20 Nov 2009

He Speaks therefore I am.

He begins to speak and everything changes. The Story begins and nothing will ever be the same. HisStory is set in motion. Not everyone can unfold a new reality simply by opening their mouth. But He is not like anyone who exists…in fact He is…pre-existent. We can’t really understand that, the best we can do is say it. Because our minds exist we can’t truly process pre-existence as a way of being. You just have to take my word for it. We can think about it we just can’t think from it.
So He opens His mouth, and what is In-Him becomes Around-Him. Everything described in the previous post, the forest-fire nature that is His Consuming Nature, begins to come out of pre-existence and into existence. Out of His Heart and into space.

In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth. (Genesis 1:1)

How He did this matters.

He “Spoke”. I am not quite sure if He actually has lips or vocal chords, but He clearly has some aspect of Himself that expresses outwardly what is true of Him inwardly. Some part of His Nature brings things from pre-existence into existence. What we would call our “mouth” He calls His Logos, or in English, His Word. It (He) is the part of God that makes known the mysteries of the inner-workings of our Creator. Not just known but know-able. The Logos is the part of Him that makes available and accessible to humans the mysteries and nature of God.

In the beginning was The Word and The Word was God and The Word was with God. (John 1:1)

The Bible says He “calls into existence things that are not”. But that description comes from our vantage point. He might say He makes manifest, or visible to humans, what has always been, in Him. “Existence” is where He deposits these things but they have “always been” in His nature.

The visible creation makes known the invisible attributes of God. (Romans 1:20)

Out of Him came mountains and oceans, out of Him came DNA and Plankton. Out of Him came romance and adventure, out of Him came life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And out of Him came all that is good and right in the world. He brought these things into a realm and a state where men could interact with them.

And then He made men.

Amazingly, this part of Him that makes known and know-able the inner mysteries of God would one day become a man. Central to the story, His Story, is the act of making known, the part of Him which would become like His creation on behalf of His creation. Central to His Story is how He would act and what He would do as an actor in His own play. But I am getting ahead of myself.

For now it is important to know that the way He made stuff was though this mechanism in HIs nature that He called Logos. The closest thing we have to this act is speaking. But it is not really close.

When we speak, out of our mouths come symbols (Words, pieces of language) which represent realities. When He speaks, realities actually come out. How He wrote the story, and how He moved the story becomes an important part of the story itself. He put it in motion by speaking, and He is still speaking today. Listen.

15 Nov 2009

Where was He?

Next, to really adequately set the stage for the story, it is of great importance to establish the answer to this question.  Where was God when it all began?  This is actually not quite the right question, since “Where?” is a question of geography, and God had not yet invented geography in the opening chapters.  However, for us to grasp this idea we must start with ideas that our minds, in their current state, can grasp.  We cannot really envision reality before geography.

So the actual answer to the question, “Where was God?” when He began to unfold the story is that, He Was.  In the same way that the answer to the question “Who is He?” is that He Am.  Our minds come to the end of their circuits while trying to apprehend this, but isn’t it fun to try?

One way to say “He Was” is to say He Was Everywhere.  Again because our mind automatically applies geography to this image, the statement is not wholly accurate. It might be just as accurate to say, “Everywhere Was Him”.  We could almost minimize Him by thinking of Him as being everywhere, because we might see Him as being a really good multi-tasker, but perhaps spread a little thin.  Too busy to really engage in some aspects of the Universe.  However, keep in mind, in the preface to The Story the universe Was Him.

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(as a reference point, the points of light in this Nebulae are new stars being created, and this Nebulae is one of thousands upon thousands exploding outward in every direction as our universe expands)

Scientists try to explain these ideas with limited minds as well, as if we would try to explain an elephant only using a microscope.  They would say that prior to the “Big Bang”, which is their explanation for the genesis of matter and reality, that all the matter of the universe was a supercharged dense mass, roughly the size of the head of a pin.  They would say that this mass then exploded outwardly to begin to emit everything that we now see as our constantly expanding universe.

