Aweikinin 19/12/2014

From Hebrews 11:1-5

           

H,

The constant question is about intimacy with God. How do we get into that? It is hard to comprehend something that is not physical in terms of love. We have been effectively socialized into seeing and touching love that we do not even know what it will feels like to not have love in that way. This is the challenge that confronts us; to make an unknowable quantity into the measure of a knowing God and to see the quality of intimacy with this invisible being as a new reality every day.

I do not know how this is achieved. I know the obvious answers but they all spell religious duty and though they are all good and fine in their place, they do not take us closer. I am talking about a living presence of love in our lives that paints through, not over, everything else. Like that sense a person gets that they cannot be anything less than friend/lover/father/sibling and any dereliction from that duty is wrong and must be amended. Well, that is a small part of it. I am trying to talk about a sense of being in love and in intimacy, the kind where your whole life is summarized in that other person’s pleasure and light. Where there is no holding back and no fear and no hesitation, just an endless tessellation of one soul to another, in shapes and forms where the only boundary is devotion.

I think I am explaining this all badly but you know how it went for me. I had a series of knocks on the head and heart and then I fell headlong into the brush. I could hear Him but not in words. More like in urges. The urge to do this or that and the older I got and the real nature of things showed up as wretched in my cynical mind, the closer I got to this idea of a white-place. I have sought the pure intimacy all my life. This place where I can be myself not as indulgence but as safety and wholeness spiraling up into meaning.

It has not been enough for me, the Sunday service or midweek fair. I am tired of neat boxes and easy answers and the soul clenching myth of routines. I desire a living, breathing connection to all things real. I want truth at its utmost or else this pale and terrible world is all there is. If this is so and I have been high on my supply all this time then like Cadmus I have to call this all absurd, living and dying and being afraid. I do not think it is something anyone can create. I do not think there is anything special or deep in feeling this hunger of the soul. I think the human core is like that. I think we all try to define the something more. Some of us go back to source and try to work it out from there. We fail but that is just how we start to kneel and look up. We give up some of this solid ground to walk on water. We look up and go for walks and talk to the clouds until we see that old face looking back at us. It is an inverse thing. We seek the other universe only hinted at in dreams and miracles and notions and insinuations. We seek love-divine and the opportunity to go missing during walks with the sublime. Perhaps one day this ‘some’ will be all. I hope so. My idea of heaven has always been a place where everyone is.

Aweikinin 18/12/2014

From Hebrews 11:1-4

H,

It is the old question of faith or works? Is it what we do that matters or what we intend to do? In the past you know how strongly I defended the intention over the deed. I used the famous bible line: “God judges the intention.” It was all fine and dandy and probably true but I forgot that other line, or ignored it because of how I had seen it misused, “faith without works is dead.” Obviously faith is in actions as well as in deeds. We are to worship with our entire mind, all of our heart and all of our body.

It is often automatic. The faith will lead you to the acts. I cannot think of any single person of faith who did not find something they were compelled to do. They might do it quite badly at first, and this is where the intention is vital, but they will often grow into doing it well, and if they do not get haughty or start playing to an audience it will continue to be worship. Intention ties the act back to God. Or good, as it tells us we are in sync with the higher perspective of the things we are doing. So often we fill our lives with the things that bring instant praise or prize. Too often we are upset or feel put down because we either expect we ought to be respected or our intentions should be clear to the human eye. How many fights are based on the simple premise “you do not understand me.” perhaps no one is meant to. It is possible that the lonely walk of living for God is a lesson in necessary isolation and you will get the same shtick that Noah got (“a boat on dry land, you fool”). That is what living in faith always is; a boat on dry land.  We cannot see and so we follow. Always, vision over visibility

The thing is to keep our eyes above. To remember why we do the things we do. To not get tired of doing good when we can and to not do good only so we can say or think or feel we did good. To give to the poor is to lend to God. True religion is to tend to the orphan, the widow, the needy and the brokenhearted. The unsexiest of tasks are the ones that have the omniscient attention of God. I suspect that the best people on earth are the ones doing the little tasks of making individual lives better in the darkest places on our planet. There will be no Nobel Prize for them. They do not care. They have their eyes set on the irresistible glory to come.

Aweikinin 17/12/2014

From Hebrews 11:1-3

H,

It is hard to follow through on the truth you now believe. It is hard to not to begin to think it is all a trick of the mind and nothing is out there but space. The vastness and majesty of the universe has now been sort of explained by science. We have come nearer and nearer to replicating the conditions for  creating life. And aside from that whole cosmological argument there is still the drudgery here. The things we really seek and believe and care about are hidden in the heart. We do not need science to tell us our hearts are not well.

I ate dinner in tears yesterday as I read one hundred and thirty four people, mostly children, were killed in Pakistan. I thought of the girls not yet rescued over here and the many children killed in this whole senseless conflict over belief.  That it has been this way for a while and that throughout history the weak and innocent have borne the brunt of war does not put it in context, tragedy is tragedy. It has come to the point where I cannot read the news without caution. This world has lost its glory for me.

Yet, I cannot leave like that. Inertia from terror and sorrow is not a solution to anything. I have to look back and realise that this is not the final destiny of the earth. The foundations of the earth are not made of temporal stuff. I see clearer these days why that date with God is vital because it is the final cure for the human problem. We seek money and glory and some sort of truth and protection from evil but none of these things go past the seventy or less years we will spend on earth. None of these things can change the crimes in the north east of Nigeria or that tragedy in the middles east and environs or the poverty of the world or the horrors of child slavery. This is a world that has a veneer of progress just above a cesspool of the human heart’s regress. We can laugh and play and get lost in distractions, but we are just a step away from sliding into the abyss we do not yet know.

Sorry for the gloom. Children keep dying. I have no answers. I am crying again. I do not know what to do. I light a candle, I pray, I ask for something to do, I want to give all my blood and all my life to a better way of being. There has to be a God. There has to be reckoning and a reason for all this. My new resolution is to not shut off from the pain or the joy of life. Perhaps in there I will see what He says. I am not losing hope or faith. His understanding of the world and men is what I see play out in the world today. His prophecy is right altogether. He formed the world from an abyss once before. He is on the road to doing it again. I cannot explain how I know, I just know. I have my marching orders. I know my place in this end army. I can live in the flow of His grace that helps me see a better everything to come. He formed the world form an abyss before. I know He will do so again.

