The Need For Prayer

It was never about the lions. The lions are always hungry. It was about a story between God and Daniel.

 Guns are really popular. Guns right now are either angels or demons to people. People everywhere are talking about gun laws and freedoms. There is an outcry on both sides of the coin. However, we see a similar situation, except way worse in the Bible.

Before Christians take arms to fight, as some are threatening, take note of Daniel's response in Daniel 6. He was stripped of his right to pray to his God. The real God. He was told he would be killed if he did so and he did anyway. He didn't hold up a picket sign or march on the Roman capitol. He didn't make a fuss, he simply did as he thought was right in the face of death. They sent him to the lions den and he was unharmed. Those that accused him were then sent and killed immediately...

God is powerful and will shut the mouths of lions if He chooses. We are nothing. We are powerless. We should stop believing otherwise as far as our state of living is concerned. God is in control. Things happen that we consider bad or unjust, yet we do the opposite of Daniel. We fight. We whine. We cry about freedoms.

We are not given freedoms apart from the freedom of God. Neither was Daniel. Did he cry about it and scream about freedom entitlements? No, He just kept praying. The answer is prayer.

Just pray.

Get alone in the house with God and pray. You cannot overthrow the government when  things get voted against you. You are powerless...and that is where God wants us. We need to rely on Him and pray. Submit.




Sing.
Migrate.









Thanks for reading...Z

Saying Goodbye For Good?

It has taken me such a long time to discover some things that I always knew with my mind, but never experienced with my life. There is a difference between the two. People know everything until they have experienced it and have found themselves lost.

Saying goodbye is one of the most difficult things for me to do. I have difficulties leaving things behind, even if they are causing me harm. I have never wanted to ever say goodbye for good to anyone or anything. This is a thought that is so sad when I think about it. To leave it behind and never come bad to it. My dream is to have a time machine. The kind of time machine that will only take you back for 30 minute periods. I don't want to stay there, I just want to revisit. I want to watch myself make all of those decisions I made and experience all of the things I remember as being golden. I want to relive them and then come back home to my beautiful wife and kids who are more than I have ever deserved.

I have everything. I have all I have ever wanted and more than I could have expected, and yet I still want to go back and live it again. I realize now that I am making a heaven for myself, one much different than the one God has prepared. One far less beautiful than what God has in mind. I want to relive the sorrow. I am not sure why, maybe the train wreck syndrome. I just don't want to let it go...it just doesn't feel right. Those times were me. That was me. Those were the things that made me what I am now and what I will be. I should be moving forward without looking back. Well I am moving forward, sometimes there is no choice in that, but I am constantly looking back. This brings me to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible. There was this place...these two connected cities where the people had lost all desire to please God or to follow even a moral code of some sort. They were a city of rapists. God sends angels to remove the one righteous family and the people line up at the door to rape God's angels. Lot, the righteous man, agrees to leave after much prayer and arguing with God and as his family leaves, God tells them not to look back...no matter what. Lot's wife disobeys and looks back and sees the horror of a city full of people turned to salt. She then turns to salt also. She had one job and that was to move forward to something beautiful. Instead she could not say goodbye, no matter how disgusting the things that were behind her. This is a lesson to us. We should heed it. I should heed it. I/you cannot live in the past. It may bring back nostalgic feelings that we want to cling to, but we must let those things just be feelings. The word nostalgia means basically, a "Pain for the past." In the human body, pain is a warning. It's a sign of something wrong. The point is to correct what causes the pain. For some, this is easy, for others the most difficult thing life could bring.

For the past several years I have been working on goodbye. I have been trying to say goodbye to my brother, who is gone from here and somewhere else beautiful, but still so much of what drives my thoughts. I've been trying to say goodbye to the bad habits my actions have produced in my life. I have been trying to say goodbye to a certain set of railroad tracks that once almost made my life a tragedy.

I am a positive person. This has not always been, but by the grace of God, I have become a positive thinker. I love to laugh. I make jokes wherever I am because life should never be taken too seriously. We are a mist that appears for a while, then vanishes. I try to stand out to every person I meet, so that they can see that God is good. But I just cannot keep from looking behind me. I cannot find it in me to finally say goodbye.

To be honest, I don't even know how or where to start.





Sing.
Migrate.








Thanks for reading...Z