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What none of us can picture or conceptualize, or even adequately describe is a reality altogether different from the one we now inhabit.  But won’t it be fun to try to describe it.

First, it is essential to recognize that this reality is a Spiritual one.  Because we so often think of “Spiritual Things” relative to our existence, we don’t image in our minds, that entire dimensions, or realms exist which our spiritual in make-up.  Science cannot describe a type of real, or reality that it cannot measure, envision, or…well…describe.

We picture space as a vast, emptiness, however, images from space do not show this at all.  Space is filled with Stuff.  Visit the Hubble Telescope site to see what this looks like.  In this same way, the Place-That-God-Inhabited, also known as The-Place-That-Was-God is a raging inferno filled with everything that is/was/will-be true about God.  Picture a forest fire consuming large chunks of land, and the fire as the essence of such a place.  Heat everywhere, smoke everywhere, bright flames, everywhere. This is the atmosphere in a realm in which God IS. (or, which IS God).

Heat, light, smoke….OK, these things are destructive, not such a great picture right!?  Except again, our current perceptual mechanisms limit us.  These things are desturctive TO ANYTHING THAT IS NOT LIKE THEM.  However they strengthen anything that IS LIKE THEM.  Add heat, it gets stronger, add smoke it increases and is increased,

The Consuming Fire that is our God, would be destructive to anything that enters this inferno which might be UNLIKE the nature of this inferno.  This pulsating mass of LIFE and LOVE and POWER, and PEACE welcomes and strengthens anything that is Like Him in nature.  It’s a good thing isn’t it that we are created in His Image.  It would be risky for us to be in His presence if we were no longer like Him in Nature.

Where God was as He set out to unfold the story, was in a realm that was Wholly Himself, and Entirely Consumed with His Nature.  The Beginning and the End. Like a furnace burning with the source of all that IS.

Perhaps this pinhead idea that scientists describe is simply the place in the Fabric of the Material Realm where God first broke through, and through that pin hole He Exploded a visual, material expression of His nature from this Spiritual realm, which was Filled with Him-Ness, into a material realm, which is still continually being filled, expanded outward in every direction with a material image of a Limitless God.

In the Beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.

But before that He Was.

7 Nov 2009

Simple and Complex

The Story is simple.  The Story is of Ultimate Love expressed fully.  What makes it complex is the details.  How would perfect love be perfectly expressed? To whom would it be expressed?  Like every simple story, it would call for a storyline, a stage, a context and characters.  It is the fact that we are the recipients that makes the story complex.

Perfect Love Perfectly Expressed involves The Great Lover, all-knowing, with all-power, and the most fragile and weak beloved.   For great Love to be great, it must not depend on the recipient.  In fact, love is expressed in it’s fullest when the Lover overcomes obstacles to loving.  Great Love is finds it’s fullest expression when the Lover loves in the face of more than just obstacles but love-less-ness.  When the recipient abandons, wounds, and betrays, and The Great Love overcomes…now Great Love is finding it’s deepest expression.

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When Great Love pursues and restores the beloved, now it is finding it’s strongest voice.  When Love heals, and pays a great price to regain the beloved, this is Love.

No greater love exists, Jesus told us, than the kind of love that will compel a man to lay down his life for another.

The Story is simple.  Perfect Love Expressed.  It is us… messy, complex, stubborn, humans that make it so complex.  To be loving is relatively simple…to love me…well this is harder.  You have to know me, pursue me, overcome my frailty, and be willing to be hurt by me.  To be loving is generic…to love the world, and the billions of individuals who inhabit it…Now we begin to see The Story.

6 Nov 2009

God is Bigger

The most difficult part about beginning “The Story” is accurately setting the stage.  In describing the Kingdom of God, I talk about the “Place” where it all started.  To set the stage adequately,we must begin with the Person, more than the place.  Having said that, let me first say I have set out to do the impossible; to describe God.