Aweikinin 16/12/2014

From Hebrews 11:1-2

H,

What was I on about again? Yes, the place to come over the scourge of the now. We are always prisoners of our now. There is always some nagging voice inside telling us that it is all in the now and things will never get better. We cannot outgrow our childish bouts of sin and succor. We cannot escape our past misdeeds. It says: if you have started you might as well finish. It tells us there are fine men and women walking around the surface of the earth and we might as well just lay ourselves in the dust and die because we will never be that eloquent in living. What can we do but be products of the now?

A lie, damn lies and statistics, is what that voice is. We must move on to what the poet calls: “vision over visibility.” We must have a stronger grasp of the thing we are involved in. We cannot believe in all the grandeur and poetry of an invisible deity and one that He has all the power in the universe but still think our stuff is too large for Him. He cannot be cosmically larger than everything but intimately small. He has to loom large in all. He has to be able to change minds, hearts as well as form galaxies.

I am thinking we have to let Him in more. Faith is the giving over of our whole lives to God. It is that divine marriage where all the sacred and mundane aspects of everyday life are brought into the light of His will. We have to care what He thinks and go about with the thought in our heads that the way He suggests is the way we should take. I have found it is not prison to do this. The freest people are the ones who are made boundless by minds free of gravity. The gospel merely states the heart can be free too. It tells us all our hungers have some shape and all our longing has a home. It unbundles the myth that all we have is now and all we will ever be is the now. It says we are not merely the sum of past deeds but the destiny of a divine sacrifice and we can be made whole in that new reality. It says to us, who doubt all things and suffer all things and want whole lives where body, mind, heart, Soul dwell in peace, that such a synergy of self is possible. It says, have vision over visibility and all good things will be yours.

Aweikinin 15/12/2014

From Hebrews 11:1

H,

I am trying to remember what it felt like to have a feeling for God. You know what I mean, to feel it not just know it. Those golden times when He was spring in step and voice in laughter and the real joy in everything. Of course memory plays a trick on the mind called reverie. We remember in struggles only the good spots of a supposed easier past. It is quite possible that it has always been this hard. It is also quite possible that a sort of inverse Eden is upon us and so we are not learning the knowledge of that tree again but growing into the knowledge of God so the world now seems naked and flimsy and cruel. Our longing for Him is growing but our darn flesh will not keep up.

Do you remember that old Pentecostal dating epigram? It went something like “do not fall in love but stand in love”? I always thought it was a little much about a turn of phrase but I am quite sure now that in terms of loving God we never stand. It is a steep fall from the heights of trying to make our way to the true floor of knowing that we cannot do it this way. A consciousness for Him seems to contain this new dislike for the pale grey of this present world and to miss the rainbow extravaganza that is to be the promised return of the King of Kings; that government of no end where lions lay down with lambs and there is no one hurting on the holy mountain. We try to fix problems now and spread a light and well we should but we still long for the completion of all things and the final manifestation of all the best attributes of the Sons of God. We want a better world but only an unwise look at things can produce anything but despair as a whole for the evil across the planet. We may be a little above the fray of constant sorrows but we are just one slip away from being in the moss. If we care for the state of the world then we know even if we never have great evils happen to us it is still absurd that they happen at all. The long night seems too long this time and we struggle to look up when down here there is all this darkness.

Am I too doom and gloom? Well, I am misleading you because I am not down at all. I get down and all (being ‘poigny’ and all) but in all this a light is growing out of the blind side of my despair. It may take a few days for me to explain this but let me start by saying this: I am starting to see that I have to look through other eyes to see the kingdom as an eternal epoch again. In other words, I am not just hearing rumours of another world built on truth, justice and righteousness; I am starting to believe them.

Aweikinin 12/12/2014

From Psalm 15:1-5

H,

Waking up to the sound of your own life is never easy. I am on a early morning bent now and with the material future so up in the air, I usually wake up to the dawning dark of worry. It is the sort of worry that leads to the escapism of stupid acts. They are the sort of stifling worries that solve no problems nor create any value to the look or feel or taste of life. It is the kind that tells you that I have mixed things up and planted solitude where there should be fellowship. I forget “I am with you always, even until the end of time.”

The thing is that our mistakes loom larger than God. I would like to say it is some godly sorrow because we know we have gone astray but I suspect it is some ego driven inability to rely on the higher things and to stop digging our own holes of despair. We do not want to admit that this is a way too far and a sea too deep. And even before all that, we do not want to admit that we are called to a spiritual existence in a material world not to a material existence with spiritual help. As that writer so brilliantly put it “we are divine (spiritual) beings having a human experience not humans having a divine (spiritual) experience.”   I paraphrase, but you get the point. The entire material world up in our face and we can fail to see that it is only a figment of time. Nothing we chase down daily is of eternal relevance or reality.

We only have to look at the things He has asked us to do to realize what a divine joke it is outside of Him. It is so against our human nature that we mostly do what we can, get self righteous about our petty progress, treat the ones too hard as suggestions or just our plain ‘weakness’ and go on with life like we have no core. I imagine God, saints save me from blasphemy, writing out the Ten Commandments and giggling to Him-self: “let me see them try and do all this without me.”

That is our core. I sound like a broken record this week but the truth is set in holy stone: we depend on Him. How did that bald eagle put it: “for when I am weak then I am strong.” All of the Christian life is giving up the idea that you are okay with the crumbs of half and half and almost there. To finally say we are ready for the Full Bread and Full Wine of God. We are taking in His life. Remember those thirty three years of glory? A carpenter, a virgin, a manger, a star, three wise men, years of silence, baptism, temptation, ministry, prophecy fulfilled, conspiracy, arrest and death. Then, life forever. He tells us to: Go and do likewise. No material look at that life as a whole makes it attractive. When we give up the hold and worship of flesh perhaps we can begin to be illuminated about all the real sense this apparent madness makes. Perhaps, when we see Him we shall be seen whole and become that wholeness and holiness that our hearts know and long for but our present bodies cannot achieve. I know, on that path, we will become His forever man, woman, being, like Him, sons, daughters, Him.

