Your Dying Spouse 409 - The Necessity {FMF}

There are things we can justifiably hate, and we're enjoined to love but can do so in excess...and thus we find a necessity of balance. This is the final part of a three-part series beginning with The Hate and The Love.

I can hate what's happening to my body, and to my life...if the premise that illness entered Creation through the Fall of Man, and original Sin, it's certainly justifiable. God hates it too. I'm in good company.

And I can love the parts of my life that make life bearable...my wife and dogs, the many friends whom I will never meet, and the fragments of my old life that remain intact. nothing wrong with this, except for one thing...I have noticed, in my heart, that they can tie me, rather desperately, to the world.

Case in point: I am writing these words a coupe of hours after watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and found the experience...well, depressing. For one thing, I felt very out of step with the reflection of popular culture, being, in a way, let on shore while the River of Life flows on...but perhaps more profoundly, the transience of ife really came through to me, that what's an object of love and joy today will tomorrow be cast aside. Not just consumer products, but beloved animals, and even people.

That's the world, and its loves.

So we need something more, I think, to keep from spinning off the rails, and the only more that we can have is a grounding in the transcendent.

The things we hate with justification can only be contained withing a framework of justice, and that's something we can't find within ourselves; it has to come from without, else it simply becomes personal preference or worse, something that slyly caters to our advantage.

Likewise, the object of love has to have something innate, something to make it worth loving beyond personal affection. There are thousands of people that claim to ';love' movies or television programmes, for instance, that hold nihilism as their object. The affection and fascination are real, but the object's not worthy. (As an example, take a show I like, Star Trek: Voyager. It's well-acted, well-made, and has an unfortunate undercurrent of hostility to religion, if not to the transcendent. It's a bit inconsistent; sometimes I wonder if there might not have been a deist among the writers, but I digress.)

So we need more.

And that more is God.

We're forever subordinate to a Creator; it's very true (and can be, for the 'freethinker', uncomfortable) that in Him we live and move and have your being.

Nowhere else.

If we hate alongside Him, and love within His pastured fields, we are fulfilling our purpose...but if we stray from these, we can become lost indeed. He can't go off on our own; we have to stay with the familiar, HIS familiar. (Familiar is the Five Minute Friday prompt this week.)

We can wander far astray, left to our own devices, and there may be no way back.

Musical accompaniment is from AJ Michalka, with All I've Ever Needed, from the film Grace Unplugged.

lease pardon my slow response to comments. I'm doing my best, and your comments are really precious to me.

Still hoping to get the new and improved version of Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart up and running in the near future. Just haven't had the energy to do it yet...but if you would like to read it, please say so in your comment and I'd be glad to send you a PDF (which should fit your Kindle).

I have another blog, "Starting The Day With Grace". The focus is a grace quote from someone you might not expect (like, say Mick Jagger) and a short commentary. I hope you'll join me.

Marley update... been moved to a sanctuary, and Bay County will revise their 'dangerous dog' codes.

WE MADE A DIFFERENCE!

And marley has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.

If you can, please do leave a comment. I am trying to answer all, and I am failing, but please know this - I read and treasure each one.

Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.