The One Thing Needful

You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart.-- Jeremiah 29

The amazing thing is that God designed us to be able to communicate with Him. We blew it but He sent us the Messiah Jesus to restore what we lost and a lot more besides.

What is man that Thou art mindful of him? -- Somewhere in psalms
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Thou hast made us for Thyself alone and our hearts are restless until we rest in Thee. Augustine ,br>
The chief end of man is to glorrify God and enjoy Him forever. -- Westminster Shorter Catechism ,br>
At Thy right hand are pleasures for evermore. -- Psalm 16:11

As the deer panteth after the water brooks, so longs my soul after Thee.

He that cometh to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him -- Hebrews 11:7


I am nothing, I have nothing, I desire nothing but Jesus Christ." This was the mantra as it were of fourteenth century Roman Catholic mystic Walter Hilton, and I like the brevity of this way of stating the essential mental set that takes us to the presence of God. It affirms both the command to deny ourselves and take up our cross and poverty of spirit. Hilton unfortunately had too many Romanisms to make him a trustworthy teacher but I nevertheless like this brief formula of his.

Finally a nod to John of the Cross' poem about the Dark Night of the soul. It's a treatise on the mystical path to God and it has nothing whatever to do with suffering which is how too many people take it. If there is any suffering at all involved in it, he probably disucseusses it in his commentary on his poem called "The Aescent of Mount Carmel" but just to read the poem itself certainly implies no suffering: "on a dark night," it starts out, "kindles in love with yearnings," -- does that sound l9ike suffering? No, the "dark night' he is talking about is the quieting of the senses that connect us to this physical world, and the clamorings of the self flife. When these are quieted, put under the blanket of dark night as it were, then the spirit can be freed to come into the presence of gOD.

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To be dead to myself and alive in Thee, empty of myself and full of Thee is my prayer. And I know I can't do this, I'm way too full of myself but hope that You might do it for me. Amen

Rape Victim and Abortion Continued Part 3

Maybe I got it said well enough but I keep thinking I didn't, it 't quite clear so here's another go at it. The problem with the supposed warm-hearted compassion to the woman who got pregnant from a rape is that it shows the basic cold-heartedness of the pro-choice position against the unborn baby. Tehy don't skip a b3eat when they say it's a clear case for an abortion, don't hesitate for a moment over the fact that they are talking about killing a human being. Even if they are willing to consider that moral questions kick in at some stage of a pregnancy there's no sense that they ever really see it as a human beintg. maybe a potential human being but in the rather distant sense that it really isn't a human being yet.

So they get all morally outraged at the suggestion that she should not have an abortion because in their mindset three isn't really an argument on the other side at all, it's just a cold-hearte person who wants to make the raped woman miserable for some unfathomable reason. As wih most positions on the left it's all about the person, it' s always an ad hominem, it's not about arguments and reasons, you're just a good or a bad person and if you suggest that even in the case of rape an abortionisnt' warranted that's just you being a bad person because in their mindset the baby isn't a human being so there isn't any argument. . And I don't think they are even conscdious of the fact that this is their mindset.

There are rare situations where the baby must be sacrifced for the health of the mother and that could apply in the case of a rape that threatens her mental health, but for the most part these are all just made-up situations. Pro-choicers often talk about the unborn child as if it were nothing more than an alien growth in the woman, a parasite or the like. This is the attitude betrayed but the way abortion is considered to be the only reaosnable response to pregnancy caused by a rape. That the baby is a separate independent individual is not part of the mindset. If it were it would be possible to consider it as a being apart from the rapist. But they connect it to the rapist as if it were this aliena extension of him ande that's the end of it. Getting ride of it is getting rided of the painfujl memory of the rape. And I don't doubt that in some cases that's true, but I also know that no0t all cases are the same and that some women are capable orf regarding the child as a person in its own right.

Well, I may still not yave said quite what I meant but I think it's a little clearer.