I command my hands to worship God!

What a song we sang at Bethel. How often I meditated on the fact that my use of faculties, lent by the Lord, are under my command to worship or not.

I have felt in command of my faculties and I have felt not in control of my faculties.  Still, while I am in control of my hands and feet and mind,  I command them to praise the Lord.  And all that is within me, the psalmist exhorts himself.   My heart and my spirit are sometimes leading in the praise and sometimes they follow out of the discipline of repetition.  He is worthy to be praised and glorified, when I am exultant and when I am saddened.Where is your faith?  the grandmother asked me in my darkest season of bereavement.  Sometimes the light is nigh gone out, as in grief and loss.

Sometimes a light surprises the Christian when prays.  It is the Lord who cometh, with healing in His wings.

Look for God to surprise you in your obeisance to His sovereignty.  Joy comes in the silence and in the tumult of obedience.   I command my sadness to praise the Lord.  God is not far behind my commitment to worship Him!

Blackness is not enough to save you!

I say that to myself everyday!

The deception that Young, Gifted and Black means that your soul is in tact



We've gotten our Black president now.  Isn't that a marker that God is not counting our blackness as being any merit in terms of our reconciliation with God?  He has never owed us anything.  We are no greater because of our underprivileged status in times past and we are no greater, now that we have earned participation in the process.

I, for one, am weeping that our cause has been swept into the basket of deplorables which is just another special interest group in this country.   I am weeping that we cannot take our privilege and be big about it and go to the innauguration and pledge allegiance to the greatness of the Democracy that our forefathers fought so hard to give us the right to a part in.  It is always the way of our people to take the "niggardly" approach to conflict.  Non-violent is laudable, nonparticipatory is implorable, I hope.

I pray that we can find a seat at the table in heaven, at last.  In spite of our tremendous sense of self importance that every battle is about us and whether our soul is "in tact".  and that is not necessarily a fact.  Amen

A prayer and thoughts about my wicked tongue

The Most Articulate President

       Who taught you to speak,  I thought.  I wasn’t willing to say it out loud and sound ignorant.

The map to greater diction and greater facility of the English language, if not leadership is learning to become articulate.

Is articulation leadership?  I think not.   A great leader, may not be the most articulate.  I haven’t seen whether Alexander the Great was as fluid in speech as other great men, I am sure Moses wasn't fluid in his speech.   What we learn is that knew the secret of real camaraderie with men.  He knew how to draw them into the fray of chaos that ends in the accomplishment of a great goal.  Set the goal out there and then start running toward it,  I think.  That is what I see when I see a great leader.  Everyone looks out of their door and sees this crazed individual running with abandon and fire in his eyes and they run behind him.

It is not just the phenomenon of talking like you know what you are doing.  It is digging your heals into and getting your elbows scraped and making people follow you.

Let us do something about this or that and somebody seconds it and off you go.  We have come so far from the real relating that draws people into a great accomplishment.  Everyone is tweeting and commenting on this and that thing.  What is your status?  My status is too busy to comment on it, says the real leader.  We said we were going to do it and it gets done. 

True that there needs to be a plan and a blueprint of the thing to do.  But, more gets done before and after the plan is made up than just talking about it.   I think that is where we are deceived today.

I think we are updating everyone of accomplishment which are only on paper or in cybersphere.

It is true that many a great Black man is less articulate than he is accomplished.  This is unfortunate.  No one really respects the person who has to hire someone else to talk about what he is doing.  Both must be emphasized.  The doing and the articulating of it.

What is our Lang-gauge?  Is our clear and concise articulation a gift of God or the fruit of having taken dominion of some righteous priority?  

I see the devil sneak little deviancies into what we say to keep our speech from reflecting what we are really trying to say.

1.Say What You Mean to Say

2. You’re Welcome as opposed to De Nada

3. Slang and figures of speech

4. The Bible on speech impediments and articulation

5. The judgment of Herod

6. The use of perjoratives

7. The use of expletives

8. Why I love what they say about Teddy Roosevelt

9.  The Nelson Touch

So what, you speak so well.  What does that accomplish and what did you really say that was worth so much?

I am sure that after so many years of talking in the house and in the elections and governing, men must say to themselves,  where is the real me in my words?

In the multitude of words there is much sin, says the scripture.  I would fear and I do fear, when it comes to words.  I look at Mrs. Day in LWF seemingly a simple woman imploring her pastor to commiserate with her on the sense of futility of Wall Street.  He didn't exactly take her side.  There is a parallel between the use of money and the use of words.  A dollar is worth a hundred pennies and they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but God says every idle word will be given account of in the day of judgment.  That says shut up to me!  How many idle words do I say everyday and I am not in government. 

How do we pay the world back for being an air polluter?  Showing so much verbal ascent to nothing of real worth.