Aweikinin 11/12/2014

From Psalm 15:1-4

H,

The bumpy road of doing the right thing gets even more unstable the older we get. First, we have to clarify why we seek to be right. In terms of faith or belief we are not moralists or puritans. Well, all the evidence suggests that we are not. We do not seek to be better than others or sit in judgement over anyone. For a Christian doing right is what the name itself denotes: becoming more like Christ.

When the question is asked, what pleases God? The answer is Christ. That is the name and the nature that resounds in all of time as being the Son of God. When He was baptized on earth and the heavens opened and that symbol of peace and reconciliation with God (or the subtext in a John Woo film), the dove, appeared, the main thing said or announced was “I am well pleased.” He is the sun of righteousness. He is right, itself. All the character of living up to God is in him, tied together. All law, all covenants, all prophecy and the whole truth personified in the second Adam. We do not seek to be moral examples but to be Christ like. The difference? We often seek to be moral examples so we can seem good as well as be good. We want to be the centre of the thing. Here, we are disciples, following and failing, living in the shadow of the sun. The former is easy to fake but impossible to accomplish. The latter is impossible to fake but easy by humility and obedience, daily and daily again, to become.

The other part is the rejection of everything else. We have reached the summit so all other vantage points pale in comparison. We have seen the truth so we can now work out what is in it and what is a lie. We do not have to follow men. We may seem independent, loose cannon(ish) or arrogant but if you look closely we are merely dependent on something deeper than the falsehood of this present world. We rely on God to take us Home.

Aweikinin 10/12/2014

From Psalm 15:1-3

H,

I guess it is instructive that a large part of getting it right with the will of God is not hurting other people. Before we seek to help them we must be sure we are not in the habit, already, of hindering them. A large part of what we are taught about all this is the need to get involved as quickly and thoughtlessly as possible in the lives of others. No. This could only work if we had the eyes to see right into them and the heft to diagnose rightly what the maladies of their souls really are. Honestly, we are yet to fully understand our own issues. It is the log and speck thing all over again.

Now, I am not saying that we should be detached from the human experience or be so careful not to make the wrong sort of gesture that we become stuck in inertia. What I really mean is that we learn to do the simple things well. The small acts of love and the kindness of love that always go further than our self righteous attempts to summarize lives into sound bites and epigrams. Like all things, we need the humility of not letting our bloated image of self get in the way.

Of course, the main thing about grace is the constant failure it stands against. If we set out to list our flaws and failings in this matter, it will know no end. This is the part that makes us give up. We are arrogant enough to think that if we know something then we should immediately be good at it or we are failures. We have to be prepared to fail a little more. This light emerging from our dark is who we will forever be. We have to give it time to become a full shine.  

Aweikinin 9/12/2014

From Psalm 15:1-2

H,

It is easy to approach anything in God as an endless list of do’s and don’ts. It saves us the time to think about the scale of the thing we are involved in. It will always be easier to follow the line in front of you and the formal rules of the road than to think of things in an informal way and to have a personal, rather than impersonal, relationship with God.

To be personal with Him takes us far from that cold way that does not include listening and learning and being connected. We can coast by on the easy platitudes of the day. We can have a pastor and a building to go to. We can function as ghosts while our vicarious preacher does all the heavy lifting. We can have busy lives and sit in safe pews on Sundays and Wednesdays and get executive summaries of the things that matter but have been choked out of us by the things that do not. And above all we can finally stifle that awful feeling we get that we will be called out to live the full depth of our belief even to the point of daily death and daily resurrection.

The temptation to put God in a box is huge. Yet we give up more when we refuse to accept the limits of our way of seeing things. We get a tin god and a tame god and one who is frequently unable to make us into anything useful or anyone true in the forever to come. The narrow way is or seems hard but it is drawing us closer to the source of all right doing. The danger of the dark makes intimacy with the light a necessity on the long walk home.

Aweikinin 8/12/2014

From Psalm 15:1

H,

It is the question of questions: how do we get on God’s good side? I think I have put that badly. I do not mean to make it sound like we can manipulate our way into His favours. That will be silly since we believe Him to be omniscient. He would know we were faking it. The question should be: How do we please Him? What can we do to live in right standing with Him?

This question has haunted me all my life. I had a strong sense of theism before I even had any idea of the riches of Christ and the depth of that call to Him. And, well, once you know all the rules it is often the case that you start breaking them. There are snakes in you that the light you choose has begun to show you. Things you know will not please Him. So, what does please Him? We often think we know. We try to keep the straight and narrow and our heads up and our hearts right. We struggle to share grace and be polite and to not condemn so we are not condemned. We know the dance and we do it well but is there something missing in our steps?

When we read through the 15^th Psalm of that 6^th chapter in Micah and align those heavy thoughts with the gospels and what Christ said and what the apostles explained in their letters we get a picture that it has a lot to do with how we act. It seems to say that salvation is all well and good but it has to change us. It has to produce new fruit and a new character. This might lead us back to the error of thinking that this is a high stakes morality play and we should all get in shape or ship out. This reduces grace and truth and love and hope and faith to a behavior control experiment and us to tame rabbits without passion, docile and obedient but lacking the full heft of personality.

I think it all ties into that sermon we heard years ago. It is a radical way of looking at the word but the preacher sums it up as: all these things tell us how far we are from the full stature of Christ and through failure we learn our only hope is constant dependence on God. Daily, daily we fall and we are never complete. Daily, daily we are carried up in Omnipotent arms and made complete. Till kingdom come

Aweikinin 5/12/2014

From John 15:1-27

H,

It is incredibly hard, as you say, to fathom what is right from what is wrong in this present stretch of life and living. Well, it is hard, if we do not take heed of the infilling of truth we are promised at the onset. Yes, I am talking of that Holy Spirit thing. The strange and wonderful idea that God comes to live within our metaphorical hearts and dwells there to tell us right from wrong as we navigate the murky waters of being alive.

It is not so strange when you think about it with a sense of mystery and eschew the dogma and ‘doctrine’ that turns truth into denominations. If He dwells without as conscience and within as companion then He engineers this great call to live out for truth in the most diverse ways. Perhaps He helps us engage our minds in deciding what the right road to follow is, our hearts to “will and to do” the service of worship and follow through and the body or actions to do it in the overt way that witness demands for the spread of the good news about who God really is.

