his life recently-but he lived life well.  Helped others; responded to needs that he saw in the world around him.  And had lots of fun doing it.
     It would seem that the one who gives his life most completely to God lives the most exciting, fulfilled life.  Not the politician or the millionaire/billionaire who seek their own glory or comfort in the few short years they will walk this earth.  All of our human actions outside of God are vanity; a chasing after the wind.
     Jesus lived a purposeful life.  Totally yielded to the will of God, yet, working toward a specific goal.  O, to submit every thought, every action to God-to give it all up to Him.  All of my life-to be able to glorify Him through every ache and pain, every second of every day.  Humanly, completely impossible.  Sins of omission.  To my eyes, worse than sins of commission.  God can use actions for His purposes.  Lukewarmness or inaction are a waste of the time we have been granted on this world-God has said He will spew those individuals out of his mouth who are lukewarm.  That is a horrible fate for a sentient being!
      So many; multitudes, live each day, totally oblivious to eternity.  Yet, I stand on the brink of eternity-my life is only a wisp of smoke.  I am here today; tomorrow the world I have inhabited will not miss me-I am so insignificant in the whole scheme of things.  Yet, at the same time...God sent His son to die for ME.  What an awesome thought.  How can my petty mind even wrap itself around this?  Oh, to able to glorify the living God each and every day.  The beauty of it all is, when I fail today, God has so far given me a tomorrow to do better-but that is guaranteed to no one, so I need to make the most of each one with which I am blessed.

Hunting the elusive morel.

     Over the years I have spent way too much time looking for mushrooms.  Heck, I don't even like to eat the danged things that much.  It is all in the batter anyway.  I would call them tasty(i.e. in my parlance, salty)-but that is mostly due to the battering.
     However, wifey claims to have a hankerin' for 'em, so I dutifully shuffled off to seek some morels this morning.  Got my boots on, pulled my cap down over my eyes(hafta keep the sun out of my eyes) and headed out to the back side of the 40 acres a lookin'.  I had to walk uphill all the way to the woods through the mud of the cornstalk stubbled field-we seem to have mud everywhere here in nemo that is not graveled or concreted this year.  Finally got to the timber after about a 10 minute trek with both hips killing me, and began my search.
     Always been told that may apples are an indicator of morels; so, obviously, when I see some may apples,  I start a closer examination.  There are a lot of may apples out there in the woods, and I believe I looked under and around most of them in that 40 acres, but I never seen hide nor hair of even one mushroom.  I made the big loop all through that 1/4 mile stretch of woods, dodging black berry briars and tree stumps(loggers done a job on the woods last fall), and all I got for my efforts was hot and sweaty.  I have about concluded that finding mushrooms is not one of my gifts.  I am fair at the hunting, but my finding skills seem to be in need of a little honing.
     My daddy used to find a few mushrooms-but he never taught me how to find them.  So, either it is all luck, or there is more to search and discover than meets the eye.  May have to tackle the search again before the mushroom season is over, but that 45 minutes I spent stumbling over my feet was enough for this old boy for today.  Had to come back to the house and sit in my easy chair for a spell after all that hard. work.  And as far as I can tell, I got only one tick.  So maybe wearing the old green gum boots was a good idea.

Free will.  I don't know if I have ever heard a sermon about this topic; and I realize it is a difficult subject to deal with.  It is, I suppose, both a cross denominational and interdenominational issue.
I believe that John 3:16 is used as a key verse in support of free will.  It is stated that "...whosoever believeth shall not perish..." in the KJV.
But what does the term actually mean?  Do we have merely an appearance of free will?  I do know that we are compared to the pot that the potter molds on the wheel-it is displeasing to him so he destroys it and remakes it as it pleases him in the image he has in mind for it.
We make minute decisions every second of our lives, so in that sense, we have to have a free will.  But do you have control over your body as to whether your heart will beat its next beat or your lungs will breathe the next breath of air?  I don't-my body is programmed to do these things which are essential to its continued existence independently of my wishes.  So from that perspective, I have no free will.  It was programmed into my body when it came into being that my heart would beat and that my lungs would breathe.
Thoughts go through my mind, but from whence do they actually come?  I can formulate some of them, but many of them appear without my actually willing them into being.