For The Story to really make any sense we must begin with the Author.

Paul gives us a warning in the book of Romans that we must not assume that God is “such a one as ourselves…”  Sometimes, because it is so difficult to describe the Infinite, it helps to at least acknowledge the limitations we face in trying to describe the The Eternal One, with words and syllables.

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Whenever someone tries to describe something you have not seen or experienced, it is our natural tendency to pull up files of our experience and try to find a comparison.  “I’ve never been to Montana, but it must be like…(Colorado…Idaho…Switzerland…our file search begins, so we an categorize the thing we are hearing about…)”  Our mind instinctively compares what we DO NOT know to what WE DO KNOW.

So Paul says, do not let God be compared to man as you try to comprehend Him.  We begin to think of HIm as like a man, but…really really strong…really really smart…really really…well, you fill in the blank.  We have never encountered an Eternal Creator face to face, so we bring up comparisons and turn up the volume on them.

If you saw the movie “Independence Day” you may remember the scene where the spaceships moved in.  Over multiple major metropolitan areas, the sky suddenly went dark, and everyone stopped and looked up.  The movie succeeded at showing what happens when the human scale of size is suddenly exceeded.  These were not big spaceships, they were horizon dominating, sky darkening, perspective changing ships.  And along with this game changing visual came the implications. What must this mean?  Are they good, or evil?  If the ships are this big, what about the creatures inside?  Is this the end of the world as we know it?

So if our eyes could see…

And if our ears could hear…

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We might begin to have that perspective changing view of THE ONE Who Was and Is and Is To Come.  THE ONE who with a word brings solar systems into existence.   THE ONE who never began and never will cease.  The Beginning and The End.  THE ONE who if our eyes could see, would more than dominate the horizon, He would fill every corner of anywhere you could turn.  Why do I feel like quoting Veggie Tales at this moment?

bob the Tomato

God is bigger than the boogie man.
He’s bigger than Godzilla and the monsters on TV.
Oh, God is bigger than the boogie man,
And he’s watching out for you and me.

Perhaps the urge to quote Tomatoes named Bob is because they now turn our attention to the implications.  We must first comprehend His incomprehensability.  After we settle this, we at least try to understand Him.

We have at least tried to say He is BIG. But if  He is that BIG what is He like?

Since we are on the front end of trying to tell His Story, it is important to try to say something about why the story unfolds, and this is directly tied to the answer to the question, “What is God like?”

In God’s ultimate moment of declaring His most favorite (glorious) attribute, He shows Moses His GOODNESS. (Exodus 33:19) Once again we must be careful because all of us know good people.  This is not the same.

Everything good that exists issued forth from the Internal Nature of God, and because of HIS VERY GOODNESS, this Internal Goodness, must also be expressed as External Creation.  One as GOOD as He, could not withhold outwardly the Goodness that is true Inwardly.  If HE did, It would be selfish, and that is NOT GOOD.  God’s very goodness lead Him to take every next step, and led Him to every aspect of the story.  Every chapter, every paragraph in the unfolding story is both and explanation and an expression of His Goodness.

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Sky’s are vast and blue because it is an expression of some attribute of God.  Oceans are endless and filled with life because it is some expression of the goodness of God.  DNA functions to replicate complex human characteristics generation after generation because it is an expression of some attribute of God.  And the Giant Story of Redemption exists because it is an expression of an attribute of God and His Goodness.

Do you see why it is so important to begin here?  The Whole Story exists and is expressed because of the Unending Goodness of the Author and Finisher of the story.  Your personal story and the global, universal story, every aspect of it is a demonstration of the Fundamental, Raw, Explosive Goodness of God.

For many of us, and in many circumstances this does not make sense.  But as the readers, listeners and participants in the STORY, we must begin and end with this assurance.

God is simply being His Ultimate Good Self.  And out of that flows the rest of the story.

2 Nov 2009

Telling THE Story

I have been thinking about beginning a long series re-telling THE STORY.  You know, the story of all time.  The “In the beginning God…” story.  I am captivated by how unlikely we are to really get it.

