Ephesians 3 comes to mind as I ponder what God is laying on my heart.
7 I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace given me through the working of his power. 8 Although I am less than the least of all the Lord’s people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ, 9 and to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God, who created all things. 10 His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, 11 according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. 12 In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence. 13 I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory. Ephesians 3:7-13 NIV
Lots to ponder there.
My heart has taken me to Romans 14:23, but first read the whole context of that punch line!
23 But whoever has doubts is condemned if they eat, because their eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin. Romans 14:23 NIV
From one scripture to another. Romans 16:25-27 contains that one phrase> “…the obedience that comes from faith…”
We first must understand what it meant to the original hearers, the original audience. We must factor in the historical distance, cultural distance, and the language itself, that is not only Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, but ANCIENT Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
One of the most honorably impressive things about biblical scholarship is the brutality of those scholars to find out what the writers originally wrote! And what they meant when they wrote it. Textual Criticism its called. What I mean, plainly speaking, is that their quest is to know what was actually written. What else is there, you might wonder? Ambition is one thing. A plan. A predetermined lie that a liar needs to sell. And they’ll use any and all means to get you to swallow it. To get you to step out into the abyss of the desert, with a camel maybe, and their koolaid in the water flask. Their objective is to lead you away, away far, when your food runs out, and koolaid runs out, and you’re too far in to make your way back to where you began. Wasting one poor sojourner at a time, and sometimes many sojourners.
I fell for it.
But therein was my deliverance.
I had to go back for my children.
We were fighting all the time, and she offered me peace. As an aside, one of the things that amazed me about her was how she could actually blame me for where we ended up. Out there in the middle of the desert. I’m ashamed to admit it. But my young heart believed in what I was doing. I was being obedient to her heart, to her “faith” and my loyalty was rewarded with the wrath of a woman who blamed me for not being strong enough to lead her. She took biblical truths into her own spin room, and came out with her own spin on truth. One such was this business of submitting to your husband. She’d submit to a godly husband, not to a fallen husband. Which was precursor to or followed by a rehearsal of my sins. A listing of my failures, shortcomings, and obvious sins, that all meant one thing: I was not fit to lead. And naturally since there were only the two of us out there in the desert, she’d take the wheel. Yes, she’d be driving from now on. And when the camel died, the food was gone, along with the koolaid, she looked around for another sucker. I’d let her down. “You weren’t strong enough to lead me.” And for me, as I look back, it wasn’t a matter of strength, it was a matter of faith.
I was 18, and Lori and I had begun dating again. I picked her up and dropped her off from Nursing School. Her parents – I found out later – didn’t know about my return. She was in the midst of her own seclusion from her parent’s grasp. It was passive aggressive rebellion.
In that nurses College lounge, where she took away my godly quest,
More to fill in here about Gods call on my life that past summer.
like Sampson, she cut my hair. I’d pledged that I would not allow sexual chemistry to rule my heart. It clouded my judgement. She seduced me, and I left the greenery and lush pasture of flowing streams, and abundant fish and wildlife to hunt, for the desert. Her lips and caress were my elixir. My potion. She, my siren, led me out and away from God’s calling on my life. Yes, she told me what I wanted to hear, “I’ll follow you anywhere.” That was the lie that she told me. That’s what I needed to hear. I believed that she loved me. She reached into my world, and pulled me out. We’d been separated by time and distance. We broke up when we were 16 years old. Way to young to be married. Way too young to commit our lives to one another. I’d had a dream that led to me breaking up with her. My life was changing, my heart was changing. Switching from living according to my own understanding, and being led instead by faith. God doesn’t serve koolaid in his cafe. He leadeth me beside still waters. He doesn’t lead me away from everyone, he doesn’t isolate me, he brings me into community. My dear friend, John Archer. “I haven’t taken notes years…” it began.
John had been to a youth retreat the previous weekend, and it must have been there that he found his own salvation and pledged to truly follow. He told me in that note that there’d be no more goofing off. He was there to listen. I followed John’s lead, to Christ.
Its an important part of the puzzle. The apostle Paul pointed out the lack of polish and glitz in his plain speaking. A demonstration of the Spirit’s power rather than a display of the wisdom of men. Bonhoeffer refers to this in Life Together. Men gifted with extraordinary powers of allurement, who have the ability to draw folks to himself, into his frame of mind, into his paradigm. Did he know it? Bonhoeffer I mean. Did Bonhoeffer knowing allude to Adolph Hitler here? I think he was alluding to that master manipulator. He was in prison for it! But he saw not just the man, but the type of man. He saw the contrast of a life ruled by man, and a life ruled by faith.
