Tom’s Archives

I’ve Dedicated 15 years of my adult life trying to discover “what makes us tick,”

So what have I learned?

1. God may remove a beautiful face to fix the ugly “inner” face of a man or woman.
2. A person is wholly who they are on the inside — a person with inward beauty far exceeds one with merely a veneer.
3. The outer face remains important — Largely to break ice with those mesmerized by the shine of cosmetic disguise.
4. The goal of gaining audience (breaking ice), is to eventually get inside them and let God go to work. God knows how to do the surgery, since He knows the end from the beginning– It may take years. Afterward, the outer prettiness means so much less to them.

That’s all?

No, there’s more:

1. God gives allowance to the loss of a child, to teach us how He felt about the loss of His own.
2. To know certain Fatherly pain, we must experience it for ourselves.
3. This kind of “knowing” is called “privileged information.”

Anything Else?

God allows us to get cancer to wean us of it’s fear. He permits near-death experiences to remove our fear of dying.

God permits us to faint in the battle to reveal the depth of His ever-presence. (and that the battle is His, not ours.)

We fail at our calling and learn of God’s unrepentant call.

Wow — Those are the basics — and now some ramifications.

God can save a person using their empty, hopeless state as a beginning — He reveals their sin problem later.

Frankly God needs nothing but a person’s will to save them, remorse is not necessary.

God will send unlovely and unloving folks to us — when they are family members, we may not have space to run from them.

We learn here the way of the cross and die to ourselves. We hope God’s Word is true and brings resurrection. It’s all a “back to the wall” expedition. Only when nothing, nada, zero, and zip is left, will we dare apply our co-crucifixion. God knows this and creates the tight circumstances. It becomes easier with practice.

Our children may follow our lives and heed our advise. This always surprised me.

We must get to know our spouses, including all their faults. Then can we love them like God loves us.

Okay?

Self-deceit is easy — honesty is harder.

Every Thing we learn never brings the “whole” picture — we must persist more, and frankly, never-endingly, to gain truth.

Folks who discover a system for evaluating the human condition, eventually realize that every person is unique.

“Denial” hides pain, “escape and evasion” flee judgment. These are not God’s methods.

Some of the minds’ greatest skills are its greatest problems.

Any Encouragement?

Yes, ” For He knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.” Psalm 103:14 teaches this. But, Lamentations 3 requires he “put his mouth in the dust, if so be there may be hope.” Job cried, “He hath cast me into the mire, and I am become like dust and ashes.”Job_30:19  Ecclesiastes_3:20 adds  “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.”

Here’s the good news, ”  …evil comes not forth from the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground.” Job 5:6

Friends, we must own ourselves, lock, stock and barrel. We must never dis-own or hide any nook or cranky of our being from God.

We may have been infected of hell but never transformed into a demonic host. Friends, every wretched thing of our life has been redeemed by Christ’s glorious death, burial, resurrection, ascension and session.

we are not the devil. Hallelujah!

What a vital thing to know — that the nature of man is redeemable to God — the devil has no hope of redemption.

As a course of defensive nature we present ourselves to God as “men.”

In God’s redemptive plan, the devil is destroyed and us dustlings go free.  love ya