I know this sounds incredibly unlikely with sinners like you and I. Well, that is the point; whoever is forgiven much, loves more. He was known, on earth, to hang out with shady characters, broken people, ready to change faulted ones. The people like us. He is trying to teach, preach, sing a song and make a life about the fault in all of our stars seen as raw material for the great realignment of earth with the heavenly will.

A pair of perpetual mess ups (language cleaned up here) are just the right candidates for a life of grace made out of unruly grass and turned into the stuff of eternity.

Aweikinin 4/12/2014

From John 15:1-25

H,

It all falls back with the thing about ‘enmity with the world’. Once we have taken up the drinking of thirst-quenching water nothing is ever quite the same. You cannot go back safely to drinking the other stuff. You are cured from contentment on this earth. The deeper you go, the less milk you consume, the more other forms of fulfillment seem less and less. You are in fulfillment, Himself. What can mortal anything do to you? Immortality is in your heart and is infecting your whole being, slowly.

Of course, it is not as simple as stated. Nothing is ever as simple as before you have to live it out. All the sermons, notes, talk, words in the universe do not compare to living out the dreams of God. Word becomes flesh to make that point.

We will often feel like we do not belong. It will feel like we are being left behind in an improving world and these ideals we hold, that are much more than ideals, seem obsolete in the ‘fast pace’ of our brand new century. We may fall into the danger of trying to keep up. We may think we have to stay relevant and with or ahead of the curve. We may begin to act like we have a point to prove. This is wrong. These standards the world has set have only temporal relevance. They do not transcend this present version of life on earth. They may not even last pass the next great leap in thought and action. There is no such thing as a trendy truth. We are in the thing that lasts forever. It will not change or bend or become more ‘reasonable’ over time. This is not an experiment. This is utter reality.

So, I guess, my point, dear friend, is that you take the ‘slings and arrows’ as part of discipleship. Perhaps, you will never be understood and appreciated in that way. We are called to witness and not to impress. The world system may be evil and opaque but the people of the earth are like us: lost souls in need of a finding God. And, hey, even if they are the enemy, are we not told to love those as well?

Aweikinin 3/12/2014

From John 15:1-15

H,

It is apt that we are called to love, isn’t it? We are told this is how we make our home in God: the commandment is to love the disciple (fellow Christian) next to us for proximity and extend it to the furthest cover of that holy love. If anyone doubts that this thing of ours in character extends to strangers and unbelievers then the story of the Good Samaritan speaks to that. We are told, further on, to love our enemies and to conquer evil with good loving. It is flower power with the mark of the divine.

We keep talking about eternal character but it starts in this temporal space, with this sandy plain and with the faulted stars of others. It is not a romantic view that justifies holding people in hand when the way to love them best is to stop being an influence. Nor is it an intellectual excursion into the right words or actions. It is, rather, our life long journey into passionate concern for others and how they end up. It is not charity in the sense of pity or the petty puppy love a ’superior’ suggests toward his/her ‘inferiors’.  It is not a pseudo-spiritual way of talking or praying or the gift of ‘advice’ that really means judging with a foul mouth. It is a heart toward the truth and always that.

To love is to make our home in God. To receive His love is the start but to spread it out in His character is the end game. We are not just “hearers” but “doers”. It is better to give than to receive. These words tell us that though there is all the room to bask in the majesty and glory and grace and love of God the better step, the friendship stage with God, is to let that light shine through us so the whole world might be a little clearer. Till kingdom come

Aweikinin 2/12/2014

From John 15:1-8

H,

Still on the theme of birthdays and wishes, I keep asking myself if it is really possible to ask anything of God as Christ encourages us to do. It is all tied up to character, is it not? If we are “in character” everything we ask will be valid. We will ask according to character and that holy being cannot be resisted.

To put this in another way, if we are actors on a stage and we know the right lines then it will all work together for good. The universe of the play will be coherent and sensible. If we ad lib here or there or freestyle it but keep the themes and major ideas going the story would still move along. But, if we have no idea of the message, do not get the theme or setting or what it all means, we begin to act at a disadvantage and no one watching the play will make much sense of our production.

At some point, every analogy breaks down but you get the larger point. We learn the lines first to get in character but after a while we may become one with the famous method and not need to stay in character but will be that character. It is in the now, the great dress rehearsal for eternity, that we need the props of miracles and rescues and prayers and study. We are nowhere near the heart of His thing. We are struggling. Life is closing in. We fall and we make mistakes but we are in it. The vital thing now is to stay in it. To not give in and walk away from love.

We are fruitful in some areas and fruitless in many. He is pruning. He is taking out the bad bits. We are stepping into the most thrilling character of all: Christ. We must stay there. The desire to be good and godly will be sorely tested by our need to do evil. Our blind spots will make us think we are walking forward even when we are way back. Our eyes opening will fill us with a supreme hunger for change. We will see what we really need is character above charisma, truth above consolation and everlasting bread over the sweet barren feed of material safety. Then, it will come slowly; we will see our great need to be like Him. To live as He lived and lives. On our knees we will cry out for this new heart, new body and new mind. On His throne He will grant every individual request. 

Aweikinin 27/11/2014

From John 15:1-5

H,

The more I look at it and live it out the more I am convinced that it has little to do with what we do but everything to do with  how we do it. We do not get points for striving to do all the overt things of a so called ‘ministry’. It is not like we need to be heavily involved in the minutiae of God’s unfolding will. We are not as important to this as we think we are. He would be God if no one believed. He would lose nothing if the whole earth scorned Him. He who is everything is sufficient in Himself to sustain the majesty of the universe without our arrogant need to think we must do the works or the whole thing will fall apart. Faith without works is dead but works outside faith are pointless.

There is something else going on here. A famous line comes to mind; the bit about stones praising God if people do not as mentioned by Christ and we are told again and again how nature itself reveals His glory. I think that all of this regeneration going on has nothing to do with doing something for God but rather becoming someone in God or ‘like’ God. I think it is about eternal character not vigorous actions or moral compunctions. The other bits play their part but this is all aimed at giving us the sort of character and making us into the sort of beings that last forever.

