https://wsharing.com/WS-NLE-180118-N.htm#NYNL2018

God's peace,

william

Early after the turn of the century, I was at a retreat center in Arkansas, connected with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity monastery set up by John Michael Talbot, and was praying about what to do regarding the Internet. I had no experience with it up to that point, but friends were recommending it was the next thing I needed to add to the array of activities which had become the puzzle pieces in my various missions and ministries. As I was praying, I noticed a spider in the corner of the window building its web. The more I watched it, the more I became convinced that was God’s way of telling me to become involved in my own web work. Of course, over the years, I was also constantly aware of a parable I had read about freedom comparing a fly and a spider. While the fly might ultimately become the trapped victim of the spider’s web, it travels freely throughout its life. The spider, however, is primarily confined to the territory of the web it built throughout its life. So, which is truly freer? Still, each piece I added over the years seemed inspired, and they also usually made sense upon rational analysis. 

I used to tell a parable to people seeking guidance. I compared life to a walk along the beach with a sack to collect things in. Items we put into the sack will vary. Beautiful, unique, practical, or on a whim might motivate us to pick something up. Small things, large items, even heavy rocks will end up in our sack. On occasion, someone will hand us one of their burdens to put into our sack. For burdens is what they become as the sack gets heavier. Soon it is a struggle to carry it, or maybe drag at some point. I would tell people that at some point you will run into a person coming toward you on that beach. His name is Jesus. He will look at you all bent over from the weight of your sack, and He will tell you the solution is simple. Just drop the sack, and come walk with Him for the rest of the journey along the beach. But simple is not the same as easy. And most of us will not drop the sack, leaving it behind. At best, we might take the opportunity to examine the items in our sack to see if there is anything we can take out of it. I have had three distinct opportunities in my life to drop the sack, and each time ended up not being able to leave much behind. Sometimes it was an outside influence, or circumstances, which precluded embracing a greater freedom, but usually I just made choices. Retirement stands before me as opportunity number four. An outing with our youngest grandson reminded me recently. 

The ice formation in the center of his photo stands in front of an entrance to a small cave in the ledges. I have walked past, and photographed, the cave opening many times on my visits to Oak Park, but I have never gone into the cave. It is usually dark, and I am not a big fan of spiders. On this day though, the ice was reflecting the light of the sun, and I could take pictures of the inside of the cave without concern about shutter speeds (I do not like using flashes). I decided to go into the cave for a better shot. It was quite magical inside. After taking several photos, I turned toward the entrance for a picture looking out, and that is when it dawned on me. Everywhere I glance there are things waiting for my attention. Many are just as beautiful as what I see inside here. Still, they box me in. There is no blame to be placed. I created this web in which I sometimes feel trapped, but mostly just feel overwhelmed. Unable to discern what the priority should be, and what I could let go, that is the cave I look out from. I have tried to never pressure people to be involved in the Teaching & Sharing Centers, precisely because I understand most of your lives are also spent inside caves of overwhelming demands, choices, and busyness. But there is way more to do now than one person can handle alone. What would Jesus do in my place? I still do not know for sure. 

In the bulkiness of our clothing, we invariably bumped into an icicle, or two, but we were as careful as possible not to destroy the beauty that was there. Both to show respect because it was not ours to begin with, and to leave the beauty intact for others to enjoy. I was glad for the decision to enter the cave, however.  Seeing the outside from inside the cave provided a new perspective. I was later reminded of a saying in a photo album I have of some high school and college friends. I do not remember the culture and language of the saying, but the translation follows it. 

"Pamutunhu ukaite jee, pano sara
pachi mere nhungu mira."

"If you do not climb while the way
is still open to you,
weeds will spring up in front of you,
and you will never make it."

In this case, it was the opening of the entrance which had disappeared when I revisited Oak Park on January 6, 2018. I shot the below photograph then. The rest of that story continues below the image. This photo was quickly selected as my picture of the week this morning, after I discovered I had already used the one I had previously determined to upload on Thursday, January 18, 2018. 

