I think it's going to rain today

Hey Everybody,

First Thursday email from the new email address. I'm slowly recovering from last week’s email theft, though Ifind some new transaction every day that requires me changing accountinformation. I haven’t been attacked financially yet and that is a positive sign.I am carrying around a vague paranoia that materializes every time I’m on a webpage that doesn’t work exactly right. Am I being monitored? Are they monitoringmy key strokes? Is it paranoia when it is easily doable?

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about just how slowly people changeor if they even change at all. It happens so slowly that I’m not even sure ifit happens. Of course people change physically you can see that clearly, thoughit too happens rather slowly, but I’ve been thinking about how people changefrom the path of death to the path of life; that movement is as slow as aglacier. I wonder sometimes what it will take to get people to give up death.Most people I know don’t give it up. It gets taken from them as they kick andscream and leave claw marks in the dirt as they are dragged into life.

John wrote so long ago that men loved darkness more thanthey loved light. Nowhere is that more evident than in the church. MostChristians think God is a liar when it comes right down to it. They know thatthe way they are doing things is much better than God’s way. Death just feelsbetter than life and so we keep doing whatever it is we love and doing our bestto ignore the rest. Sure we get the bigstuff right. We hold the correct theology. We have said the right words. But asthe old saying goes: the devil is in the details.

What does it mean to go to your grave refusing to give updeath? What does it mean to destroy people’s lives by helping them to death?What does it mean to destroy your own life so you can be happy for just a fewminutes of every day? What does it mean to say “God I will not change becauseyour ways are too mean, too hard, too fill in the blank.” What does it mean tosay depart from me you who practice lawlessness?

What does it mean to be so focused on the now that youdestroy the future? It means a lot of pain and suffering in the future. Iexperience that pain every single day. Almost all of the major frustrations inmy life today, flow out of either myself or others trying to save me orthemselves from pain in the short term decades ago. I was focused on the ‘now’and didn’t think the future would even get here. This abuse feels better thanloneliness. This addiction feels better than being responsible. This beingtaken care of feels better than taking care of myself. It has taken a heavytoll on my present.

At the same time in recent years trying to think long termhas gotten me in a lot of hot water. Nobody wants to think 100 years into thefuture any more. They don’t want the world to exist that far into the future orthey don’t care what happens then. Kindof like the economist Keynes who when asked “What are the long term effects ofyour economic ideas?” replied, “In the long term we’ll all be dead.”

We don’t want to think long term in our day and age. We don’t what to go to the trouble to makesure we have extra oil and wicks for our lamps. I wonder if it’s too late to goget some now? Ah, It’s not going to be dark that long. We don’t want to planour cities, or our driving machines, or our houses to last for our greatgrandchildren. That would cost us too much now. We don’t want to lay up aninheritance for our grandchildren because we’ve got to spend all our money onshort term survival. We don’t care about the future because we won’t be here.We just want to consume until it’s all gone. We have forgotten how to producebecause Jesus is coming back in October. So why bother? Just like the people ofNoah’s time we don’t believe in rain because we’ve never seen it.

Ah the droll Randy Newman fits nicely here:

Broken windows and empty hallways
A pale dead moon in the sky streaked with gray
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it's going to rain today

Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles
With frozen smiles to chase love away
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it's going to rain today

Reading the signs of the times,

Brad

WWW.cosmoyada.com

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