Lord, my tongue is vile and convicts me and I need the cross of Christ to clean me up and make me new.  Help me redeem the time with my tongue, Lord.  Give me grace to be a doer of the Word and not ever more of a talker than even a hearer.   Give me grace to listen to those that I love more than I talk.  Give me grace to listen to the silence of a wordless grief stricken world.  Help me redeem the fact that I was more willing to look like I was representing others than really listening to what others were needing from me.  God, I need a season of renewal in my soul.  Drain the swamp of my words.  Help me say and do what you want me to.

Reminiscences from 2009 on the grief Journey of my life

Restoration of my soul in the expression of God’s divine love to me in His providence of restoring three for one, in sons.

One glimpse of His dear face, all sorrow will erase, so I, hopefully run the race, till I see Christ.
Jesus will  be the only true healing for the grief stricken soul.  The sight of Christ will erase all of the memories of pain upon this earth.  Every once in a while, I attain to that point.  I used to imagine that the sight of a new son would complete the process and the grief would be gone.   Like they  said of Joseph that the sights of Ephraim and Menassah,  or at least the name of them meant that the remembrance of the grief was erased.  I have kept waiting for such a thing to happen.  I see that there are occasions, where the beauty of the Lord erases the remembrance of the deepest grief.  It would not be called deep grief, if there were not much to take to erase it.

There is not a friend like the lowly Jesus.   There is not a beauty like the ministry of the Holy Spirit to the grieving mother.  God loves the grieving soul.  God comes near in solace, no matter how much you resist His comfort.  God enters in the beauty of His holiness and there is much comfort and peace in His ministry, but the blindness and deafness of grief often resist His nearest embraces.   Like the wrestlings of Annie Sullivan to the blind an
d deaf child caught in the distance of tools of communication.  God sends messages of Love, holy love, which are painful and interpreted incorrectly by the grieving heart.  He comes in the Holy Spirit to express love.

I tried the smell of hyacinths to cover the painful smell of breastmilk and my own body which were grievous forever.  The smell of death of someone closer than your own soul, it felt like.  That comfort worked for a little while.   I tried to hold the children as close to my heart as possible, all the time, unable to satiate the grief of the loss.  I tried looking at beautiful places, like arboretum and botanical gardens to try to find a place of beauty where the pain couldn’t reach me.  It always catches me there. There is no place of solace for the soul in grief.   I justify God and learn of Him.  Each day He gave me new comforts from His word and new encouragement s in His psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.   There is no place to hide from that grief.  It will heal, they say.  Time heals all wounds, they say.  Look at what you have, they say.   Let go and let God, they say.  All comforts, but all untrue.  Jesus will make it right when I see him.

Every once in a while there is a beauty of life or kind a creature or theory that takes my heart to that place above the grief.  I must enjoy it for the moment.  I must sa
vor that taste of beauty, for just that very moment.  That hope of comfort in anything but the grave.  Something to hope about, but the ending of this struggle against the pain of grief.  I see that person for the moment.  I see that flower or that  exalted theory in scripture for but a moment and it satiates, for just that moment and then I land, sometimes on feet and sometimes not.  On this earth, I know that I will land again.  God builds the language of love that enters in where no other thing can.  The Holy Spirit allows a method of communication to begin in the grief that is like the signing of Annie and Helen.   Water, I say to him.  You love me, even now, I say to him.  I can’t feel it in my grief.   I know it is there.  Every touch, every glance of eye to eye, brings a pain of truth that means that the love of God is alive.  Even though, especially on this day, it is hard to see and feel.  Pain is perceived, love is perceived, but the trickle that continues down into the soul is limited by the pain.

One glimpse of His dear face, all sorrow will erase, so run the race, till we see Him.  No other face, though beauty and comfort are there in them are as lasting as the eternal comfort of Jesus.  None else can, not cover, but heal all my soul’s diseases.  Don’t feel sorry for me, this is the language that God is bu
ilding with me.  I am sure that each person has their own griefs that God is speaking to them through.  This is my ichabod.  God wrestles me.  God shows me His goodness and my wretchednesses.  There is no cure for my wretchedness, but in Christ.  There is no cure for my pain but in Christ.  As my soul falls and falls into the abyss of the pain, every day,  I have to trust that He is going to catch me, before I end in Hell.  I have no control of the feeling of the pain. He made me blind and deaf to the comforts until He in His Grace builds the bridges.  The bridges and the interpretations of the comforts are His to do.

