Eternity should properly be called the Mix. Defined as a grotesque melting pot that the God of eternity is forever stirring toward unity. We humans come into this world by a process of dispersion or scattering, our only choice is to explore or search out our earthly place. All of life in our world is a grand dispersion or scattering.
Eternity is
the reverse of scattering. Eternity is a grand coming together in the Mix.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Death is a turning of the page. Every sinew of my being says there is a God of the next page, there has to be such a joyful place for joy is such a rare earth mineral, here and there but never for very long. Life is about competition yet life has to be more than just scratching at the earth for a place in the sun. Life has to be more than heredity, gene pools and the like. There has to be more.
We arrive
with nothing; we are deserving of nothing and when our page turns, all of us are
nothing or we gain everything. The game does not end on the fifty-yard line, it
is all or nothing. There can be no half way God. Thusly I believe or more
correctly hope. A hope is far beyond wishful thinking, hope is more of an
earned expectation after much searching. This is the universal constant in our
earthly life equation.
When and if
the competitive fires have gone out and the dreams are no more, we alone await
the turning of the page. Wait one minute, some of us scream, that may be the
alive definition that some of us live out but the turning of the page more likely
is a wrecking ball that intrudes into the world of this competitor. Death is an
enemy, a robber that prowls the night, there are dreams yet to be lived. What
say you?
Life is not about justice or fairness, only the fight is guaranteed to us in our world, nothing more. Winning or losing is not the life barometer, the only barometer that makes us alive is our competitive life fight, win or lose. One round or ten rounds, opportunities missed, roads not traveled, applause or condemnation, they all are of little consequence.
The more has to be so much bigger.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Charles Darwin, among others, was born on February 12, in the year 1809. Two hundred and sixteen years later, our Christian God thinkers have failed to take into account our world as it actually exists. As a result, they have tried to keep God believers in the story time caves of ancient thought.
One hundred years
after Darwin published his book, “On the Origin of Species” (1859), most of our
world had agreed with Darwin. Even the God believers in the pew have awakened to
the new science reality as the turmoil caused by this publication began to subsided.
The caves have become increasingly irrelevant to the people, we have to live in
our now world.
The Christian
God thinkers, regrettably, are a cave dwelling Church protected class. Some God
thinkers in the last fifty years have tried to sound hip to Darwin but I have
yet to read a plausible, consistent and scientifically relevant God
understanding that fits our world. Please, just give me a name of one such
authority, ggoslaw@gmail.com. While I
await the flood of responses, I shall continue.
The authorized
Christian God thinking cave dwellers have a problem. They say, how can we speak
to the people in a manner that is relevant to modern science, particularly Darwin,
and at the same time remain glued to the historical doctrinal statements of the
faith and the Christian Church? This Church has demanded for thousands of years conformity to the creedal
statements as it labels all dissenters heretics and deserving of impoverishment
if not burning at the stake.
Who can
blame anyone with skin in the game for not bucking the religious system or systems? Not I but maybe this is why God has
consistently picked on the nobodies of this world to breed correction. We
nobodies have nothing to lose. The correction at issue is twofold, Jesus was the best nobody to have lived among us and he selflessly lived out his God given message. Second, our history as humans is of this
world not the story telling improvised genealogy of the Genesis account. This
is very simple and direct but the sparks will fly.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
There is nothing more beautiful than a woman in labor or a woman who yields life leadership to a man while ignoring her own superior abilities.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Sin is an earthbound fog. The fog limits our vision and awareness of consequences. Sin is an atmospheric condition similar to that of any other. Sin can be seasonal or doggedly routine. Sin can be geographically located or burned off by the sun. Sin is arrogance. What sin is not, as some make the biblical story time of the Garden of Eden to say, is an unavoidable God ordered natural human condition. Sin is an atmospheric condition. Our world was created with the possibility of living and dealing with the arrogant fog or the choice of seeking clear skies. That was the choice given to every human as represented by the tree in the midst of the Garden of Eden. What the tree or the fog is not, is our natural human God ordered and intended destiny.
Life
therefore becomes a test, a choice, that choice will reverberate into eternity.
Jesus chose to walk into his God intended destiny, the humble way. When Mahatma
Ghandi was invited into an unfamiliar home during his many travels, he would first
go to the bathroom of that home and clean the toilet. In so doing, this saint
was making practical the belief that the arrogant fog, for him, had long gone.
Cleaning toilets was his way of staying out of the arrogant fog. Now that is a
test.
G. Goslaw
Landers, ca.
