God's Love is a Doorway

14. For he knoweth our frame;

he remembereth that we are dust. (KJV)

14. He knows us inside and out,

keeps in mind that were made of mud. (Message)

The “special creationists” have always ruled the church. That fact is now rendering the church irrelevant to a modern scientifically aware culture. It is time to grow up church. Accepting the creationist scenario is to reduced the divine to a cosmic magician who puffs humankind into existence a few short millennia ago. The Psalmist labors under no such delusion.

He states, “ He (God) knows us inside and out, (He) keeps in mind that we were made of mud.”(Message) Equally valid, the other translators use the word dust. Thirty five hundred years ago the Psalmist expressed the scientific equation for life, mix a little dirt with water, bake and life will happen. How can this verse be ignored? It has been ignored because it didn’t fit the divine magic spectacular.

Also, the church has felt compelled to remain in the magic corner fearing the accidental hypothesis of evolutionary religion. The Psalmist would never assume that the mud baking process was an accident. His mindset was immersed in the immediacy of the will of the Father God in this world, there are no accidents just foreseeable results. God is so powerful that magic shows are not of Him or Her. The Church can,therefore, with great confidence explore His universe reverencing His creation.

The concept of mud or dust is rooted in the beginning parables of Genesis. Am I loosening your biblical assumptions, let’s hope so? In like manner, Jesus used stories (parables), to convey God understandings to we street persons. Any preacher will tell you that a good story is worth a thousand words. Are stories (parables) deceptions? No they are not, if they help explain who we are and where we stand in relation to the Godhead.

The biblical revelation is that God purposes both a physical and a spiritual formation for the earth and He is about this dual baking process. Mankind alone has the potential to explore the spiritual dimension. We are, however, stubborn. We most often are content to pander to our physical inheritance. Slowly the ordained baking process continues. The goal of spiritual formation is an active identification with the Godhead and a willingness to express His definition of love in this world.

It is beneath our potential as created beings to value only the physical. All of scripture is the story of some of our attempts to find and step through the doorway to the spirit from the physical. All of this life that confronts us with the reality that the physical alone is futile, is of God. This includes the pain of our days. The good news is that God’s love has ventured back into the physical to entice us to follow His Love through the doorway to full humanity.

G.Goslaw
September 29, 2009

Questions and Answers

Publisher, Stephan Wingert
Editor, Don Holland
VV Daily Press
Victorville, Ca. 92393

September 2, 2009

Gentlemen:

This regular reader of your newspaper is informing you of my dissatisfaction with your newspaper. Possibly other readers have a similar complaint. You should ask, why are our efforts being ignored? Your paper is in financial distress, why? For any media to navigate these changing times has to be difficult. It is my belief that it would be more prudent to examine the editorial policy than to remain content to blame the stressors.

The problem is that there is very little follow up coverage of happenings that matter to your on the street readers. Your reporters do an excellent initial story but many probable reader questions are left dangling and unanswered. We do care to know the answers. Keeping your readership better informed long term with appropriate story follow up would seem to be fundamental to a win, win for the paper. Please, let me be specific.

Spring Valley Lake Politics
Your coverage of SVL politics is very superficial. An article about a petition drive, a fight on the beach, possible financial mismanagement but no ongoing follow up. This reader and resident was in attendance at a recent meeting with the new accounting firm. The presenter asked if the Daily Press was represented but your newspaper didn’t show. The new accountant says that he is not responsible for the past system. We were given to believe or allowed to assume the opposite by management. When will an independent audit happen? Will the SVL assessment payers ever know if their funds were stolen? Where does the current board stand on full disclosure and how responsible are they for the ambiguity? What is being hid?

Spring Valley Lake Crime
The security budget for SVL continues to skyrocket all because of crime. Management and the board will use such fears as justification for even more increases. Your newspaper has reported on two invasion robberies in SVL in the last three months, three overall. In these cases security was impotent. The fight on the beach at SVL was reported without appropriate questions being asked. Again, security was unable to keep the peace. What is the root cause of these incidents? Were the people involved property owners or tenants? What was the motive for the robbery, to steal a few guns or drugs again? These are the questions your reporters should be dogging the sheriff to confirm. The answer is of critical importance to we property owners.

Accidents ?
On July 20, 2009, a non accident occurred on Bear Valley Road, taking the life of a Victorville innocent woman. Highway accident fatalities are not a rare occurrence in the high desert, we all assume as drivers that there is a risk. However this case is blatantly criminal regardless of the excuse. Your newspaper to this date has made no attempt to keep your readers up to speed on the investigation. Is murder by suburban just a youthful indiscretion? Was the young man a legal resident? Did he have a driver’s license and insurance? Was the suburban registered and to whom? Will your paper ever report upon the ongoing investigation? The answer to all these questions would increase the level of involvement in your readership and your reader’s want some answers.