John and I were bunglers. We didn’t have girlfriends. Dean Waschuck was there in the picture also. Dave Schindel also, and a few others. But there we were sitting in the upper balcony of Calvary Temple, just beneath the overhanging audio/visual control room. We were in church on a Sunday Morning, ready for another hour of goofing around. What were we doing there you might wonder. Well, we were dragged to church by our Christian parents. God doesn’t have any grandchildren. There’s a tired old saying about leading a horse to water. We were too old maybe, to have to sit beside our parents, so that they could keep our attention focused on the purpose of the meeting. But now, with the vantage point of being an adult. When sitting in church with a baby, your attention is split between parenting and listening. Between your role as a parent and your being a child of God, in need of food and water. So, there, I’ve provided the excuse for how we ended up there Sunday after Sunday, in a church of 3000 attending. Pastor H H Barber down there on the main floor, with everyone coming to listen. That’s another thing to explore. How man people is too many? How many people can one man lead?
John Archer and I found one another in amongst the luggage. We were in the baggage car. I can’t remember why I went in there, why I noticed this young man near to my own age. But we noticed one another.
Further explanation needed here.
Poetry comes naturally, and its important but plain speaking helps my bewildered reader, that’s you by the way.
I’m musing about how I got here.
God has all the time in the world.
Your time is always ready, but my time has not yet come. John 7
I was child number 4 of 5. My sister was given 4 brothers, but I only had 3. She was always treated special like that. I’m not jealous, you are.
My brother, Glenn, had been literally thrown out of the house by an exasperated father. He was told to leave and become a big time operator. My brother had civil war boots on. Oh, my God my God my God. That young man, who was so tall, so old, so big, so invincible to that little boy that I was. He was 15 and I was 10. I remember that night that Dad threw him out.
My lousy brother, John, the next in line from the top, he knew how to pull the strings. I remember him yelling from the bottom of the stairs in the basement there. “Glenn! Glenn! oh stop… no don’t know…” and etc. My father, filled with rage came to John’s rescue, and took a hold of Glenn by the scruff of his neck, and my father knew all about his lies, no need to hold court. Sure we were there if he cared to know the truth. John had set him up. Glenn his victim. John supplanted Glenn. It was fake, ok? Glenn wasn’t doing anything to John. John was the favoured child. The little angel.
I watched my big brother go up those stairs, never to return to me there. Like Cherish in the backseat of the Plymouth Horizon, I was strapped into my bed, in the dark, eyes open, helpless.
Cherish was strapped into the car seat, and about 4 year old. She was the youngest child, who witnessed the crime as it unfolded. She was too young to know what was really going on, but her little spirit knew, and she cried.
I was laying there, trusting? Was it trust that made me lay there, as the tyrant beat my brother, and threw him out? The big fat bully. Guess what happened to that bully? Guess what happened to that bully at the hand of the perfect child who could do no wrong? When Daddy and Mummy’s age caught up with them, and they needed to be cared for. Johnny came with his crippled wife, to put the needle into his vein, and push the poison in. Daddy was strapped to the hospital bed! He kept pulling the feeding tube out. The feeding tube was there because the overdose of the calming drug had paralyzed his throat, he couldn’t swallow. He had to be fed by a tube.
We were all in various spots far far away. Myself and Glenn, by 2012, were in Vancouver, Andrew in Korea, and Diana in northern Saskatchewan. John and his wife Wendy were in Winkler/Mordan. Just 2 hours away from Mum and Dad. They were the nearest at hand. My only oasis in the guilt that might otherwise consume me, is that Diana had gone to be there. She came to take them to Nipawin, to live with her. Mum wanted to go, and Daddy told her she could go right ahead. He offered her a divorce, and called his daughter a 41 year old know-it-all. Diana left, and drove to a parking lot nearby, to weep, and to call her husband, Dave. We didn’t know what was coming. How could we know? How could we conceive of what was to come?
There’s lots more between that day and the day that I found myself at my father’s bedside in the regional hospital of Winkler/Morden. He had no tube. He no food. His feet were black up past the ankles. He lay unconscious. John “ministered” to him, by taking a saline soaked sponge on the end of what looked like a straw, and kept his mouth from getting too dry. Dad would suck the “juice” out of the sponge. John laughed and gently chided my father for his effort to gain nourishment.
I’d been told he couldn’t swallow. That was the reason why, my brother, who stole the office of being the sole person in charge of my parents care. He had my father sign the paper a few months before, handing over all decisions of life and death to him. And while the ink was still drying, he signed another paper declaring my father unfit to make his own decisions.
Back in my parents apartment, were the papers of their will, that they wrote and had notarized when they were still sane. I know, because my father told me they’d done so. But they made a fatal mistake. No copies of this document were ever sent out to the various siblings. No one conceived of what would transpire. The devilish things, the demonic things.
