I’m closing down my wordpress

I have moved all my writing efforts to ONE blog, and it is not this one. If you read my blogs and would like to continue to do so, please visit:

ragamuffinwrites.blogspot.com

and “follow” off to the right, or you can rss or bookmark it.

thank you for reading

may be leaving wordpress for a younger, sexier blogspot

In attempts to narrow my blogging to less spots, I am thinking, again, of closing down my wordpress account.

I have reached a time when there are rarely any views of my posts at wordpress, and it even fewer interactions with those who are reading. I am also copying and reposting each blog at my blogspot and xanga where I am beginning to see more interaction.

Even though it pains me to even consider this, could my relationship with wordpress be nearing an end?

What do you say?

Spoke w/The Incredible Hulk

I spoke with the Incredible Hulk yesterday through text message.

“I don’t feel anything anymore. Does that make sense?”

“More than you know!”

“All the stuff I do, or what people react to is not something I even care about anymore.”

The truth is we all do this in one way or another. We numb things so we do not have to feel them. We either fight or fly. Therefore some who get angry because if they are angry or fighting, they don’t have to feel pain. They’ve numbed it.

There are others of us who can block it from our hearts and minds. We can literally pretend it does not exist. Both are equally numb.

I am the latter. My friend: the former. Both numb the pain so we do not have to feel pain. The problem is that both hurt those who are closest to us.

One hurts people with his anger. The other hurts people with his lacking emotional presence. When we numb in either way, we hurt those around us.

“Yeah, and I just keep people at a distance.”

Of course! If they get close, they may hurt you, and if they do, you will try to numb the pain of that hurt by blowing up. Then that hurts them, and you don’t WANT to hurt them. So it makes sense to keep them at a distance so it never comes to that.

Bruce Banner escapes to a remote area in order to keep himself away from people who may hurt him and enflame his anger. It is simply safer that way. He does not wish to hurt anyone, but he knows what is capable of becoming. So he isolates and distances himself from people…from the possibility of love and relationship.

With relationship comes the possibility of hurt.

But the great story behind the badass special effects is watching Bruce Banner learn to love again; watching him learn to control the anger in order to feel other things as opposed to numbing and isolating.

The Day I Short-changed God

Slowly, I have been reading through the book “Disciplines for the Inner Life” by Bob and Michael Benson. It has been a great book to work through as it guides me each day into scripture and reflection on how to grow closer and closer to the heart of God. Aside from Ozzie Chambers, this book has been one of few books to really challenge my mind and heart toward intimacy with Jesus and the life that comes of that intimacy.

Each week brings a new topic or characteristic for me to enter into. Last week I fell behind. I admittedly got lazy and failed to come to scripture in order to see what God may have had for me to see and learn. I further admit it may have had more to do with the topic of the week: humility.

My head and my heart seemingly did not want to read about, learn about, much less be challenged to humility.

So, stubbornly, since I had already fallen behind on the week, I just flew through the remainder of last week’s readings so I could just move on to this week’s topic: obedience.

I will just let you rest in the humor of that little jest of God’s on my behalf.

Arrogance

If “arrogance compels us to treat our limits not as unique openings through which God can reveal his goodness but as diseases to be cured,” then you may refer to me as arrogant as the rest.

* quote by Susan Annette Mutto

Jesus Prayer

The last week has brought me each day to take a look at what is known as the “Jesus Prayer”. It is one very simple prayer, in one thought, which communicates and professes a myriad of things.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

The prayer was formed by the early Desert Fathers, and it eventually became a classic and common form of prayer. You see a similar statement in Luke 18:35-43 with the blind beggar, and you commonly see historic uses of it in rhythm with your breathing. (Inhale “Lord Jesus Christ….Exhale “have mercy on me…”)

I have been reading and praying the Jesus Prayer this week with refreshing realizations. In one simple prayer, you profess adoration and attrition. You profess the glory of God and the sinfulness of man. It is penitential while also being joyful and confident. It is fundamentally Christilogical.

It is simple enough to begin as we realize the most common block to prayer is the act of simply beginning. The prayer is discursive: it does not move from one thought to another. Yet, some have said, it sums up the whole Gospel.

It professes the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the reality of the Incarnation by addressing Jesus. It is a profession of what Jesus is; Son of God, which opens a profession of the Trinity (SON to the FATHER; something we’d only believe with the help of the SPIRIT).

It also professes and confesses our dire need for mercy and grace, which theologians stuffily refer to as “depravity”. The prayer leads our thoughts to the life of Christ while facing us with the story of our helplessness. It is a petition of a poor, humble, and recognizably sinful soul. It is a CRY for mercy.

In most cases, it is intended to be repeated frequently throughout the day to help accomplish what Paul challenged us to do; PRAY CONSTANTLY (1 Thess. 5:17). When repeated frequently, it can lead to a real life change. It reorders our priorities.

It can be practiced and prayed anywhere at any moment. It does not have to be vocalized, and at different times, can find its deeps soul-connection in the silent meeting of the heart. C.S. Lewis wrote, “I still think the prayer without words is the best–if one can really achieve it.”