This reader attempts to be a realist. The complaint is a long standing issue with your paper and positive change is probably wishful thinking. Does your editorial policy cozy up to police and political influences? Are you trembling for fear of a lawsuit? You bucked the system with the exposes of financial mismanagement in Victorville. Your readers expect more consistency. At least this one reader, has gone on the record.

G.Goslaw

Charlatan

Letter to the Editor
Daily Press
P.O. Box 1389
Victorville, Ca. 92395

September 19, 2009

Response to letter from William Cash
Victorville Daily Press of September 18, 2009

Brother Cash, you are a disappointment playing the “C” card in the political debate. There are Christians who are not comfortable mixing faith and politics for just this reason. Say the President is untruthful, say he is a liberal, say that he misrepresented himself in the campaign,but spiritually devalue no man for personal, theological or political motives. You are not qualified to judge his spirit by calling him a charlatan. You forget that is what happened to Jesus when the religious authorities questioned His spiritual credentials. That occurrence is also a part of the biblical record.

G.Goslaw
Victorville, Ca.

Four Lies

Introduction
Life is about balance, it is a swinging pendulum whose extreme swinging points are lies. They have so little foundation in verifiable truth that they render the conversation irrelevant. Could we not attempt to identify these extremist theological positions that make God uncomfortable? The Church fails to address these lies and must clean it's own house. The non believer makes no claim to know God but we who do refuse to be honest.

1. SIN is SOCIAL This understanding equates our progress in spirituality to our conformity to a multiplicity of societal norms. The problem is that societies change, the variation in societal structures are in themselves extreme, how do we know what is of God or if He even has a societal norm?

2. SCIENCE is SEPARATE This understanding assumes that science has a world view that is antithetical to man’s spiritual formation within the context of the universe in which we exist. The scientific endeavor is the great Satan of the last 500 years. The churches attempt to cast it aside, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, is a lie that is rendering the church irrelevant.

3. SEX is SORDID This understanding has an even greater longevity, even to the dawn of time. In the attempt to make the natural drive toward procreation somehow fit within the divine order of things, we have reclassified it as animalistic and embarrassing. Surely God would be revolted if He knew the truth about us.

4. SALVATION is SELF-CENTERED This lie says that God’s salvation plan is all about me. All persons, somehow, travel the same road toward God, experiencing the same markers at a pace that is predictable, uniform and a reflection of me. The testimony of spiritual accomplishment becomes the unifying message and we only wink at the offensiveness to God. Salvation looks like me. An ideal experience or reflection of the divine is not the ground of future dealings with the Almighty.

Conclusion
The church has been stuck in these four lies for a very long time. All of them can be traced through the secular history books. Of late the pendulum has been swinging toward balance as the Bible is appreciated by the laity. The scriptures hold us all accountable. No more are we subject to the tyranny of the clergy. This does,however, have it's own risks and rewards.

The problem is that the traditional church, the clergy in particular, has turned to “proof reading” scripture. From a few snippet’s of the Word, our theological acumen is reduced to dogmatic barriers that prevent the church from sharing with one another as the universal Church. To be the Biblical Church, agreement is not necessary but sharing without demonizing others is a minimum dogmatic requirement.

The difficulties of establishing and communicating such a biblical theology are monumental, scholarship cowardly specializes in the details of scripture avoiding heated disagreements. WE must talk and share to approach consensus on a biblical theology. However, it is far easier to give out a simple and enthusiastically stated doctrine backed by a few snippets from the Word of God than to do the heavy lifting of a biblical theology. The guilty are the theologians, the preachers and the lazy listener’s. We all know who we are. Eventually the pendulum will stop.

G.Goslaw
September 25, 2009

Proxy

Spring Valley Lake Association

13325 Spring Valley Parkway

Victorville, Ca 92395

September 19, 2009

NOTIFICATION OF PROXY

Property Owner and Association member

Mrs. Marjorie Goslaw

Spring Valley Lake Association

Victorville, Ca. 92395

Please instate my son, Glen Goslaw, as proxy for all business as related to my membership in SVL Association. I have the right to assign this proxy authority for a period of 3 years from the above date and so designate. (Association Bylaws 8.1)

Mrs. Marjorie Goslaw

God's Love is for the Asking

13. Just as a father has compassion on his children,

So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him. (NASB)

13. He is like a father to us,

tender and sympathetic to those who reverence him. (Living)

Wisdom is buried in popular culture as many a short trite cliché. As an example, the search toward subjective salvation has been a forever “bone of contention” in the church. There is very little confusion amongst we Christians as to what God has objectively accomplished in history. There are, however, three questions that have proven to be contentious over the last two thousand years.