A life built on this character will outlast the world and the coming “fire next time” and all the storms and tempests that every individual life will have until we land safely on the endless shore of God as a true son or daughter of that wholesome will. We are being made into patient, kind, loving, humble, joyful, peaceful, faithful, self controlled and fruitful beings that are the true light of the world and salt of the earth. It seems to me that God has no interest in business empires or political agendas or vain glory campaigns that suggest we are in the public relations department of heaven. He is not out to prove a point on any matter or to show that every idea has some ‘Christian’ substitute. He is into the individual hearts that return to Eden and gain that non separation of the original plan of man with God and God with man. He is making us in His image all over again. These other things will occur as a consequence of this return to first love but let us not think that this is what matters. It is life-eternal and all that character. That is the true and eternal solution to all the problems of us, in and out, today and toward forever and in our hearts and in the world.

Aweikinin 26/11/2014

From John 15:1-3

H,

I get your point about the joy. It was never meant to last in that sense. Here we get glimpses of it before we roll back into the ‘normal’ blend of tension, hunger and expectations heightened by our connection to God. It has always been a bitter-sweet irony that we are made more aware of our hunger when we follow the narrow path of truth then when we float along the broad way of consolations unfulfilling. The human body and even the mind can fool itself with constant winning and pretty faces and a serene life but that old teller, the human spirit, must always hope endlessly for more.

I think that this ‘hunger’ does not end because we make a decision to go straight and narrow. It begins to expand as if it knows that there is now more and much more to fill it. The conversion experience is just the start. The process from hungry soul to fulfilled being is fore-shadowed in the early joy but then there is all this pruning going on, a de-evolution if you will, and this will take a lifetime of setbacks, corrections, close shaves and maybe some self declared exiles.

The constant thing about our walk and dance is that we stay connected. Hope, faith and love are all around us. We have access through prayer, illumination through the word and companionship through the spirit in our hearts and the community of the church as living force. It is not just a feeling though we get the feeling of it, for that keeps us hoping, from time to time. When that feeling is missing we look up in faith that nothing has changed and when our strength has failed us and we cannot look up anymore then we recall His love that does not cease and let ourselves fall back into this first principle.

Aweikinin 24/11/2014

From John 15:1

H,

I have to confess: there is a buzz about this morning. I am up and about and exercising and finding the secret joy in life. Yes, me. I know the human nature of things will forbid me this thrill lasting the whole day. Perhaps heads will explode and hearts’ rupture if joy is to go through every fiber of our present being. Perhaps, it will not.

This contentment has only come from being with God. I do not mean this in merely a state of prayer or reading the bible, though that is somewhere in there, but in really looking up at the things that matter and down at the many things that do not. I cannot say that the problems I have, that you well know, have moved from that state of mountain-hood they were in yesterday. I have moved. I have been moved. I do not even know how or when it happened. The Buk says music gives him the sense that everything will be okay in the end. That is the sense I have today.

I wish I could bring out some prescription from this. I wish I could lay out a lesson. If there is one then it is merely to stay connected to the vine. I do not know what that means. It is something I am exploring. I am not a good candidate for these things but, hey, no one is. We are all equally in need of the divine touch of love. We are all equally able to receive it. We must all be called to connect with it in some way. Of course? On a day like today, it sure seems like it.

Aweikinin 21/11/2014

From Psalm 139:1-24

H,

It has to be clear from all that has occurred that God is not what we wish Him to be or what we want to frequently use Him for. In the best pursuit of the much hallowed God-life there is always the bitter pill of almost constant disappointment. He is often fashionably late or in the wrong place. There are enough opiates to make it seem like we mean “God is good all the time”, but that is just what we say because we have been taught to be afraid of His pettiness and how that might mean He would not be “good” the next time. In reality (hehehe…the eponymous “let’s be real here”) there are many times when our prayers and hopes and dreams and crucial moments go unattended.

I know it may seem like I am indicting God. I am really laying the blame squarely on us. I think we are the ones in the wrong place at the right time and, this, most of the time. This kind of thinking has no novelty and it is frankly the cause of much misery in pursuit of God and then the making up of doctrine to guess where God will be and what God might do. It is not that we are wrong so we must find the right way. In the words of that poet, Bono, we must really “stop helping God across the street like a little old lady”. The bible tells us that we do not get answers because we ask the wrong questions. It does not then leave it to our over hyped imaginations. It tells us the questions. We are told how to pray.

We are lost in the most cosmic sense possible. It is not a self help religion. We are not trying to find ourselves. We are simply declaring ourselves willing to be found. We are in an act of surrender. It is the start and the end of the Christian adventure. It is “our father\in heaven\hallowed is your name/your kingdom come/your will be done…”

So, dear friend, what to do but realise the daily call to kneel and ask and be found in love? Nothing. This is not as bad as we think it will be. Being still in God is one of the most active things in ‘real’ life. Those who are still in God get the most done. They are imbued with that eternal weight and glory of knowing where they belong. The humdrum of the rat race is in slow motion to them. There is the speed of light and sound in almost every Godly step. If we let God in there is every promise of something bigger than all our ideas, hopes, aspirations, ambitions, competitions and need for affirmation. He puts the Zoe in life. An open heart in lieu of a restless body will lead us to the things we want the most but do not yet know.

Aweikinin: a song.

About union.

Talking like we used to do
It was always me and you
Shaping up and shipping out
Check me in and check me out

Do you like walking in the rain?
When you think of love, do you think of pain?
You can tell me what you see
I will choose what I believe

Hold on, darling
This body is yours,
This body is yours and mine
Well hold on, my darling
This mess was yours,
Now your mess is mine

Your mess is mine

See you in the marketplace
Walking 'round at 8am
Got 2 hours before my flight
Luck be on my side tonight

You're the reason that I feel so strong
The reason that I'm hanging on
You know you gave me all the time
Oh, did I give enough of mine?

Hold on, darling
This body is yours,
This body is yours and mine
Well hold on, my darling
This mess was yours,
Now your mess is mine

Bring me to your house
Tell me sorry for the mess
Hey, I don't mind
You're talking in your sleep
Out of time
Well, you still make sense to me
Your mess is mine

Your mess is mine
This body's yours and this body's mine
Your mess is mine

 

Music and lyric by James Keogh

Aweikinin: a poem.

About loving.