On January 6, since the sun was shining without the interference of clouds, I decided to go out to Fitzgerald Park to see what types of ice formation and snow pictures I might take. I had mentioned to Donna that is where I would be going, but I was getting a later start than expected. After spending an hour or so at Fitzgerald Park in bitterly cold temperatures, I decided I might try and catch a shot of the ice formation at Oak Park where Hunter and I had gone into the cave. The question was whether or not the sun would be too low in the sky at this late hour, and the ice would be in the shadows. As I approached the street I was going to turn on, I noticed a big tow truck had a car loaded on it, and was angled in such a fashion that it blocked the road. There was an easy plan B, but as I passed that intersection, I thought out loud it was probably God’s way of saying I should go home rather than to Oak Park. And since, when I am alone, I often speak with God is if He were sitting right next to me, I also remarked we both knew it was not the decision I would make. Even if there was only a slim chance that the sun might be peeking through the trees and buildings on the other side of the river, and hitting the ice formation just right, I needed to check out the possibility. By the time I got parked, and walked across the snow to get to the path that takes you down to the river, everything was pretty much in the shadows. I went ahead and walked the trail to the place of the ice formation. And since I was there, I started taking pictures even without the sparkle of the sun. As I turned to make my way off from the ice below my feet, the slipperiness sent me reeling. I landed flat on my back, cracking my head on the thick solid ice. As I lay there pretty dazed, I was not much impressed with the choice I had made. I was at Oak Park, not Fitzgerald where I told Donna I was going. Plus, I did not have my cell phone with me. However, since I was at least conscious, hope and faith were present. After a few moments, I managed to slide off the ice, and get back upright. Things still seemed a little hazy. I had recently read the book Ridin’ Shotgun by Marli Brown, in which, at one point, she made a reference to Esther’s difficult choice of faith with the words, “if I die, I die.” Those words popped into my head, and actually brought surprising comfort at the moment. I wobbled a bit in my first steps, but I resumed a very slow careful walk along the trail that would take me back up to the main park area, and sluggishly through the snow back to my vehicle. The drive home was an interesting mix of thoughts. It occurred to me sometime later, it would not have been much of a growing experience for me, or anyone else, if I actually had died on the spot without anyone knowing the details. Of course, now that I have related the story, I will be making a point of avoiding all ice at Oak Park. The Browns are domestic missionaries with a musical ministry. Hers is a very honest book about the struggles of finding your way even after you feel a particular calling from God. I could relate even before this experience. For instance, when is an obstacle a challenge you are being given to help you grow by learning to overcome it, and when is it a warning that this is not the best path or choice, find another? In this case, it felt like a lesson about my stubbornness (or my obsessive just one more nature when it relates to photography), and yet it also reminded me God is always there and, even at age 67, my body is wonderfully made by God, and amazingly resilient. 

I mentioned the Scripture quote from the book of Esther. If you have never read Esther's story, you should make the time to do so. It is one of the more fascinating events involving a female heroine in the Old Testament. 

Since Valentine's Day is not very far away, and you are not likely to hear from me again that soon, you got a little rose flourish here, as I prepare to move into the william's works section of this email, newsletter, journal, blog, whatever it is. Others might call it preaching. But, whether my poetry, or this, I mostly write for me. I am happy to share it with you. Yet, I still write for me. It helps me to find my way through the challenges of life, and examine the "planks in my own eyes" as cautioned in Matthew 7:3-4 and Luke 6:41-42. 

