Here am I.
I’m so confused.
Standing here wondering
What more have I to lose…
My only hope,
To comprehend
How this came to be
And the purpose in His hand.
I need to know.
My drug’s the clarity I seek.
When I find it for a moment
I can scarcely breathe;
Everything is slowed.
Whirlwind ride that’s killing me,
Brought to a pause and I
See Whom I believe.
Copyright 2016, L.L. Shelton
My Beloved Father in Heaven,
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to make this plea in a public place for I hope that it will find a home in the hearts of others who want these same things for which I pray.
Please forgive me when I fail you and provide me the strength to be more nearly representative of you each day.
By your Grace, please allow that I am never made to stand against my fellow human being. Yet if it must be, grant me the fortitude to bear it.
By your Grace, allow me rather in spite of all my human frailty to forgive, and yet in Truth to uphold your mercy and your justice knowing and accepting you to be the judge of souls and that your’s is the only legitimate judgement; giving me leave to enjoy others in both loving fellowship and loving witness and permitting me the discernment to realize the difference.
By your Grace, please allow my human American brothers within and outside of The Faith sight, that we may continue to imagine a pure vision free of the persecution of one another, and full of love for one another as human beings created in your image.
By your Grace, allow America to continue in true wisdom and to provide a secure home in which all have opportunity to worship you freely; a home for the weak, the downtrodden, and the oppressed- though it be of great cost to us, and do continue your blessing upon us and make a great human family of us in spite of our diversity and because of our commonalities.
By Your Grace, My Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.
2017, L.L. Shelton
Have you heard the one about the psychotic and the neurotic? The psychotic knows that two plus two equals five. The neurotic knows that two plus two equals four, but he worries about it. There’s an education is this bit of humor!
How does one arrive at a disturbed character? This is not a rhetorical question. One arrives at a disturbed character by continually ignoring three things:
1. The Genuine Existence of God
2. The Authentic Character of God
3. The Justice System of God
The Bible tells us clearly that every human is equipped with a conscience and that the conscience is there to point him or her toward God; to reveal His very genuine existence as well as His authentic character, and to make obvious His definition of right and wrong- His system of justice.
The Scriptures also tell us that the man or woman who does not see any benefit in retaining this knowledge of conscience will eventually be possessed of the depraved mind that is left to him or to her. The Bible tells us that this depraved mind is capable of all types of evil- probably beyond what some who have thoroughly nurtured the conscience are capable of imagining.
This depraved mind is the one that displays the disturbed or disordered character; this mind is held captive by a system of belief that has developed a set of core values (to direct the soul) that is selfish to the degree of being diabolical. This mind is the antithesis of the mind of God, if you will allow, an anti-Christ.
How does one keep himself or herself from arriving at this reprehensible state?This also is not a rhetorical question. The answer is evident. One must continually nurture belief in the three things one’s conscience has been designed to bring to attention:
1. The Genuine Existence of God
2. The Authentic Character of God
3. The Justice System of God
From the beginning, each and every time one is situationally placed so that it is necessary to purposely acknowledge these three things one must be made to do so- forced by his or her own will to acknowledge the conscience or by the will of an earthly authority figure such as a parent, a teacher, or other official to do so as the conscience must be the arbitrator of what many theologians refer to as common grace; and the truly converted under specific grace if momentarily and specifically submissive, shall be aided further by yielding to the will of The Holy Spirit of God within the self so accessing the wisdom and power available to him or her.
The person who consciously and continually engages in an effort to refute or to silence the conscience will naturally digress to the condition of the disturbed character. The disturbed character will appear as having no conscience and will yet be a “functioning” member of the community. A disordered character is displayed by one who was once only disturbed but has now slipped into the realm of the surely dysfunctional (rendered incapable of carrying out the requisite responsibilities of society).
The failure to nurture the conscience is the failure to nurture Truth and will surely result in the demise of the individual and the eventual destruction of any general population in which these individuals are prevalent.
Notably, George K. Simon, Jr., Ph.D., has done a beautiful job of further explanation, and in giving socially acceptable as well as academically responsible language to the subject matter found here and in our Bibles (particularly in the book of Romans), in the book he authored: Character Disturbance, The Phenomenon of Our Age.
We must take seriously the view of ourselves found in God’s Holy Word for the protection of ourselves, our loved ones, and for the benefit of humanity as a whole. May God help us!
Copyright 2017. L.L. Shelton
You are the first page and the last.