It ought to be fun
This river of ours
It has a smiley face and a steel built door
An open window and a curious soul
To learn, only to learn

Why so serious?
About the sound and the fury
This is just the fuzzy overbite
The tragic joke of pre formed eternal life
Nothing to scoff at
Nothing to die for either

Unless, of course, it is
For one
An
Other

We keep trying to clean up this mess
We should just lie down in the dirt
The cleaning band is on its way
We keep trying to make (up) love
Let’s just look up
They make it better, up above
Trying to make our steps a dance
We forget the beautiful, divine romance

Trying too hard is not a sin
If we stop right now

So:

Why so serious?
About the sound and the fury
This is just the fuzzy overbite
The tragic joke of pre formed eternal life
Nothing to scoff at
Nothing to die for either

Unless, of course, it is
For one
An
Other

We keep trying to clean up this mess
We should just lie down in the dirt
The cleaning band is on its way
We keep trying to make (up) love
Let’s just look up
They make it better, up above
Trying to make our steps a dance
We forget the beautiful, divine romance

Aweikinin 18/11/2014

From Psalm 139:1-22

H,

I know I can be unreasonable in my anger. Of course it is nothing like that perfect scene where Jesu Christi went a little old testament on the peddlers at the market. I have always struggled with that idea of being angry but not sinning. How is exactly is that achieved? Sin over sinner? Present issue over marred history? Demonstrative grace over mad flailing at the object of true derision? Who knows?

The truth may be closer. It may a little more voodoo than mind over matter. We cannot hate people of course because whatever they descend to do it is never out of anything other than selfishness. It is not so much that they hate you. They just love themselves. In other words it is conceit to think that these moves against you are anti-you more than  pro-them. Their pleasure and your pain just happen to coincide at that particular tragic moment. Does this help? In a sense it seems less to believe this. We would rather be an integral enemy that just a whim of someone’s caprice. That, of course, is just conceit. It helps in remembering that your pleasure has been someone’s pain before. The little time you spent thinking about that other pain is the start of realizing you are not the hero of every story and may well be the villain in some.

This obsession with our own side of the story is anathema to growth. We must see these things as wrong and decide that sin and sin nature is the problem. In us and in others it is alive and well and is trying to kill us. It must not catch us by surprise. We are human and our capacity for evil is great but there is a spark lit in good that we reconnect with in God and all semblances of good. The eternal triumph of good over evil has begun with our decision in God. There can be no sympathy for the devil because now we have read all the books and the world based on his low ideals is tethering to the brink of extinction with only the veneer of civilization and the illusion of a better place for some, if they are smarter, faster, harder, and the rest can go off a cliff. We have seen the best rebellion has to offer.

We want more. We want an end to evil within and without. We want a new earth. We want God.

Aweikinin 17/11/2014

From Psalm 139:1-20

H,

There is a point where we rebel against the wickedness in the world and in ourselves.  The latter reaction carries the danger of self loathing and the former the danger of self righteousness. Neither posture is the definitive picture God is sending to us. There is a colossal nature to the mind of God we can never fathom. We rail and rant for His justice but can we grasp the concept of not just making things right for now but for all time? It is hard to frame all the problems of evil in the world this way but it is a start.

You know how I get about people that hurt children. It haunts me to think of the evil man has done to even the most helpless of him-self. I cannot comprehend the darkness of soul that takes a person to this particular point of no return. Jesus famously noted, with the subtlest of high standards, the damnation that exists for those that hinder the joy and promise of children with evil acts. We live on a continent where war and famine and disease and the evils of man over man continue to wreck the most unspeakable havoc. It has been the same throughout history. It is not that this is a dark grace or that the so called black man is not capable of living in the light. This is the weight of the human soul caught off from source. It is crushing.

I have not yet noted my own personal demons. The quake and shake of my very insidious thoughts and though none of these thoughts have killed one or one million we cannot know the extent that the single soul can go if it does not look up to the light of goodness even if it is the inferior illumination of humanism and human rights or the superior enlightenment of first spiritual principles.

Still, all this is above me. I cannot see it. I cannot catch the head of the comet. I do not know why evil persists and those that chose it can rule over those that do not. Free will does not remove from my mind the deep need for intervention in the moments where innocence is ravaged. I only have faith as a sword here. A belief that God is good and has a plan and that no matter what is done to the body and no matter how the mind is abused there is a large part of the spirit that will always belong to Him and that the rest is restored when that spirit finally comes alive.

I only have faith as a sword.

Aweikinin 14/11/2014

From Psalm 139:1-16

H,

It is hard to describe what it feels like to believe in God. It is not understood by one look at one part of the human psyche. It is not empty superstition. As you well know I take a liberal view to most things and so the ‘moral’ side of the thing would never appeal to me. I struggle with the very idea that God is so intimately concerned with our sex lives that we need books, concerts, sermons, wicked looks of judgement, seminars and self help (wrong words?) gurus to keep ourselves in line. I do not think any man has the right to tell another man how to live so the idea of the all-knowing pastor is a constant headache. I am not typically disposed to the look and smell and feel of what a church going Christian ought to be and when I look like I am then I am frankly faking it.

I do not come to God as conclusion because of these things but in spite of them. I know I bore you with the details of my constant conversion but this is my letter, I will do so again.

 It was an idea to me at first. A feeling that there was something larger seeking my attention and I heard that voice clearly. I say “He” but I do not think this being is male or female. We suffer a lack of pronouns here so I stick with the male since we, the church, are female and there is a divine marriage of beings afoot. I felt this being in my everyday life and though the moral compunctions of His presence were clear that was just a small part of the whole machine. I felt He wanted my attention and my life. I did not give either easily. I fought because I did not want the constant burden of looking up. The turning point was when those spots in me occurred that I could not explain. Gaps and holes and mysteries and propensities toward dreaming and being to the point that I could no longer deny that parts of me where undiscovered. He soon linked both things for me:  the idea that I had more to me that even met my own eye and the truth that He was that more. I was missing something and it was not a woman to love (though that has its high points) but a part of a person only known in the dark of God.

So, it has been that ever since. Even though I seek human community and stumble to conform, it falls back to that first moment of clarity: I am known completely by some other. Known and loved and expected and welcomed and imbued with a divine purpose and a unique spark of life. In Greek mythology Zeus has a penchant for mixing the divine and the human to birth heroes like Hercules and Jason and Perseus. In Christian reality, that is every single human being, the thunder of God hidden within every soul, and the goal of all talk about relating to God is to bring out the manifestation of these lofty, but mostly asleep, beings.  