There were a number of reasons I did not incorporate when I formally began my missions and ministry late in 1994. a touch of william, and some of the other aspects of today's Teaching & Sharing Centers, had been in place for a while by then. I had previously set up two corporations in my life, and knew the amount of extra work their existence generates. Plus, I realized by that age, I did not work well under worldly authorities (bosses, committees, councils, boards). I already had twenty years in business as an owner of my own State Farm office (sole-proprietorship). While I would seek counsel for some decisions, big and small, I needed to be able to make the final choices unencumbered. I was embarking on a dance with God which was also intended to be an available help for others seeking more than surface living (as Peace Pilgrim called it). Organizations tend to take on a life of their own, and can end up more focused on self-preservation than whatever serving mission brought them into existence. That has often been one of my concerns during the first decade of the existence of the T&SC 501c3 non-profit. It is an interesting balance to find. The organization exists not to be served, but to serve. It is supposed to be an available help for you. Yet, to continue to exist at all, it also needs help from you. Too complicated, for my mind to successfully wrap around how that should all play out. That is why I am glad I truly believe this to be of God, not of me. I do not have to work it all out. I will go to my grave believing that the Teaching & Sharing Centers organization was designed by God to make a difference in people’s lives. And, while I am here, I will do my best to make sure it has every opportunity to do so. The details of our lives will not change much until our perspective changes. It is that simple. It is that difficult. With a plethora of options available to us, it can be daunting to decide what is really helpful. I made a decision a while back not to routinely forward things. But, I will copy and paste into the william's works area a few items I set aside because I felt they were worthy of sharing. And, of course, I might add a word or two *smile* of my own along the way. 

Love is not really an action that you do. Love is what and who you are, in your deepest essence. Love is a place that already exists inside of you, but is also greater than you. That’s the paradox. It’s within you and yet beyond you. This creates a sense of abundance and more-than-enoughness, which is precisely the satisfaction and deep peace of the True Self. You know you’ve found a well that will never go dry, as Jesus says (see John 4:13-14). Your True Self, God’s Love in you, cannot be exhausted.

Material gifts decrease when you give them away. Spiritual gifts, by contrast, increase the more you use them. Yes! You get more love by letting it flow through you, just as modeled by the Trinity. If you love, you will become more loving. If you practice patience, you will become more patient. If you stop the Divine Flow, you will be stopped up (“sin”).

Love is not something you can bargain for, nor is it something you can attain or work up to—because love is your very structural and essential identity—created in the image of the Trinity. When you are living in conscious connection with this Loving Inner Presence, you are in your True Self. God is forever united to this love within you; it is your soul, the part of you that always says yes to God. God always sees God in you—and “cannot disown God’s own self” (2 Timothy 2:13).

Many Christians live with a terrible sense of being rejected, because their religion is basically a worthiness game where no one really wins. That’s precisely not the Good News. It’s bad news. The Gospel will always be misinterpreted by the false self in terms of some kind of climbing or achieving. Since the false self can’t even understand the command to love one’s enemies, it has to disregard the message as naive, which is exactly what most of Christian history has done. Jesus’ rather clear teaching on love of enemies has been consistently ignored by all the mainline churches. Christians have been fighting one war after another, and excluding, torturing, and killing enemies right and left because the false self can never understand the Gospel. Yet we have been baptizing, confirming, giving communion to, and even ordaining false selves throughout our history. It is probably unavoidable, and God surely must be patient.

Once, after I gave an anti-war sermon, a businessman came up to me and said, “Well, Father, maybe in an ideal world. . . .” I know he meant well, but that’s what we’ve done with most of the teaching of Jesus. We interpret his meaning for some ideal world. Of course, the ideal world is never going to come so we can just ignore 99% of the actual teaching of Jesus, as the institutional church (and I too!) have usually done. We concentrate instead on things that Jesus never once talked about, like birth control, homosexuality, and abortion—bodily “sins” because the body can most easily carry shame. We shouldn’t disregard bodily shame or addictions, but they are not the core problem. Jesus focused on issues of power, prestige, and possession—which all of us have largely ignored. I don’t think the church has had intentional bad will. It has simply tried to get the false self to live the Gospel, and that will never work. In other words, we’ve tried to have a church without fundamental transformation. Thus we whittle down the whole Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus’ direct teaching that “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword” (Matthew 26:52); and we look for absolutes in ever new secular places—like the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution which allows us to carry weapons. And this is done by a vast majority of Bible-quoting Christians.

