How Would You Answer?

9/28/2001

Good morning “Chosen” (and what’s more, “Chosen and dearly loved!”)...

ALSO, I woke up feeling the need to ask you all to consider this question. Think of it as, “SOMEONE FROM ANOTHER CITY IS ASKING YOU FOR ‘ADVICE’ ON THIS SPIRITUAL MATTER.” : ) They ask you this: “IF one, regardless of what city or town or country they live in, were to continually flood their senses with videos (entertainment, or drama, or even ‘educational’), or flood their senses and time with news, food, pleasure seeking, or undisciplined emotions, or biological family, or ‘home schooling,’ home ‘improvement’ projects, excessive amounts of time or thought in their jobs, or large amounts of internet, or television or newspaper or magazine... is there ANY chance they can grow Spiritually? Having filled themselves up with these things, can they still Experience God to any great extent?”

And the answer is?

AND, “What would it LOOK like in that person’s life, or those people’s lives, if they had starved their GOD-SENSES by overfeeding their flesh senses?”

How would you answer them?

Wouldn’t you suggest that they would be easily bored, more shallow as time passes, more erratic in controlling emotions, tongue, and character, less likely to humbly open themselves to others, increasingly more worthless at times the Church is together (if they are blessed enough to even HAVE a Church around them), less likely to be caught in prayer, less wise, less loving, fewer given Opportunities from God, and more and more restless or wasted inside? What WOULD you say to a person from another city who would ask you a question like that?

And what would you tell them, OR YOURSELF, to DO about a situation like that, do you think? ;) How would you suggest they spend their time in the evenings and in their “closets” INSTEAD of “videos (entertainment, or drama, or even ‘educational’), or with news, food, pleasure seeking, or unharnessed emotions, or biological family, or ‘home schooling,’ home ‘improvement’ projects, excessive amounts of time or thought in their jobs, or large amounts of internet, or television or newspaper or magazine....”? It’s a choice for “THEM”—right?

How will they choose to change things, in how they spend their “spare” time with one another? Rather than be eroded and mutated into nothingness by filling their senses through the “gates” of the eyes, ears, taste, and touch, or the “gates” of emotion, mind, and pleasure—could they cut back all of that stuff to 5% or 20% of what it HAS been, willingly? And replace much of that with quiet evenings of reading silently together, praying silently together, or out loud at times? Or before work, or the day starts? Together, and “in the closet”? Or, extending Life to outsiders over dinner or intruding into their lives, carefully Built? And WORK on opening their hearts and lives to others, on a REAL level—taking the time and thought and humility to do that, “that they might be healed”? And INVOLVE others more with getting into coworkers’ and neighbors’ lives, etc.? What WILL they do, these people in another city we are trying to help? ;)

What WOULD you tell them, these folks in another city, about their dilemma??!! ;)

•  Lilies and Sparrows Don’t Have Energy Leaks