So as I thought about it, and why it is that we are so unlikely to get it, a thought occurred to me.

Imagine with me, if you will, a civilization four hundred years in the future.  Post apocalyptic, for my purposes.  Not the Biblical apocalyse, but some kind of world disaster.  You know, a “Mad Max”, “I am Legend” kind of world.  Our modern buildings and culture have long since been overgrown and disintegrated.  Man again lives off the land, with no electricity, no internet, no power at all other than fire, and human will.

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Now in that world, imagine what it is like to discover signs of our civilization.   Ruins of our modern buildings, or underground cables….rows of telephone poles that no one has had a use for in the last several hundred years.  Over the centuries, stories have passed down, and been distorted of what it was like to live in the “great civilization” but no one really remebers.  It is too far in the past.

Now in this world, imagine trying to explain to someone how a turbine works.  Imagine trying to explain how to load a profile picture on Facebook.  Imagine trying to tell someone how to set up a computer network or log on to the World Wide Web (that’s what www stands for in case you have forgotten.)

Trying to explain to someone how to do something, or how something works is difficult even in the existence of our culture. Imagine if these processes have been non-existent for a few centuries and you now try to explain to someone how they work.  People in such a world would have no framework with which to understand such conversation.

Consider now these words from Jesus to Nicodemus:

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I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony.  I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?

John 3:11-12

How then will you believe…?  It is not necessarily a rebuke.  It’s a legitimate question.  If you have no experience and no framework from which to understand Jesus words, HOW will you believe?

It would be like digging up a four hundred year old Mac Book Pro from the ruins and trying to conceptualize a video chat, when you have never even seen video of any sort…what faculties and framework must we open up in order to really hear the story of a place we have never been?  Not just a place…a kind of place unlike anything we know…a realm…a…kingdom.

How we would believe may be the most important part of telling the story.

Several ways to believe exist.  And the WAY you choose to believe filters what happens to you when you believe.  The way you believe determines what you believe.

We can believe by agreeing intellectually, but having no internal image of the thing with which we agree.  We can believe by not disagreeing. We can believe by thinking the story teller must be right, so why argue?

Or how about this?  We can believe by assuming our faculties, and experiences are incomplete, and by allowing our whole self, our mind, our emotions, our heart,  our deepest self to receive something that is clearly bigger than us.

Let’s try.

27 Oct 2009

On Donuts and Dominion

The air smells like leaves, and enters my lungs differently than the humid Texas air.  The leaves remaining on the trees look like flames, with their bright orange, yellow and red hues.  This is also different than Texas.   I have been in Texas more than twenty-five years.  My life is anchored there.  Right now I am in the land of my childhood, southeastern Michigan.  I just had a fresh donut (well…Ok…three), and hot cider at a local Cider Mill.  I haven’t done that in decades.

October road

So while I am here, I notice something that is more visceral than conscious.  These experiences are memories that I have not been remembering.   Something in me is connected to them, though it is faint.  The air, the leaves, the smell. it more than familiar, it is embedded.

I am not so much longing for something, or reminiscing.  I am really just noticing how much is stored in me that I am unaware of while I walk around.  Friends names and faces, familiar experiences, or locations, seasons in life that leave their mark on my soul.  All those  things seem to be stored somewhere in me.

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It makes me think of one of my favorite stories.  True or not, I am uncertain, but the story is re-told of the three-year-old boy who stands over his baby brothers crib.  Looking at the serene face of his infant brother, he says, “As soon as you can talk, you will have to tell me about God.  I am already starting to forget…”.

I think that certain places. moments and experiences remind us of the things that are stored in us.  Some of these things are memories of childhood experiences, some I believe are deeper than that. Some of the things stored inside us have to do with the Image of God in us, whether we have consciously experienced it or not.  Certainly these are things we are made for, like the Lion born in captivity, that still has an innate awareness of the jungle he was made to rule.

