Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Please Stop Giving This NUT an Audience!



This man should be forced to wear a "toxic" or "Poisonous" warning on all of his clothes. What is our responsibility towards these people who simply cannot admit they are way off track? Is it not painfully obvious that they are full of a lying deceitful spirit and therefore cannot speak the truth for they have deceived themselves and the truth is not in them. Claiming to be wise they have become fools, exchanging the truth of God for lies; Claiming not to offer their own opinions they go on to offer their own opinions. Claiming to simply say what the Bible says (which by the way it CLEARLY states that no one knows the day or the hour... taken to mean "no one" not even Harold)they invent new ways of sinning. This man has shipwrecked his faith and is determined to take as many as possible with him. Stay away from him he is toxic and his brand of faith is toxic!

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Managing Our Doomsday Inclinations


May 21st came and May 21st went and yet once again, as always, another doomsday prediction has not come true. For literally 1000’s of years there have been prophets of doom, setting dates and getting people all wound up over their predictions of a coming apocalyptic event. And, every single time since these predictions have been made, there are way too many people who buy into the doomsday forecasts. They sell their possessions, they put their beloved pets down, and they get themselves ready for rapture. In some ways I have some sympathy for these folks. Their wholehearted dedication to announcing and getting the word out of coming judgement is quite staggering. I saw on TV, a man from New York who spent most of his life’s savings advertising on billboards and putting signs on subway walls and buses. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to warn everyone of the coming judgement. When interviewed he seemed genuinely sad that so many people had not heeded the warnings and just went on with their day. He finished by saying it was still money well spent because it may not have happened on the 21st but it will happen this year. Which is the sad part of all this. People have been so completely and totally deceived. The final shot of the news story of him sitting in his living room reading his well-worn Bible made me both sad and angry; sad because he was searching the scriptures daily and yet he was completely missing the message therein. The message is we bring heaven to earth. Our faith is not an escape out of this messy world. Angry because once again the good name of Jesus and his many faithful followers was dragged through the mud of lunacy and scam.

But doomsday predictions are not solely generated by religious kooks and fanatics. Science has joined in the march toward the end with predictions of the sun burning out, giant asteroids hitting the earth, a super-volcanic eruption that creates an ash cloud so thick it jokes out all of life, and who can forget all the climate change warnings that roll off the presses seemingly every day, blaming pretty much every single disaster in the world on climate change. The end is coming they warn and the future is bleak they shout.

Hollywood producers have also joined in the collective rant about the end of the world with a steady stream of movies that try to capture through cinematography what the end will look like. The Terminator series, Armageddon, The Day after Tomorrow and one of my personal favorites, The Book of Eli, are some of the more popular movies that have nurtured and furthered the end-time fascination and speculation.

But why are human beings so interested in this topic? Could it be that we are simply longing for a better place, a paradise, nirvana, an end to all the trouble, turmoil and tribulations? Even when things are good they fail to completely satisfy our innermost desires and so we dream of a place that completely satisfies all of our deepest longings for meaning, purpose and total love. All of nature joins in with its groans for deliverance and all of humanity right along with it seeks a way out, an exodus to a land of milk and honey.

Well, the scripture teaches that God has placed eternity within the heart of all humankind. This means that we know intuitively that what is here is temporal and must come to an end to make way for a new and desirable future. The doomsday forecasters are partly right. There will be an end. There will be a new beginning. God has promised that much for sure. But the day and hour NO ONE KNOWS, and no one ever will. I guess the big thing is are we ready?

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Thoughts about Clouds


When the kids were growing up we had a trampoline in the back yard. From time to time the girls and I would go outside and jump and play on it. When we stopped we would lay on it and star at the sky. We would always be fascinated by the clouds and the different forms they took. We made a game of identifying different shapes, like whales, dogs, people’s faces, and sheep, lots and lots of sheep! There was something mesmerising about the clouds.

Each morning before I head off for my daily walk to the gym I look up at the clouds. Depending on what I see there in the sky I choose my clothing for the walk. There are many kinds of clouds in the sky and even a few different colours. There was fog the other day that was thick, there are low clouds that seem like you could almost touch them, there are thunder clouds that produce a huge mountain of cloud, and there are wispy clouds and then there are the patchy fluffy clouds, the kind that kids always seem to draw on their pictures. At times they shine like gold as the rising sun reflects off of them, sometimes orange, gray, blackish, and at times such a bright white they are hard to look at. Of course there are those rare occasions when they are not even there.

Clouds are usually if not always mentioned in the weather reports. In fact a multi-billion dollar industry has arisen devoted to a large degree to the study of reading and interpreting cloud formation and tracking their movements. All this so that it can be reported several times a day to an interested and even demanding public. Recently we witnessed a rare cloud occurrence that left parts of the North Shore City in ruins. The tornado that ripped through Albany was many things. It was ferocious because one person was killed by it, it was fascinating as there were several video recordings of the clouds as they twisted into funnel shape and touched down, it was forceful as we witnessed several buildings damaged, cars overturned and written off and the rubbish and debris scattered everywhere, and it was frightening as it produced a mixture of wonder and fear depending mostly on how close one was to it. It brought thunder, lightning, rain and in some places flooding, it brought winds that gusted at times up to 200 kilometers per hour, strong enough to uproot massive trees like they were matchsticks. But at the end of the day it was the clouds that did all this.

We can all know one thing for sure. Clouds never stay the same. They are constantly changing, always shifting, moving, thickening and thinning, speeding up and slowing down, sometimes delightful other times dreadful. Life is often like the clouds. Uncertain, difficult to read, even the wisest among us can get it wrong. Life is always changing, shifting, shaking. Life is sometimes awesome and sometimes fearful. At one point Jesus mentioned that people are better at reading the clouds than they are at reading life. In this case the light of life was standing right in front of them and they missed it, misunderstood him and maligned him. They were better at reading the clouds than reading Jesus. At one point the clouds made him disappear while his disciples watched, gazing up into the clouds until it was announced to them that the same way they had seen him disappear was the same way he would reappear. Not long before this event Jesus had announced that at a certain time in history he will return and at that time people, “will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory”. Even the most significant event of human history will include the clouds.