What must you do to be saved?

     My denomination believes in the eternal security of the believer-what most people call: once saved, always saved(i.e, if a person is truly saved, he cannot lose that salvation).
     However,this has nothing to do with the believer, everything to do with the God.  My God is all-powerful, omniscient, and omnipresent.  He also is constant-He does not change.  It is stated somewhere in the Bible, that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  And another place states that NOTHING can snatch a believer out of the hand of God.  
     I fear that most people believe in a works based salvation wherein a person can be saved today, then do something wrong(sin), and lose his salvation, and then have to be resaved to regain his salvation.  This diminishes God, and in my eyes, would make such a god unworthy of worship.
     I believe in a God who saves us by grace through faith-it is a free gift(grace)-the faith comes from Him(Ephesians 2: 8-9:  For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no man can boast.)
     I will not take the time right now to go into all the ramifications of my belief system, but it involves much more than just the salvation of individual believers.  It involves such diverse topics as global warming and all of human history.
   

An aimless rant on global warming/climate change.

     Ah, perhaps the rain has stopped for now.  God shows us how dependent we actually are on His mercies.  We really need to dry out a little bit, but we can go into drought mode so quickly.  I would so much prefer having too much water than not enough.  Nothing grows when you have a drought; at least grass grows when you have excess water.  And where I live flooding is not an issue, so too much water is preferred.  But why can't we just have the right amount of precipitation?  Why do we always have these extremes?
     Is global warming a reality?  The weather does indeed seem to have changed since I was a child, but I am still not certain that it is man-made climate change.  I suspect that one solar flare would cause more problems for our planet than all the carbon emissions which we have produced.  The same thing applies to volcanic eruptions and meteor strikes.  Both do far more damage to planet Earth than anything mankind can do.
     So, yes, I do believe that we can affect our planet-however, I suspect that factors beyond our control will have a much greater impact on our climate than anything that feeble little mankind can accomplish.  Experts can debate this issue but it is only opinions at the end of the day.  Evidence or statistics can be twisted and utilized to support so many conflicting theories that I do not believe this issue will ever be satisfactorily resolved for either side.

WWJD? What would Jesus Do?

     What would Jesus do?  WWJD?  That was the question a few years back.   As a practicing Jew, which Jesus was, He would have obeyed the law-as long as He did not violate the law of God by obeying the law of man.  He is said to have been perfect(whole or complete) in all His thoughts and actions.  The only law available for Jesus to obey was the one handed to man via Moses-what we would call the Old Testament.   The New Testament was not written until after Jesus had lived His life here on earth as a mortal man who was also fully God.
     I here state my belief from what I see in Scripture.  Jesus fulfilled the whole law-He obeyed the whole law of God.  If God said it, He believed it and practiced it in His life.  That would include all the dietary laws; the prohibition of wearing linen and wool together; the prohibition of tatoos; all of the Ten Commandments.  Anything God had said would have been obeyed by a Jewish Jesus in the way that God would have had it obeyed.  To do anything less would eliminate Him from contention as the Messiah and Saviour of mankind.
     It is not required that one be a believer of Jesus' Messiahship; however if you are-then it would seem, you should adhere to the tenets of Christianity.  I accept grace-no, I embrace grace.  But Jesus, in His perfection, did not need grace.  He had completely fulfilled the law.  Everything He did-every thought, every action, had to be perfect and in complete compliance to the total law; anything less, and He is NOT the Messiah.
     Grace itself cannot abrogate the law.  To do so mars the perfection of the law.  Grace must work within the parameters of the law-man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man.
      However, the Sabbath was to be obeyed, and a Jewish Jesus would have done so.  Not the laws of the Sabbath added by mankind, but the spirit of what the Sabbath was about.  Now, under grace, I can regard all days as the same or I can especially observe the Sabbath or I can observe some other day as particularly sacred-but is that violating one of the Ten Commandments?  I can see a Jewish Jesus as especially observing the Sabbath, but can I conceive of one who would have held another day, such as Sunday, as the primary day of observation of the proverbial "day of rest"?
     Enough said.  This was not to be a rant about Sabbath observance.  I believe that God can be worshiped any day of the week.  But it would appear that if you are observing only one day a week that the Biblical standard is Saturday, not Sunday.