Anyone who has read a few pages of our human history knows that three things define who we are as humans. We like our sex. We like to kill each other and we like to party. Jesus also was a party animal. Jesus screamed to his world of Palestine 2000 years ago, “hey, guy’s there is a party going on”. Drop the swords and the one upmanship and follow me to the party of all parties. The tables are set and the celebration is already happening in eternity. The only question to be answered there, in eternity, is the seating arrangement, who shall be closest to the action at the head table?
We shall be eternally thankful that God will decide that one but for Jesus, the seating arrangement will be about one choice we make in this life of ours. Are we satisfied to chase after the temporary big three or do we chase after the forever God. The God that cannot be defined in this world, the absentee God who beckons to every human ear.
Party on friend!
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
1. One God
2. One God for All of us.
3. One God who ever rewards the seeker of God joy.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca
“It is a harder path to hear answers than to ask someone to give us an answer, but it is the path that many people have embarked upon.” CAR: DBB, 2012, p114.
In my own experience, it has been the only path left to me, on my front porch. No matter what we are going through in this beautiful, hazardous and frequently ugly world in which we find ourselves, we are never really left alone to face the whatever trauma of living, guaranteed.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Signing off, some say signing off at last, after 939 blogs and fifteen years it is time to shift gears. It has been fun and I have discovered abilities that have been dormant for a life time. Many thanks are extended to those few readers who have been patient with my dribble. The radical left of Soros, Obama and Biden have been given a gut punch that will sideline their treachery for years to come. Our country is now in the capable hands of President Trump with a great future before us. I will be flying our house American flag tomorrow and watching all the festivities. History will record tomorrow as a pivot point; the people shall reign.
As for the
God stuff, I have arrived at a God understanding that is not traditional
Christianity but it is at least for me viable going into the future in this modern
world. All religion is a no go. Agree or disagree, time will tell.
You have my
best wishes and to all a good night.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Psalms 31: 20 The songster David describes his God.
You (God) hide them in the secret place of your presence from the conspiracies of man; You (God) keep them secretly in a shelter from the strife of tongues. NASB
We humans
are social animals. Does this offend you? It shouldn’t. The Rufus monkeys are
social animals. Their language is not our language but among Rufus monkeys, they
relate to one another as a group, socially. So it is with we humans, verbal language or
body language, we are a specific group in the animal world who are necessarily socially
related. I wonder if monkeys have secrets, maybe, maybe not?
We humans do have our secrets but more importantly we have a secret God place. This place will not show up on a map or an X ray, it can be denied, laughed at and ignored but this place always has the lights on. The secret place is possibly the only place for us in this world with total privacy. Do you secretly desire such a place with total privacy, to be totally alone? Such a place is free from all the social gamesmanship of this world. That avoided desire for such freedom is a seeking after the unavoidable God secret place we find in our aloneness.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
A message for the soon to be new Secret Service, detail all the recent Woke hires to protect Joe Biden and friends!
Need we ask the opinion of those who were burned alive and the thousands of recent homeless in the LA fires? Without competence in government, we all are doomed as a nation. Where are the celebrities now?
Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
The reality of God is not mental high jinks or accepted tradition. The reality of God is only experience, one person at a time being touched by the eternal. If so, why so few? Are the many mere spoiled goods to be trashed or recycled? What our world has always and most needed is not a theology of the few but a God understanding of the many. All of us, arrived with nothing and leave this world with everything.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
The nameless writer of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes was a thinker that today we would consider to be an existentialist. Such a thinker believes that the individual person is responsible for creating purpose and meaning in their own lives. Gods, governments, parents, teachers and all secondary authorities are only advisory. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, the God is dead philosopher, most of these thinkers do not believe in a God or Gods.
The writer
of Ecclesiastes was an everyday existentialist but a God believer in the long-term. To him, in the short term, all of life is meaningless and beyond our
understanding. All of life is “a chasing
after the wind". (1:14; 1:17; 2:11; 2:17, 2:26; 4:4; 4:6;4:16, 6:9 TNIV) This was
the short-term conclusion he arrived at after observing and experiencing all
the goings on here on earth.
“All this I tested by wisdom and I said, I am determined to be wise but this is beyond me. Whatever exists is far off and most profound-who can discover it? " (7:23,24 TNIV)
The writer tested with wisdom, today we would say we are testing the evidence. No evidence was readily available to prove the existence of God, then or now. He looked around, concluding:
" The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; BUT TIME AND CHANCE HAPPEN TO THEM ALL." (My Capitals: 9: 11, TNIV)
Where did the cosmic disciplinarian God go? Surly God would be handing out benefits and bonuses to the good guys.
"There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked how get what the righteous deserve." (8:14, TNIV)
God did not and does not make sense in the short term. Our Gods can betray us, religion can betray us, governments can betray us, family can betray us, teachers can betray us, in whom can we trust? The only possible answer is the long-term God hiding in our midst.