Gateway to Silence: God in me loves God in everything.

Artist and scientist Michael Flynn designed a singing bowl for display in ArtPrize, an international art competition held in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The bowl requires no electricity but it does require something that is in short supply: cooperation.

As I observed people trying to make the bowl sing, I was surprised that none of them bothered to read the directions about rocking it gently. Instead, impatient to make music, they kept trying their own ideas. After a few minutes they walked away frustrated and disappointed, as if the bowl was defective.

How many times, I wonder, do we become frustrated that life is not working the way we think it should? We keep trying ways that seem right, but things keep turning out wrong. Instead of following God's Word, we continue trying to find our own way.

The singing bowl reminds us that we cannot expect life to go well if we ignore the instructions of the Designer (Deut. 4:40). Failing to obey divides us from one another and separates us from God. To fulfill His plan for the world and make the way of salvation known (Ps. 67:2), we need to follow His instructions about living and working peacefully together. When life does not go well, it may be that we have stopped following God's plan.

- Julie Ackerman Link

Life is a beautiful song that God is teaching us to play.

From “Our Daily Bread” courtesy of RBC Ministries

The three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) teach that one Creator formed all things. There is thus a radical unity at the heart of the universe’s pluriformity, resolving any conflict between diversity and the shared “divine DNA” found in creation. This theo-logic allows us to see “the hidden wholeness” in all things and to confidently assert that “everything belongs.” The distinction between natural and supernatural, sacred and profane, exists only as a mental construct.

You may be asking, as so many have over the years, “Richard, how can you make such naïve blanket statements like ‘Everything is sacred. Everything belongs?’ What about Hitler, nuclear bombings, ISIS, Westboro Baptists, and the United States’ epidemic of mass shooters?” I agree that we can and should name evil as evil. But unless we first name the underlying goodness and coherence of reality, along with our own imperfection, we will attack evil with methods and self-righteousness that will only deepen the problem. This is Nonviolence 101. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the importance of nonviolence became widely acknowledged.

Further, Christianity has far too easily called individual, private behaviors sins while usually ignoring or even supporting structural and systemic evils such as war, colonization, corporate greed, slavery, and abuse of the Earth. All of the seven capital sins were admired at the corporate level and shamed at the individual level. This left us utterly split in our morality, dealing with symptoms instead of causes, shaming people while glorifying systems that were themselves selfish, greedy, lustful, ambitious, lazy, prideful, and deceitful. We can’t have it both ways. Evil lurks powerfully in the shadows, in our unconscious complicity with systems that serve us at others’ expense . . .

_____________

A Message from One of Our Founders

The most basic human instinct is personal survival. Jesus turned that upside down when he said, “If you try to save your life, you will lose it. But if you give it up for me, you will surely find it.” (Matthew 10:39 CEV) Only teaching and sharing can move us beyond that basic instinct to the level of love. 

As a matter of our routines and missions, we do not rescue cute little puppies or kittens. We do not save emaciated children from starving. We do not fight to keep a natural area from being turned into a shopping center, or provide food, or clothing, or shelter. We have nothing tangible to market. But what we do at the Teaching & Sharing Centers will affect all of those things. The “compete and compare” model embraced by our culture creates divisions at every level of our society. While there is a healthy side to competition, and even comparing, unchecked they cause problems in marriages, in families, in neighborhoods, between churches, in communities, and at every level of prejudice where there is some difference that can be focused upon. 

Our mission is to change that. Beyond the basic Good News of salvation, Jesus showed and admonished us to teach and share. It stands at the core of the solutions to most of the problems and challenges we face in our families, in our communities, in our countries, and our world. We often hear people complaining about how bad things are, but most do not want to change the primeval compete and compare format which made them that way. We do. If this makes sense to you, and you can see the basic need for a core shift to a teaching and sharing way of behavior across the board, we invite you to join with us at whatever level of participation, big or small, you can fit into your life. Together is the key word here. As we teach and share together, from puppies to pulpits, to basic human needs, to a balance between nature and business, all will be positively affected. I pray God will guide our hands and our hearts, encouraging us by Jesus’ model of teaching and sharing, to fix the intangible philosophies which create our very tangible troubles. 