Who is worthy of God’s love? Some would say and have said that political institutions and the church establishment are somehow favored by God. It has never worked. Please remember the religious establishment of Jesus’s time, the Emperor Constantine, the centuries of dominance by the papacy, the state church’s of Europe, and America’s recent attempts at stirring the pot of religion and politics, they have all muddied the waters.

How is God’s Love accessed? The universal answer is by faith. We humans insist it can’t be that simple and give it additives. Some have added church membership, baptism, an ethic, prosperity, worship peculiarities, a “special” calling or language. Everything is possible and most all have been tried. The assumption is that if you are a person of faith, God will bless the whatever. The Bible and church history do not document this assumption but rather laugh at our attempts to be God. Martin Luther said it at one time in his ministry, faith alone.

What does it look like to experience His love? Is there such an animal as a normative Christian? Jose says no way! We humans are genetically, culturally and socially diverse beings who experience life differently. God’s love is not a cookie cutter. He takes each of us and melts us into beings who become pliable enough to do His will, not necessarily the will handed down from worldly authority figures including the church. We should allow our brothers the liberty to discover the God sent expression in this life for each individual.

The Psalmist compares this people side of salvation to a Fathers love for his children. Scriptural father’s and today’s fathers have feeling’s for their children, we want the best for them. As fathers, even when our motives are right, we are far less than perfect. Please read the biblical stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they struggled as we do. God’s love is the only perfect representation of fatherhood.

Should we not seek His love first and foremost? Yes, if we fear Him. Again, to fear God is to respect or reverence Him as the perfect Father that He is. The Prodigal son of scripture had a case of the gimme’s. The Father let him go with half the family inheritance, waiting for the time when “he would come to his senses”, and return to the family. We must only ask respectfully by

faith and then keep trusting the Father who knows best.

G.Goslaw
September 17, 2009

Home Sweet Home

Open letter to the Board of Directors

Spring Valley Lake Association

Victorville, Ca.

September 8, 2009

The Goslaw family would like to make a statement. We have found Spring Valley Lake a great place to live. Robert (now deceased) and Marjorie have owned two consecutive properties for close to thirty years in this community. Local politic, for better or worse, has never been a priority in our lives. At this time, however, our concerns have to be communicated to our neighbors through the board of directors.

There is a conservative tradition in this family that most of us share. We oppose ever growing big government on the state, county, city and SVL level. The handwriting is on the wall in some quarters for a big government solution to our current SVL problems.

At the top of the list is the past administrations loose undirected management style and we homeowners who wrongly were content to remain aloof. We cannot farm out to employees our community government. Before anything new is tried the fallout from the past should be corrected.

The second most pressing problem is obviously crime on our streets. It is documented in the Breeze, the Daily Press, the neighborhood chit-chat and around the dinning room table. We really do live in the larger community and the downside of crime is a part of the whole ball of wax. The fear generated may be used as an excuse to invoke the big government solution with it’s unavoidable decrease in personal freedom and an increase in association spending. If the solution is a closed community and a further ballooning of an already bloated security budget, we Goslaw’s are opposed because association fees will also skyrocket.

Our patriarch lived for three things, God, golf and personal responsibility. Two of the three attracted him to SVL. Personal responsibility created this quiet, no fuss, take care of your own business community. We as a family wish not to see that environment change. Some wise character, surely in the distant past, expressed our opinion this way, “don’t ask others to do for you, what you are not willing do for yourself”. Personal choice and the ensuing responsibility is the definition of freedom.

Historically SVL has been predominately an owner resident based community. When owner's are present in house they can advocate for the family and for our neighbors. Times have changed and it is only a guess as to how many homes are occupied by tenants. Three of the five homes on our cul-de-sac are rentals. The management of the past didn’t seem to care or found it uncomfortable to make the distinction. Crime in SVL is largely tenant instigated, (writer’s opinion so please try to correct me), but no one knows the status of each property. Drunken fights on the beach and home invasions are cause and effect crimes that are not in the playbook of the home owner who occupies his or her residence.

How should the board proceed into the future? The following are only a few suggestions that would make sense to this member unit.

1. Identify all property as to owner occupied or tenant occupied.

2. Improve identification and verification procedures for all residents and guests.

3. Revise the guest policy to reflect the devaluing of tenant owners.

4. Reduce the clutter of manpower in the security department as the Breeze states, “if there is a real problem…call the sheriff:”.

5. All child care and youth resources and programs should be self supporting.

6. If fees are to be raised, it should only be raised on tenant occupied properties.

7. The board of director’s policy making should minimize the need for employees.

8. Encourage a management investigation of household profiles where crimes have occurred in the past, then make the report public.

These views are those of this association member unit. We are not affiliated with other SVL political units. We speak for none of our neighbors, our hope is that there is enough like sentiment in the community to make an impact on policy making into the future. The call is for efficient, minimal SVL government.

Marjorie Goslaw and Glen Goslaw

ggoslaw@ gmail.com