I was there at his bedside, with more and more questions mounting, and I was playing some music for my father. Johnny had played organ music playing hymns, and I played Johnny Cash and Herb Alpert. While Lonely Bull was playing – I kid you not – my father’s last breath was breathed, and the machines blipped no more. He was dead.
The funeral was to be arranged, Diana soon arrived, and Andrew was sent for. Glenn and Debbie too.
But their things? Those were in the apartment no longer. They were in totes, and stored in an outbuilding on one of their properties. We were never allowed even close to them. There would be no opportunity for a covert search for those documents. Empty promises that one day those things would be divided between us all, to keep us from fighting I suppose.
Mum was next. She lasted until 2017. I remember a caution, to not piss off the bullies, who now had her in their grasp.
On labour day, 2017, my mother had a stroke in her room at the nursing home. And they let her lie there. They let her die. No intervention given. Read up on what to do at the first sign of a stroke. Letting person lie in bed isn’t one of them.
She died. She wanted to die. She was ready. Shrimp Boats, I wrote about that, I’ll add the link later.
Cherish witnessed Lori’s crime in 1995. Glenn left when I was 10, so that was 1972. The civil war boots? Glenn had this way of walking in them, he’d raise up his heal, and step forward with his toes firmly planted as the other leg and foot would stride forward. The result was a steady rise and fall, his back straight and strong. That night I couldn’t see him walking down the street, but I knew.
I found out later on, many years later, that Glenn had gone to stay overnight at Uncle Bill and Auntie Janet’s place. He’d earned money that summer from our grandparents out in BC. We lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In the morning, he went to the bank, got his money, and caught a bus, to the coast, to my grandparents waiting arms. He ran away. Finally decided to fight no more. And he was gone. Never to return, until that funeral, my father’s funeral. His fuel for life, he explained from the podium, was to prove his father wrong. His house of cards was standing tall that day. It all seemed so rock of Gibraltar. But a few short years later, his business was stolen out from under him, his mortgage foreclosure complete – his house on the mountain side overlooking Horseshoe Bay worth $2 million – his marriage gone, and his mind. He was sitting catatonic in the dark room of Lion’s Gate Hospital staring out at the abyss of ashes that lay all around him. Too little too late to save anything, but himself alone. And as one saved from a fire, Laurence was called in. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I had a life of my own to live. A wife and child, my job, my Coop, my community… all these things. My own version of an empire with me as CEO. I can honestly say that God was in charge, and is in charge. The border between my life and my brother’s life was the right one.
At some point between January 2012 when Daddy died, and was put in the ground, my work buddy – fellow bus driver – Julian Mervyn and I donated our week’s holiday we happened to have coinciding, to power wash his house, so that it could be put up for sale. Debbie’s son, a professional renovator, had revamped their kitchen. It was made ready! And they decided to stay! Who could have known that time was so essentially crucial!
There was the book he’d read, that led him to stop taking all of his meds that kept him sane. He’d kicked the cocaine, he’d kicked the alcohol… but pharmaceuticals took their place. He had the gospel, we’d had our talks with one another. I’d given him books. But another interloper had come in, and sewn the seeds of “speaking things into existence” He’d spent money to go to the convention in the states.
The throne of his life was occupied by himself. And his advisors were myriad, and told him what he wanted to hear. They served the koolaid.
So, against the book’s advise, he kicked the pharmaceuticals and literally lost his mind.
That set the stage for the empire of his business to be masterfully stolen out from under him, which is another whole story in itself.
The house? Well, Covid19 hit us all… and the Real Estate Market took a turn… a dry spell maybe? And in the meantime the high volume of cash flow needed to keep his house of cards erect, stopped or paused, but damage done… the devils of the real estate world got a whiff of forecloser… and just sat back and waited for the bank’s notice of forecloser… and some lucky man or woman bought it for a song, I’m sure.
Debbie went to live with her sister, and Glenn threatened himself with self harm, and the ambulance took him away to the hospital, to that dark room, to stare at the wall, safe from himself having any more power over his life. There were no straps or restraints, but there was a lock on the door to the ward, and everything that came and went from that room was controlled.
Where was John, you might wonder? John and Wendy were in our lives, by Facebook Messenger Chat. John, Andrew, Diana and I. When Glenn came to this point of need, I contacted John. And he receded into a cave of sorts. Inexplicably. It wasn’t until Andrew’s situation came to its culmination that I was given a clue. Picture a dog, locked up in Kennel. It escapes, by digging under the chain link fencing, and it’s in heat, you see? So off it goes, and meets up with a willing male, and nature does its thing. The female dog, who must have a name, is apprehended, too little, too late. Returned to the kennel. Its pups are left to die. To starve, and die of the unnatural cause of lack of nurture. Denial of the necessities of life.
