Bags All Packed

 

In 2011, when I went from commencing to begin to start to think about to actually creating a blog, I had no expectations or plans or even goals. I've been writing to find out what I think in one published form or another since 1990.

What to title the blog came out of nowhere and I vaguely recall it was the result of an exchange I had with an email pen pal of the time. I think my original concept was that I was ready to go, bags all packed. Being a surrendered Christian, I know my flaws very well but I also trust that Christ has those covered so I am not afraid to leave this mortal coil for the next life.

Of late I have begun to think that "bags all packed" might represent something else as well though.

There is no question that the last twelve plus months have seriously impacted the psychic health of most humans on this planet. Social divisions have fractured into unbridgeable chasms, emotions are worn thin and tempers heated to boiling point. 

In the big scheme of things it almost seems like a test somehow: what is our limit and what are we able to endure before we implode? How bad does it have to get before we break up into unmendable pieces or...admit we need help from a Higher Source? 

Suicides are more common, especially in the young and teen demographic. Marriages are dying at a higher rate than even before, which was already at an all time high percentage. Marriages not withstanding, families in general are splintered along political lines, of all things.

If I wanted to get seriously deep here, I'd have to reveal my deep concern for being able to see correlations with Biblical prophecy about the End of Times. Of course, being practical I could also refer to other eras of great stress and turmoil that might have caused similar conclusions of the day as well.  Jesus, Himself, said He didn't know the hour or the day, only the Father knew, so I'm not going to get into those weeds.

The point I'm wrestling with is - what is the point? What should we come away with for all our angst and tribulations in this new normal? Is there something positive to be gained for all this trouble?

Well, for one thing, I considered that many of our struggles are less about outside influences and more about how we, as individuals, handle the slings and arrows we find ourselves dodging.

Maybe this is a good time to do some introspection?  How much truth can we handle, especially about ourselves?

I think it comes to this - on our life journey we each arrive at a crossroads with things both hidden in our pockets, that we brought with us from our beginnings, and things we collected along the way and then stuffed in the invisible bag we lug around on our backs. Some good things and many not so good things. 

We each are a product and sum total of all the attributes that we come preloaded with, starting with our basic personalities, and then added onto all the experiences and conditions that are thrown at us. Which explains why some folks can have very bad childhoods and yet step up to be good parents, while some turn out to be abusers because they were abused. It has to do with both innate and acquired coping skills, perspective and the ability to rise above adversity and hardship. 

Regardless whether we choose to hold ourselves accountable for our circumstances, or blame shift, to transfer our own issues and the consequences of our choices on to someone or something else, we all, at some point in our lives, reach a fork in the road where we have the same question to answer:

What do I want to happen and what do I have to do, to let go of, or step up to, in order to make it happen? 

Ask yourself, what do you want to be written as your final chapter, the recalling of the last path you chose? 

Are you determined to cling to things you've had stuffed in your back pack for the better part of your life, the unhappy ragged bits and pieces, grudges, hurts, like being bullied or neglected, misunderstood or not appreciated, the times you failed or had to quit? Or would you be willing, for the sake of just finishing well, to take your heavy stuffed bag off and walk away to free yourself from the weight of the collected misery you have carried around for so long? 

If you can't let go, if you are determined that all of your problems are external, not internal, that you have no control over your choices, your actions, your responses to the way life comes at you, that you have no obligations to anyone else because of your actions, then you will likely carry your bag all packed to capacity to the last word of your very last paragraph. 

Someone I love said, the best way to have a relationship with God is to first get out of your own way. That could also apply to navigating this often pitted road of life too. We are mostly our own worst enemy.

An opportunist will take advantage of the present conditions of life being turned upside down, by, first, acknowledging we all have baggage. Then opening the bag, looking inside with honesty and making some cleaning out/letting go choices, which lightens the load and instantly opens up options for continuing on in a better, more productive, frame of mind. 

But really the best, most freeing, positive thing you can do for yourself and those you love, is to just set the bag down and walk away from your determination to be burdened and step out, like being reborn, toward God's will for you.

Then take your first breath... again. 

For Him,

Meema

Matthew 11:28-30 RSV

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Why?

 

A big Thank You to Nann for contributing this blog post. :-)

For Him, Meema

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By Nann

The following is an excerpt from Strange Kingdom by Ken Costa that caused me to ponder this and what I thought about it. As usual, my ‘take’ on this does not harmonize with the popular explanation. 

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Why?

That single word reverberates through every human population in every age, through every nation, tribe, and family that has ever existed, through the experience of every single person on the planet who has ever lived.  

At some point in our lives we will find ourselves asking, “Why?” Or, more likely, shouting, screaming, or crying, “Why?”  

Why does a disease devastate whole populations? Why does a ferry go down with the men, women, and children on board lost? Why does an airplane disappear, leaving behind distraught relatives without even a shred of comfort from knowing what happened to their loved ones? Why earthquakes? Why tsunamis? Why the subtle mutations in otherwise good cells that lead to cancer? 

Why sorrow, illness, violence, bereavement? Why are my prayers not answered?  

Yet, in Jesus’ cries from the depths of suffering and violence on the Cross — the deepest grief ever known — He carried our why with Him.

We are not alone. He understands us, He’s been there, and He assures us that He has a plan to wipe away every tear, to make “everything sad... come untrue,” as J. R. R. Tolkien put it at the end of The Lord of the Rings. No one likes tough times, but those tests add power to our testimony.  

If God didn’t withhold from us His very own Son, will God withhold anything we need?  