Why do we desire to stand on top of mountains?  Why do we have appetites for solving dilemmas?  Why do we enjoy speed, or weightlessness, or increased strength?  I am convinced all of these things are stored in us.  However foggy they may be because of wear and tear, I am certain they are in there.

We are made to stand along side the Ruler of the Universe, and do our part.  Being made in His image is about much more than thumbs and noses, it is about nature and capacity.  It is about love and about influence.  It is about the ongoing desire to right wrongs and to enjoy beauty.

Buried in us, deeper than a childhood memory of autumn and cider mills, is a code.  A design.  A nature which will find expression.  I hope it is sooner and not later.

I am pretty sure that our thinking has something to do with how we lose sight of this.  Thinking the same day after day, we start to assume that we are made for day-after-day.  Our mind builds a much smaller world than we were made for, because of the limitations of our mind.  Thinking “the same” seems to shrink our world, and ironically our shrinking world seems to makes us think “the same” even more.

You have to choose on purpose to think differently.

22 Oct 2009

Thinking Routinely

A good friend of mine just got back from a trip.  In California she spent time with two different groups, helping them think differently and move further down their journey to freedom.  I watched her face while she talked about.  She was tired but refreshed.  What is it about stepping outside our routine that makes thinking differently so normal?

I realized this morning with a sigh of relief that we start Kairos again today.  This will be the last of five of these events we host in 2009.  It is a great deal of work, but I am energized, because we stop everything else and focus.  What is it about stepping outside our routine that makes thinking differently so normal?

Moses was walking through the desert, and the Bible says He turned aside to see what kind of sight he was seeing.  He saw a bush which burned but was not consumed, and his whole life changed.  What is it about stepping outside our routine that makes thinking differently so normal?

Jesus took a detour to travel through an area, not normal traveled by His people.  By a well, He had an encounter with a woman.  This encounter changed her life, and her community forever.  What is it about stepping outside our routine that makes thinking differently so normal?

I do not wish to convey in any way that God is not with you in your routine.  Of course He is, I just think we are less likely to notice Him. I think we will all discover is that familiarity breeds…well…familiarity.  In our routine, we find it less likely to observe the sacred and the supernatural.  In the familiar we seem to expect less, that which is unfamiliar.  We may even look right at it, and not see what is right in front of us.

What if within your routine, you stopped thinking routinely, and allowed God to show you what you miss because of familiarity?

17 Oct 2009

Thinking Differently: Keys to Freedom

It is close to the time that I will be able to announce a timeline on completion and release of the book, Thinking Differently:  Keys to Freedom.  While we wait, this video is an overview of the concepts which will launch the early portions of the book.  Enjoy, and pass it on!!

Until All Are Free….

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/7105387[/vimeo]

14 Oct 2009

Thinking Differently Right Now

Today I plan to write a very short post, and then take the rest of my time to actually think differently and not just write about it.  If you are a regular reader, feel free to use the extra time to think differently yourself.

Just a reminder, thinking differently is not the same thing as thinking different.

“Different” is an adjective and describes nouns.  In this case, the content of your thoughts.

“Differently” is an adverb, and describes verbs.  In this case the processes and mechanisms of your thoughts.

To think “different” today, means you think about something other  than what you were going to think about.

To think differently means you may think about the same things that you would have but you use different mechanisms and processes.  You think with your heart instead of your brain.  You look for God’s perspective instead of rehearsing your own.  You consider possibilities other than the ones that have become your default setting.  You consider God’s intent, and motive toward you as a new factor in your thoughts.  You listen first for the voice of God, instead of pushing “play” on your own recorded and redundant thoughts.

What are some of the processes and mechanisms that help you think differently?

On your mark, get set…..Think Differently.

11 Oct 2009

Promo Video: Thinking Differently

Keep an Eye  on bobhamp.com for news as we get ready to release my book soon.

[vimeo width="640" height="352"]http://vimeo.com/6956909[/vimeo]

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