While precisely allegorical, it is actually EXACTLY what they did to their own dog. That was their own story that they told me about.
They also told me that God was coming to judge the earth, and they were waiting eagerly for his wrath and judgment on the world, and the church. Picture them this time at the back of a cave, no door… a pointy sticks pointed at the cave opening…
Picture a door, and one of those old fashioned peep holes, a square plate that is slid from left to right, behind an iron grating, the one out there in the biting cold, their eyes meet yours, and you say, “die in your sins” and close the peep hole. The door is already locked. The porch is your final resting place, the snow, and icy cold are your executioners.
John and Wendy withdrew. No help of any kind offered nor given.
With Robert Kumbalavelli to guide me, this was somewhere around February 2020. I went to the hospital, and met with the doctors and nurses… there’s a long line of miracles, and I don’t know just how long, about 2 years later, Glenn was in his own bachelor apartment, paid for with OAS and GIS and CPP.
What does all this have to do with you?
God is calling out to you from your word, to give your WHOLE life to him.
To be single.
Daniel 3:16-18 NIV
Liars will tell you what they see in their crystal ball, and the image there is what you want to see, but it, too, is a lie.
There’s another story, of a life that was led by lust, sensuality, and desire for fame. That came to a desperate point in time. Its me, again, brother Laurence.
Robert Kumbalavelli was there beside me once again. To lead my brother to a place of rest.
At one point, I drove my brother to a ditch in Ladner here, and gave him the drugs, his pharmaceuticals, and I told him, that he’d be his own administrator of his drugs. He could take his daily doses, or not. He could take them all at once, as he was in a habit of doing, and try to talk somebody into replenishing them once he came out of that stupor. Or he could just take a short cut, and climb into that ditch directly there, and die. But one thing for sure was. His little brother would do all he could to help him get from there to where he’d some day soon could be. But now just me, God, who had called me to come alongside… cooperation, not control!
I remember a phone call from my brother, John and Wendy. They told me of the door, and the peep hole. And that Andrew was to be left to die in his sins. But I just could not do that. I don’t get credit. There was no choice for me. I had my wife, who helped me decide between what was on us, and what was on him. Both Glenn and Andrew were denied the use of our couch. But both Glenn and Andrew had the full force of a man of faith, who had learned to listen, with listening obedience. We saw miracles. And soon enough there came a time when I could do no more. Andrew’s self will kicked in, and I had to step away. Glenn’s also. I remember leaning over his shoulder, to tell him that paying a $500.oo cell phone bill – in his ragged financial position – was ridiculous. He quite calmly told me to GOFUCKYOURSELF and it reminded me of when my father called my sister a 41 year old know-it-all actually. The extent of my tether had been now made known. I distanced myself from my brother, to let him take the wheel. That was somewhere in between the decision to keep the house, and the psyche ward.
But between in God’s hands, Andrew ended up in his own psych ward(s) and eventually to a transition home in Surrey. There came a point in time, he told me, where he made the decision NOT to sabotage the peace. He decided not to trade the gnawing agony of not knowing his future, for the surety of chaos. He chose to stay. He chose to continue to yield his will, to a greater good.
His story is still being written.
I’m tired now… and will continue. The rest of the world is alive, and calling out to me, so I’ll pause for another time. But I’ll leave you with this.
11 We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. 12 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13 Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14 But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. Hebrews 5:11-14
The life lived by faith is knowing the right thing to do, and following his lead. I know that nursing college lounge is where I stepped off being led by God, and into the desert of following a well meaning, but self centred woman, who had decided she could make something of me in her own image. Trimb off a limb here and there, and make me into her goose to lay the golden eggs. She’d soon have her house with the white picket fence, her boat, her cottage, her happily ever after.
Only trouble was, that God never let me go. And I never let go of him either. She eventually quit fighting me, and hatched her plan, to get rid of me, and carry on with “a man that can supply me with the things I need” which in a way she did. She used him up, also, and the final stages of his demise are already in the works from what I hear, and soon she’ll be all alone, with empty koolaid flash, dead camel, and hot sun above.
God met me there in the wilderness… like the angel that called out to Hagar…
and I am where you see me now. Cheryl’s a part of that. She was brought along side of me. My faith re-built, her faith built. Like two ships side by side in the shipyard! But then in the miracle of being able to vault from allegory to reality, marriage is the merger of two ships, with one Captain! Who’s that guy at the helm? I’m his first mate, there’s your clue.
Running Down Vimy 