Aweikinin 13/11/2014

From Psalm 139:1-12

H,

It is the ultimate problem with grace and love. We are taught to earn things. We are told the system is value based. If we grant that there is a grund norm of all life then we begin to think in terms of how that vastness relates to us. If we take that a step further and give it an individual shape and form, say Christianity, then we read in the book of books that this is what He is like and these are the things we must do. From that point on we are on a steady road of guilt and redemption that must be a nightmare for any psychotherapist.

Of course, it is not as hard as all that. It should not be. It is a controversial argument to make in whatever form but our job, as He told us on that great visit, is to stay in Him. The things we hope to do for God and the person we want to be in God is merely a fruit of our relationship with Him. We come at it the wrong way because we think of Him in figures of speech. Metaphor, simile, analogy and all that humdrum I never mastered are good for descriptive purposes but they are no substitute for the experience of life. They all break down at some point because one person cannot fully describe to another what it is like to be in God. All our attempts to do that only lead to terrible sermons. We must live in it to know it.

Another worthy note, in this vein, is how the cup really does not fill you up. You do not become less hungry by giving up to God. You become more. You become more aware of your hunger. It is little wonder a rejection of “when we first believed” can manifest itself in a ruthless hedonism immediately after. The soul grows a bigger appetite to increase our capacity to be filled. Of course, it does not feel that way. It feels like we have gotten worse or more sinful. The truth is that we are just alive again and with the large appetite of the recently awakened.

The crucial thing to know is that God is in there with you. He is in all your efforts to get lost in things and out on the other end when you want to be found again.  This is an eternal enterprise for your soul. It will take time only He has. When you fall in a ditch, as I frequently do, He is the other voice telling you all this is not fatal. The only fatal thing is to give in to the idea that the dark is your home. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are like that prodigal son who recovers while eating on his knees with ….well; you know who he was eating with: porkies. Our moment of Zen, epiphany, conversion or re-conversion, after-guilt or wise moment just occurs every day. We must be rest assured we cannot get away from the father who waits with open arms for that daily return to love.

Aweikinin 12/11/2014

From Psalm 139:1-6

H,

I do sometimes get an inkling of a feeling. A sense that I am surrounded by something good but this sense does not last long. Who can feel good for long in the bad air of the lower earth? This is the place where all the misery of and in the world can be lobotomized out of any being by the simple touch of luxury and the illusion of personal safety. We are all in the race not to change the nature of the biological contest, as least according to the kernel of Darwinism, but to thrive in it. We assign winners and losers based on opportunities taken and the sharpness of our own resolve. It is supposed to be the best of the world rising and, if you add a humanist or liberal or condescending tinge to it, those top hats helping the worst of the world. Not that those on floor also  can rise, that would be beyond communism, but that they can eat bread and water and live with low aspirations and “stay in their place.” The benevolent ruler as opposed to the malevolent despot but the problem remains that neither answers the innate question about the equality of man.

God save us from this low wall of being. God saves us from this low wall of being. He makes the measuring line intergalactic and announces that we all fall short of the highest ideals. He comes into our story and shows us what is good and perfect and that it is attainable. He locates our love for Him in how we treat people who can do nothing for us, it seems, and puts the saving of our soul in terms of utter sacrifice. It is a wise thing, this gimmick of grace. He is teaching us, slowly, what really matters and who really matters. He is protecting us from our worse selves by showing us the slant of love and teaching us to match it.

There is no stronger solution for the human soul than the map of truth that shows us where we have been, where we are right now and where we are going. The first two are beyond our constant delusion of control but the last is well within our purview of choice. We can decide today to start being better than we have ever been. We can start today to talk to God, again.

Aweikinin 11/11/2014

From Psalm 139:1-4

H,

It is real comfort to know that I am not as spontaneous to God as I want to appear in real life. You know how I would always quote that epigram from Norman Mailer’s “Deer Park”:  “do not understand me too quickly.”  Right or wrong, I hate to be explained to myself. I do not know why. It is all that crushed hope of being read as bad when, even in my own sinful way, I was attempting to be good.

I do not mind this though. I do not mind when God calls out my intentions. It is good to know He is well aware how sick His child is.

Right next to our need to be in mysterious shells of self is the counter-intuitive need to be understood by at least one person. Is that not another sullen irony? We do not like to be explained around and told who we are but all of the pursuit of romantic love seems to be the need to find some stranger, at first, who understands us and to whom we can be ourselves.

It never fully unfolds as the fairy tale in our heads. All the fights in the world between lovers will track back as a betrayal of that first gust of mutual understanding. If we stay real long enough, we will discover that it is a myth for one human heart to know by instinct another human heart in any full sense. We can endure, ignore or pretend but there is no lie that can cover the fact that sometimes that person you love is thinking and acting like a total idiot. The rationalization and/or resolution of this primal bout of idiocy will break love or make love stay.

So, I am glad to be known by God. It frees the people I love from my inhumane need to castigate or condemn them when they do not buy into the hype that is my ego. I am free to come to God knowing He already knows my inner %$#@^&*. He tells me it is what He came to fix. It is comforting that He never goes: “Forri, you are absolutely right and so and so, well they are all wrong and I shall punish them.”  It is good for soul and spirit that He addresses every infraction with others and within me as a failure to love. He knows me enough to know my grouses are not as original as I think. In a wide sense He has lived in my skin. He has conquered all my issues with anger and self worth and the lusty need to get lost in wrong and now offers to me a better way. Every day, the divine hand stretches out to my light lacking soul with an indispensable offer to grow, to change and to be more like the Forri He has always had in mind. He has gone back to the basics. He wants to make me, and I think you too, perhaps, hehehe, into His full image and stature.

Aweikinin 10/11/2014

From Psalm 139:1-3

             

H,

The crucial bit of intimacy with God will always be our ability to think we can hide from Him. We have inflated our idea of who deity is, in a false air balloon, to such a level that He becomes unattainable and flat to relate to. There is emptiness in worship that can only be filled with a new awareness and the great approach. Instead, we use loud microphones and songs that are not really songs but entreaties to a rubber god who likes his ego, well, rubbed. We are trying to trick God essentially because we see Him as a cosmic robot who has a track record of being led around by the nose by people ‘wise’ enough to ‘know’ the things that ‘please’ this idol we have put in the place of who we claim to serve. All the dynamism and prescient intelligence that must go into creation is left behind and we reduce God to a bargainer for tithes and offerings and ‘service’ to a particular doctrine or denomination. We forget He once said: “if I was hungry, I would not tell you.”