You are the future and the past.
You are the epitome of every view.
The Story belongs to you.
You are the reason and the rhyme.
You are the space and the time.
You are the old and you are the new.
The Story belongs to you.
You are the whole and so the part.
You are the mind and so the heart.
You are the One; we await your cue.
The Story belongs to you.
Copyright 2017. L.L. Shelton.
The string is the wave.
Hallelujah He saves!
Seven point eight three,
The frequency,
That transfigures you and me!
Absorbing Light,
My eye can see Right!
The frequencies
Man made to see
Interfere with You and me.
Copyright 2016, L.L. Shelton
In earth a cold harsh path
Had been mapped to feel my feet,
Carved especially for me the ruts,
Groove often ran most deep.
Residing in a violent storm
Black sludge encased my limbs,
Offering to smother me,
Yet He produced a hymn.
Attuned only to that song
Anchored firmly in my heart,
Shadows might have overtaken me.
But I was meant to whistle in the dark.
She says I tend to stir the soul
Unaware the spoon within my grasp,
Noticing too late the moments,
Tangled solidly within my clasp;
As a murderer stands heedless
To the blood upon his hands,
As a lover lies his passion spent,
Incognizant the thorns upon the land.
Oblivious to markers obvious,
Simply noted by an ordinary mind,
Mid-event I’m visionless,
Maybe I was by His Grace made blind.
Experience lies fixed I find,
Dwelling soundly in my being,
As I am rendered only feeling,
Sightless I am seeing.
Impetuous is flip side
Of spontaneously kind,
Fanciful a weakness
Until one must escape the time.
Copyright 2016. L.L. Shelton
(An Addendum to, Brief Thoughts of Love)
My Young Friend,
Each of us is composed of both physicality- our body and the stuff therein, and of a soul or spirit- the eternal self; that was a thought in the mind of God before our physical existence and destined to continue long after our body has perished. We are each in possession of a mind- emotion and intellect (albeit there are varying degrees of functionality among them) and along life’s way we each develop a personality and a sexuality, both a reflection of a deeper development- that of character. Character is the essence of who you are; it is your nature. These things are inextricably intertwined until the day of physical death. Until then, one can not function apart from the other and each is connected to and affected by the other. This is a terrifically complicated and marvelous design.
God has created our sexuality specifically to allow for and to encourage the most intimate level of communication in relationship that two people and their Heavenly Father can together experience. He designed this aspect of the system to lend us the ability to procreate and to grant us the capability of relating in a way that is illustrative of that way in which The Trinity relates, and of the way in which God in Christ relates to His people. Also, it is to be a reward unique to the covenant marriage of a man and a woman in the Presence of God. It may be startling to consider that God is a part of the expression of one’s sexuality, and yet it should be obvious. God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere at once. As Christians, we are promised that His Holy Spirit lives in us- all the time. Our God does not slumber or sleep, rather He carefully watches over us continually.
However, because we are living in the contaminated environments of the earth and of our own fleshly bodies, we are apt to the perversion of our sexualities. Though there are myriad natural consequences as a result of expressing one’s sexuality outside of the one relationship for which it was designed, and those consequences are always spiritually degrading, often emotionally detrimental, and many times physically debilitating; still we are highly likely to misuse this aspect of ourselves, and yet Christ insists that we are to strive for sexual purity.
Interestingly, Christ is apparently unconcerned with the technicalities of things surrounding human sexuality; things such as whether or not a person should date at this age or that, whether a kiss is sexual or not, or that a person refrain from intercourse until marriage. It is possible that I have, again, startled you. I mean to convey that Christ’s concern is for something infinitely greater- our sexual purity; and sexual purity has its roots in the imagination. It is in our imaginations that He desires to reign supreme. Pure sexuality begins in the thought life and can never be achieved apart from it.
Sexual purity is maintained through the constant effort to view God, ourselves, and others appropriately, as living beings valued beyond price, worthy of sacrificial love; as opposed to objects to be used and abused according to our whims or our erroneous desires.
In God’s economy, there is truly no need for such deliberations as whether or not to hold hands on the first date; as He has in Christ surely freed us from endless and rigorous contemplations of the nature of “angels on the head of a pin” rather, God has allowed for us to be (in Him) all that we can be!
In His Love,
An Old Friend
See Psalm 51, Matthew 19, Mark 7
Copyright, 2012. L.L. Shelton