That God, the God that snuggled up to the nobody Jesus, snuggling up so close that Jesus called this God Father. That God who promised us in the words of Jesus another reality in our world and beyond death. Jesus named that reality the Kingdom of God. We arrived with nothing and leave with everything (gg).
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
The front porch is habitable again. My porch faces east and the house is a natural shelter from the breezes that come off the ocean. The Santa Anna winds, however, are another story. Without the sun and the winds blowing fiercely, the only shelter is indoors. My morning smoke on the porch stops when these miserable winds blow as they have the last few days.
How miserable can they get? Just ask the folk in the Los Angeles inferno who lost their homes the last few days. I hesitate to make the winds political but there it is, Los Angeles has reaped the reward of voting for the liberal environmentalists who would rather budget social wokism than available water and fire safety. Elections do have consequences, sometimes firry consequences.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
The One hidden God living among us is the God we humans have consistently turned into a variety of religions, each of which serves only to separate we humans. No religion works to our good and they are all dead ends. Thank God, the One hidden God living among us is bigger than our petty pipe dreams. Just wait, unity will be had by all, someday soon.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Are there any adults among the 2025 political gathering in Washington? Just one politician is willing to say out loud what everyone knows to be the truth. Therefore, there is only one adult. Senator Rand Paul says, there can be no successful long-term money reform in Washington unless entitlements, welfare spending, Medicare and Social Security are a part of the discussion. This is the ugly truth.
Maybe,
President-elect Trump should welcome Senator Paul to the soon to happen, national cost
cutting party.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Are we as Americans in 2025 children or adults? Are we participants in our democracy or are we merely feeding at the trough of government? It would seem that in our time, the adults among us are few. No matter the income level, social status or education, all of us are intent on chomping down at the welfare office and the stock market. Our cries for more and more are baby talk and our politicians in Washington earn their mansions by dishing out the baby food. This is the now America.
Blame it on
the politicians if you must but we every day Americans have to change or we die.
We have to grow up. We must become givers who want the greater good, the elusive
national good. The ancient Roman empire faced a decision point as monumental as
ours and failed. Two hundred and fifty years of growth and then two hundred and
fifty years of fractured dreams that ended in national suicide. Are we so
special that we can somehow buck the trend of history?
2026 will be our 250th year anniversary as a nation.
Let’s get practical. Most of America welcomes all the MAGA optimism about the future of we the people and deservedly so. Optimism has the power to influence history in the short term but optimism is not enough, optimism is not hope. Hope is long-term, hope is adult stuff. Hope says we are about paying the price now for a better future. Hope says we will feed the kids first and be content with the leftovers. We adults must join together and be better American participants.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
St. Matthew 10: 29 -31.
29. “Are not
two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground
apart from your Father. 30. “But the
very hairs of your head are all numbered.
31. “So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows. (New
American Standard Bible, 1995.)
29. Are not
two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not
one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. 30. And
even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31. So don’t be afraid; you
are worth more than many sparrows. (New International Version, 1978)
29. Are not
two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them will not fall to the ground
without your Father. 30. But the very
hairs of your head are all numbered. 31. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value
than many sparrows. (King James Version,
1611.)
My new (old) Bible came in the mail yesterday, New American Standard Bible 1995, Giant Print, indexed, red letter, brown that looks red, in genuine leather, $35. Love it for all these reasons but mostly my affection is based on sentiment. I discovered the Bible when I bought a NASB paperback edition in the seminary bookstore, 1977, or so. I was not a good student nor a good fit for the job but the NASB and I have been partners ever since those days. Little did I understand that the search for authenticity would take so long.
The
description of God as expressed in these three verses are, in my humble opinion,
the most authentic Jesus words in the Bible.
Jesus words are simple, primitive and earthy. We are like sparrows whom
God cares for even in death yet we are more valuable than the sparrow to God. Much of the remainder of Chapter 10 can best
be described as what others said about what Jesus said, therefore, in my book,
verses 29 to 31 stand alone.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Woke FBI: The message in New Orleans, again, don’t believe your lying eyes! Not until President Trump is in charge of the FBI, will we be informed or given the truth about what motivated the new Orleans terrorist. Was he an illegal alien, a mad liberal Democrat, an Iranian doing Jehad, an angry sex charge person who believed the lie that happiness is about sex or just a hate filled degenerate?
The act itself was and will ever be intentional terrorism. Bravo Ms. Mayor. All this dying over the last four years is the Biden, Democrat legacy that they will carry for many years. Who says elections don't have consequences?
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.