I have found that to be quite true of the Jesus Prayer. I may not find my soul to meet in that silent prayer each day at all times. It would be the Stoic Error of “thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes.” But I continue to remember the Jesus Prayer this week. I intend to write it out, to vocalize it, and to silently drive my soul to pray it as constantly as I can muster.

LORD JESUS CHRIST, SON OF GOD, HAVE MERCY ON ME, A SINNER

…poverty…

I cannot do and live out the Beatitudes very well, which is why Jesus is Savior before Teacher.

He makes me what he teaches me to be.

My sense of not being able to fulfill the Beatitudes and the life Jesus teaches me to live is exactly the poverty needed of me.

Jealous

I can still remember the first time I saw a Nooma video by Rob Bell. It was in a church service, and the video was “Trees”. I cannot even tell you what the video was about because all I could think was something along the lines of, “Ahhhhh crap! I could have done that!” All I could think of for the entirety of the video was that it really is a great idea, and it is TOTALLY something I could have done.

I really liked seeing Bradley Hathaway do what he does as a traveling poet. I would mention him to my brother a few winters ago and my brother acted unimpressed and nearly cynical at Bradley Hathaway’s art. I listened to my brother rant for a short time before I said, “Wait! Do you not like Bradley Hathaway because he’s doing something you could have done, but he thought of it before you?”

He thought for a second and humbly surrendered, “Yeah….I think that may be it.”

Unless a speaker or writer really says something to make me be impressed or think differently than I had before I heard them, I am generally dismissive of them as a speaker and author. Now granted, I HAVE heard them speak somewhere before a group I was a member of. I HAVE purchased their book that at least they wrote and published. Two things I have not pursued or gone after! But something in me is dismissive and unimpressed.

This thing within is jealousy. Jealousy is basically a part of you that is convinced there can only be one of something, and you are not that one.

The problem lies in that most things can have more than one of them. It is possible for there to be more than one artist within whatever artistry you pursue. But that part of you that gets FRUSTRATED when someone else accomplishes something you know you can do is jealousy.

Jealousy is the belief that there is only room for one.

As I reflected on that today, I get frustrated with the jealousy within me because it has debilitated me from moving toward the things I know I can do.

But the other reality that struck me is that I serve a jealous God. We fight the jealousy within ourselves because WE should not be a jealous people. There is room for other artists, other friends, other…

But we know, as Christians, there is no room for other gods. We serve a jealous God, and that means we serve a God who believes and authoritatively states that there is only room for one of himself. There is only room for one master (because you cannot serve more than one). There is only room for one God (we cannot simply “coexist” with our many gods…though we can coexist as people). There is room for other people and all the diversity they bring, but there is room for only one God, and our God realizes that.

Our God is a jealous God.

stricken by these words

“We receive life by chewing and swallowing the life of something else…we have to do it to stay alive. We have to do it daily…But there it is–the biggest mystery of all, right there before us, three times a day. We are enacting the rite. We are participating in the holy mystery…namely, that we have no life except that we owe to the laying down of some other life, and hence that thanksgiving is the appropriate response.”

- Thomas Howard

“Don’t Try This At Home” – (Writing Exercise #4)

I remember a moment in the house on Jules Street in St. Joseph, MO. My brothers and I had been jumping around on a mattress in the living room. I am not entirely sure what a mattress was doing in the living room. For all I know, it was there for this very reason.

We had created some game which involved jumping on the mattress until we were sweating like brothers should after many hours of play. Don’t quote me, but I’m sure our socks had worked their way nearly off of our feet. The ankle section of socks always have a way of grabbing a hold of your foot so they never actually come all the way off. Its almost as though they hold on like shipwrecked cruisers.

Most games played by brothers end in wrestling, and this one was no different. Whatever the original game had been, it had become a brawl.

The old house on Jules Street was so in many ways. Ragged shelves were built into the entry way. The kitchen was some awful color and design with reds and yellows, and there were radiators along the walls for heat.

The wrestling match may have taken place in the winter or the summer; I do not recall. The radiator may have been on; I don’t know. You tend to forget details like that in the shadows of events like I am about to unfold for you.

One brother and had seen too many episodes of the WWF and attempted a move that should only be done by professionals and not at home on a mattress near a radiator that may or may not have been on.

The other brother was flung across the mattress past the point where even the professionals would have had ropes. I am not entirely sure the professionals would have placed their mattress so close to a radiator either.

What seemed like minutes unfolded in only seconds. The clang rang out from the radiator louder than any noise could have completed at that moment.

CLANG!

The flung brother laid motionless for only a second before grabbing his mouth with blood flowing trough his fingers.

Time froze…I swear…it froze! (Perhaps the radiator should have been on.)

When time freezes, it has a way of fast-forwarding to catch up to the present.

Once the brother took his hands away from his mouth, he must have taken his hand off of the pain. At the sight of his own blood, he screamed out in excruciating pain. I don’t know that I really understood the magnitude of his pain. I was more taken by the sight of a bloody mouth and…is he…?…missing a tooth?

We would later realize he had lost his tooth complete to the root. We would search and discover the tooth on the wrestling mat. The tooth fairy knows more than I had realized because she gave the brother so much more than anyone has ever received for just one tooth.

What an oversight for the WWF not to give a warning before their matches. Those guys may actually be ‘professionals’.