Everything we have is on loan to us from the Truth that creates it all, even our very own bodies. If you think our "white" concept of ownership gives us some sort of ultimate say, or dominion, try telling the the hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, floods, or wildfires, you cannot touch that, I own it. It is mine. I say what happens to it. 

_____________ 

Conservatives teach violence as a legitimate choice every time they want to retaliate by bombing someone or sending in our troops. Liberals teach violence is a legitimate choice every time they tout a woman’s right to choose trumps all other considerations. Both those choices are clothed in very lofty sounding ideals. Who does not feel a tinge of patriotism when we triumph over someone who has harmed us or one of our friends? Who does not believe in freedom of choice for the individual? Personal free will is the most basic and important gift God has given to us (next to Jesus). Such an endorsement by God should give a faithful person pause anytime they would restrict someone’s freedom. But, if we teach violence is simply a choice, and a valid option in some areas, then it should come as no surprise when somebody just makes a choice to take lives because they can. Respect for life is just one example of how our core societal “pick and choose” way of looking at things fails us. Now lest you think I am preaching a particular dogma, I do not know the specific answers to our many issues. Only God knows. But I know by moving toward a culture of teaching and sharing together, and really listening to one another, we have a better chance of finding solutions. And those of us who believe in God need to involve Him in the conversation, without insisting that others believe in Him, or see things our way. 

From: Ned Gottleber (Thank you to Gary)
Sent: Monday, January 1, 2018 12:50 PM
Subject: Some Good Stuff

I have learned that . . .

. . . I like my teacher because she cries when we sing "Silent Night." (Age 5)

. . . our dog does not want to eat my broccoli either. (Age 7)

. . . when I wave to people in the country, they stop what they are doing and wave back. (Age 9)

. . . just when I get my room the way I like it, Mom makes me clean it up again. (Age 12)

. . . if you want to cheer yourself up, you should try cheering someone else up. (Age 14)

. . . although it's hard to admit it, I am secretly glad my parents are strict with me. (Age 15)

. . . silent company is often more healing than words of advice. (Age 24)

. . . brushing my child's hair is one of life's great pleasures. (Age 26)

. . . wherever I go, the world's worst drivers have followed me there. (Age 29)

. . . if someone says something unkind about me, I must live so that no one will believe it. (Age 30)

. . . there are people who love you dearly but just do not know how to show it. (Age 42)

. . . you can make someone's day by simply sending them a little note. (Age 44)

. . . the greater a person's sense of guilt, the greater their need to cast blame on others. (Age 46)

. . . children and grandparents are natural allies. (Age 47)

. . . no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on
and it will be better tomorrow. (Age 48)

. . . singing "Amazing Grace" can lift my spirits for hours. (Age 49)

. . . motel mattresses are better on the side away from the phone. (Age 50)

. . . you can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles these three things:
a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. (Age 51)

. . . keeping a vegetable garden is worth a medicine cabinet full of pills. (Age 52)

. . . regardless of your relationship with your parents, you miss them terribly after they die. (Age 53)

. . . making a living is not the same thing as making a life. (Age 58)

. . . life sometimes gives you a second chance. Age 62

. . . you should not go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands.
You need to be able to throw something back. (Age 64)

. . . if you pursue happiness, it will elude you. But if you focus on your family, the needs of others,
your work, meeting new people, and doing the very best you can, happiness will find you. (Age 65)

. . . whenever I decide something with kindness, I usually make the right decision. (Age 66)

. . . everyone can use a prayer. (Age 72)

. . . even when I have pains, I do not have to be one. (Age 74)

. . . every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love that human touch
 - holding hands, a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. (Age 76)

. . . I still have a lot to learn. (Age 78)

. . .  we should not be trashing the environment (God’s Creation).

. . . there is something not right about us having so much
 while others in the world have practically nothing.