I am the person whose God is the Lord, can a woman forget her own son.  Can she forget the child of her bosom, is there a greater grief?  Many, probably?  I don’t know and I am not comparing.  I just know how God deals with me, in my pains.  He is faithful.  He makes the communication possible.  He enters the grief.  He anchors my soul when it starts to spin out.  He sends the life-raft when I am floundering in the deep.  He sends the hand of love on my shoulder to understand when this grief is even too big for the dearest ones to me to understand.
He never says, aren’t you over that yet?   He never says, are you crying about that again?  He never says, Will you ever stop talking and fussing and losing a dearly beloved? He never says that?   No, he sends, just the right comfort to the area, again and again.   I lose it!  He is there.  I go crazy in my grief.  He is there.   I can’t take it anymore.  He is even there.   The tenacity of Annie Sullivan is nothing compared to God’s great love.  He is the fairest of 10000 to my soul.  He sends that beauty for me to see and I am comforted and He is in that comfort as well.  W-A-T-E-R,  I thought it was milk, said Helen,  whatever it was, it was thirst quenching.   I learned that words meant things.  That beauty was a comfort from God.  That my soul is in a tenuous condition,  in the grief.  I can’t trust myself.  I can’t comfort myself.  They don’t have the sickness that I have.  There is no “quick fix” for what I have.  Maybe there is a quick fix for the other things that these people have.  I will be crawling on my hands and knees and make very little progress.  I will be walking around the table of heaven.  Picking the food off the table with my hands like a dog,  because my heart hurts.  Because my pain is intense everyday.  It will be worth it all.  His face will make it worth it all.  And I do believe that.  Every once in a while, He sends a comforting glance from someone and I know it is from God.  He can’t love me like that can He?  Yes He says,  even stuck in the slough of dispond!

Does Jesus weep over our city?

At least, He wept over Jerusalem.  He had a heart of ownership of a city which had thrown off the shackles of relationship with God for a shackle of dominion and greatness.  Jesus had seen the greatness of creating and reigning and complete sovereignty and he stoops to Jerusalem and the city runs Him over in their desire for a greater accomplishment.

What higher accomplishment is there than pleasing and seeking God?  If our city is to be wept over and not run over by its own tractor of judgment,  we would do well to look at Jerusalem's mistakes.

"We have no king but Ceasar?"  Really?

When Jesus rules and when Jesus reigns, He comes to change our priorities.  Repentance and Faith is the story on His pen.  Self-actualization and the right to participate in the process is nothing, if we have sold our souls to achieve that right.  "I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord!"

Heal our Land Lord and stop them from putting the noose of Homosexuality's judgment on the necks of the Black Caucus.  Help us not be deceived, Lord and identify with Pharoah's Army, again.

Is Thy Law a Light, Lord? Help us to prove that theorem.

Proverbs 6:23 

For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light; and reproofs of instruction are the way of life:

Proverbs 6:24 

To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman.

The Discipline of Learning!

The reproofs of instruction are the “Way of Life”…

It is as though someone asked the Proverbist, what is the purpose of all this learning stuff.  A son with “Senioritis” asked, why am I applying myself to study?  This is why we encourage the learning, line upon line.  This is why we are so very stern to correct you over and over.   We don’t let you stay in a line of reasoning that is apart from the reasoning of God.  Your life will be bettered, if you go this way.   You will see and grow to not be the naïve simpleton who is wooed away from your life by every reasoning that is about you.

Maybe this woman or that woman has the right road to go and then you wake up with your heart alone in your hand.  Discernment was not yours by the expression of study.  We awake early to our learning and we make it a habit and above this, we make it a love of ours.  Being reproved by truth and reproving is a continual sharpening of the mind and spirit as well as the body.

Seems hypocritical for Solomon to say that instruction is going to keep you from the “strange woman”.  Who had more “strange women” than he?  Where is the disconnect here?  Yo, Dad, keep you from the “strange woman”?  What gives?

Perhaps Solomon would say that is his religious answer to the question posed.  His public answer is that it is “supposed” to grow you to the point where you think before you act.  I can just imagine him answering the inquiring fools in his discertation.  His sons said if that is godliness and wisdom, I will be imbecilic.   I am among that style of childish reasoner, if I am alone in this thought, I confess.

How can you tell me to study to learn to be godly and single hearted in my covenants?  This is the question begged by all instruction toward godliness, but all the more when that Professor is Solomon, whose heart was turned away by his women.

He bowed to the idols and he served them as an initiator of polytheism in the kingdom.  Did God turn a blind eye to this?  Not at all.  This vulnerable King in Israel initially had prayed and been directed that there is repentance and reconciliation with God, when we come back to ourselves.

There is both a privilege of requesting wisdom from God and a pitfall.  The heart of God is just that magnanimous that He “Loved the world and gave His only begotten Son” for the harloting nations.  Solomon showed us both sides of God’s heart, in his growth and in his demise.  God is holy and He will never be defiled with sin.  But He sent us a Savior.  Who is Christ the Lord?

Our wisdom can keep us and our wisdom can condemn us as well.  My Pastor said “all of these instructions work at keeping us, only when kept in our back pocket as we are fleeing sin.”  When our steps slide,  thank God that there is reconciliation with God.