Suffering is unbearable unless you know God is for you and God is with you. Because if we think amid our pain and suffering that we are forsaken, we could fall into three possible traps: isolation, self-absorption, and condemnation. “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” is one of the most remarkable questions in the history of humanity.   In fact, this is the only time in the Gospels when Jesus prays to God and doesn't use the word Father. Whenever we pray, cry, or scream, “Why?” we are, intentionally or otherwise, placing ourselves alongside Jesus in a kind of communion with the One who asked that same question of His Father.   “Why?   Why have You forsaken Me, Your very own Son?” We might feel so totally abandoned, so thoroughly rejected, so fundamentally lost that all we can do is cry, “Why?”  

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Yes, the suffering that Jesus endured is unfathomable to me.   Never will I deny that.   But I see it like this . . . God had a plan.  Jesus knew that plan before He left the Father’s presence and was in agreement with the plan.  Jesus knew His Father would never leave Him nor forsake Him.  

Jesus, Himself, told the parable of the wicked managers beating those sent previously and that they would murder the Son, the heir.  Nothing the evil ones plan and plot is a secret from Almighty God.   Father knew they would murder His Son.  So they planned to use that death to bring life to creation!   How marvelous is that?  Outsmarting them at their own game!

Jesus knows when we are at the end of our rope - due to an accident, a death, a devastating event - we believe God is not there for us.   So He stated that on the cross . . . ‘I am at the end of my rope - GOD WHERE ARE YOU?’   The darkness around was the heavens telling the story.   Mankind was in gross darkness.   It was separating us from Father.  

Then came the morning.  The darkness vanished.   Then the grave was empty. Father’s plan had been carried out perfectly!!  

We often don’t see the end of the plan when we are suffering through it. In retrospect, if we abide in Christ, we can not only see but marvel at the outcome.  Our part is to obey and submit to the plan - no matter how dark it gets or how much suffering is involved.  

LUKE 8:17 ESV

For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.

Luke 12:2 ESV

Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.

Matthew 21:33-41  ESV

33 “Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country. 34 When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. 35 And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. 36 Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. 37 Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ 38 But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ 39 And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. 40 When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” 41 They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.”  

It's Just Not Fair!

And the big question is: where did Victim Mentality come from? 

It surely didn't materialize to rule us overnight, nor even over years. Those who study human history will assure us that it represents the oft repeated pattern of the rise and fall of civilizations. (A reality that is not all that reassuring, btw.) This slow boiling down of our society to a dry scorched pan, from free, strong, independent thinkers to sheep/group psyche, I am ashamed to admit, likely began with my generation - the Boomers.  

So, the Greatest Generation sacrificed, fought for, and died to give the next generation more opportunities for the good life. And then that generation gave us: 

Free Love - Trust No One Under Thirty - Love Love Love - Love Yourself. The Culture of Drugs - Anything Goes. And the lie of Post Modernism.

Then, as the Hippies' frontal lobes semi-matured and they began to propagate many of us (though not all of us) instilled in our progeny that everyone deserves a trophy so no one 'feels' left out, no one has to 'feel' like a failure. Now, since no one can be a failure, everything anyone does is deemed good, so no need to keep trying. Lowest Common Denominator, Grade on the Curve so no one fails. 

GOOD ENOUGH beats BETTER - no such thing as BEST. How you feel is way more important than what you think so, what you think can be interpreted as:

Everything bad that happens to you is always someone else's fault, definitely not yours because you are good. How/what you feel is the ultimate truth and JUSTICE, for you, requires that you be respected. 

Once the lie that all humans are (not just should be free to try to be) equal in every way had fully infected Higher Education, we were officially credentialed to destroy the concept of excellence in order to keep the playing field, ever so righteously level. This didn't happen randomly either. It was a recipe devised by minions of satan but, of course, to understand this, first you must accept that God exists and, therefore, so does satan. 

If you want to destroy a society that was founded on basic rules of common sense, integrity, honor and civility, begin with the children. Teach the children well, as the song lyrics say.  So, though it might look random, it took careful planning and patience to implement the PLAN and make it 'feel' and 'sound' good in the smallest increments so the change wasn't noticed - until the damage was so severe it was too late to reverse it.  It also required that God allowed it to happen because satan is not equal to God. Why though? Why does God allow bad things to happen? To test our mettle? Can muscles be built without resistance? No pain no gain?

To understand this you have to grasp that all things that man sees as good or bad is not how God sees it. Like children, we want candy for every meal but, like a good parent, sometimes God requires that we eat our vegetables. 

Regardless of DNA, in spite of equitable individual human rights put in place by government that allow anyone to CHOOSE one's own attitude and then be accountable for the choice, to either seek a path of being successful or to settle on simply riding on the coattails of and/or blame others, the foundational, unchangeable laws of the Universe, set in motion by an Omnipotent Creator, determine that, excellence will always outshine mediocrity. Best is achievable but requires some effort. And glitter can never be gold.

In other words, things either work or they don't. 

Unfortunately, in a declining civilization, as mediocrity becomes the standard, excellence is viewed as an anomaly and, in fact, an insult and threat to status quo. In the Age of Victimhood the addiction to the false feel-good drug of SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS is blinding and thus the standards that build and hold civilization up can/must be ignored to justify the new lowered bar. Then when things don't work anymore and anarchy takes over, no one can figure out what just happened because blame shift is the common rule.

In a fully implemented justice warrior society, victims cannot see their own level of success because they only see what they are not/have not and they have been carefully conditioned to believe that it's just not fair if someone else outshines them. They will demand their trophy or they will burn down someone else's to reap the justice they 'feel' is owed to them. Because, you know... it's only fair. 

Reminder: Rome was neither built nor destroyed in a day. But it did fall never to be rebuilt. Those who have believed it could not happen to America need to review the absolutes of history.  

For Him,

Meema