We say that actions come from intentions and highlight that God cares more for the intention because we are flawed and can make a mess of our best laid plans but we must also know that acts matter. What we do does matter. The heart must get right so that right acts can follow. It is not that God demands acts over intention or vice versa but that He demands both. He wants the heart to match the body. He wants worship to start within our hearts but move to every fiber of our being and our doing.

If we stay in Him we are told this will begin to happen. It is instructive what you said yesterday about guilt of not praying enough for our country. Guilt, however, does not come from God. The desire and ‘sorrow’ to repent does come from His conviction but guilt is often paralytic and, in our case, leads to bottles and acts that go nowhere. It is better to get up than to stay on the ground mourning the road already gone. Well, the road is never really gone. It is a narrow way of endless grace till we are transformed. I am not saying we will not feel bad or that we should pretend to be up when we feel down. I am saying we should always put in mind and heart that there is something beyond the grievous mistake and the so-called fatal flaw. He knows, He sees, He forgives and He calls us always to better things that lie ahead.

Aweikinin 7/11/2014

From Psalm 139:1-2

H,

It seems that self awareness is peddled about a lot in religious and non-religious circles but it is a crucial thing. There are many things we do that we cannot explain. At first these acts seem alien to us and then they form into habit and we expect them but we may never really know why we do them at all. The ‘talking cure’ as pioneered by Freud and his colleagues hints at the possibility of exploring the subconscious and what dreams may lie there that form in thoughts which more often than not become acts.

All of that is well and good and perhaps even revealing but nothing can prepare the soul for the ‘hard’ questions that intimacy with God promises. There is no dark place that the light that never goes out is not interested in ending. It is a love above all because it is concerned not just with the idea that there is intrinsic value in every human soul but that such value has eternal relevance and can rise to the great heights of holiness. This is not a nagging or pushy love that tells you almost with a snicker and that hypocritical sneer: “I just want you to be better, baby”. This is the all front account of grace and the leading up and up in love without any need to pull you down, the crucial Freudian slip, in order to, allegedly, bring you up. In this sense, no human can bring you up to anything. They can merely hinder and they can only help. Funny enough when they try to ‘help’ they often hinder and when they try to be honest and kind and loving they can only help.

The ultimate aim of God is the reformation of the soul to its primordial efficacy. He is curing death one soul at a time. It is not so we will live forever and become bored and brooding vampires but that we are able to become part of, and truly enjoy, the eternal delight. Love like this has to know your mind. Love like this cannot guess at your acts and words of defiance. A love like this can only start from above.

Aweikinin 6/11/2014

From Psalms 139:1

              

H,

You know that quote I like, the one that says every fight between two lovers is some version of the statement: “you do not understand me!”  It is the seminal attraction one human being has for another: I am understood by this other person. It is the basis of most human love. Friends share common ideals and the best of lovers can talk without fear of being misinterpreted or shut down. It is the ideal that pushes us from relationship to relationship, seeking that sun of understanding and that pillar on which to rest a head weary from explaining himself or herself.

It is rarely like that, though. We cannot read intentions and we learn not to trust words. We are often only able to judge character by action. We are judged by this same standard too. It is a bitter experience to be read out your intentions by others and you know, all the while they are talking, that it is nothing like what was in your heart at the crucial moment. It is painful not to be known.

Thinking of all of these things reminded me of the moment of surrender I had to God. Of course, in reality, this surrender is a series of moments and not just one. The crucial one, on this road, has been the realization that I am understood by God. I cannot tell you how that freed me from the burden of living my life by the preferences of others. It taught me not to labour to explain myself and not to fret over the stinging rebuke that comes when others read me wrong. It helped to eschew the bitter pill of anger and revenge. I realized myself how much I look at others and judge them when I do not know a thing about who they really are.

This was the rock of my loving God: He knows me. It declared itself in my heart as a unconditional truth. And more than knowing when I intended to do good he knew the bad I was trying so desperately to hide. He knew the thoughts I had I could not share and the struggles I covered up in fake smiles and half laughs. It was like the dream of every hungry lover come true. He looked at me, He knew, He accepted, He was guiding me toward change but the quality of His love was not diminished by the infancy of my eternal heart. I knew I was on to something in that holy moment of waking up to truth. It is a joyful thing to be known.

Aweikinin 5/11/2014

From Romans 12:1-21

H,

There is that old bile that rises in my throat and then may show itself in spiteful looks or acts. The human soul is not carved to the shape of indignity. It is not made to be put down. It is not wired to receive deception with joy or hurt with magnanimity. This does not mean that it is innocent of these things done to others. If it was then there would be no wounds and there would be no bile.

I have to admit that my slights have been slight. There are people really wronged walking about the earth. There are disasters and tragedies that are evidenced in broken hearts and stilted souls. What can man do to me? The psalmist cries. A lot, I should think. I know that is not his point. His point is something like Christ said about “fear not who can destroy the body but who can destroy the soul”. A wounded fractured soul is still in pain and so it is still alive. The eternal value of it is unaffected by temporal events if it thrives in God. The psalmist did not merely boast that man can do nothing to him or her. He boasted based on a belief in God. He looked up and looked down and decided what was eternal and what was not. He wisely decided that man was no match, even under the influence of the great foe, for the glory of God.

Perhaps this is something lost in the modern church. Everything is an insult to us. We are angry if someone does not immediately bow to our greatness. We are upset if we are not at the epicenter of things. Everything wounds us and so our witness is small. We do not carry the marks of Christ lightly. We are not like them that went joyfully to their deaths for the love of God and (that other) country. We are not recognized by some, in hulking language, “puny human!” and our joy is made incomplete. With bile in my mouth, I say we all need to grow up.

When we give ourselves to God we see that things are different. The world may not change but we surely must. We cannot force this change any more than we can force the weather but it will come upon us and we will respond to it. The change in altitude will change everything else. We are at a height where everything else is small and the glory of God is sure. We are too quick, in the now,  to want to get ahead in life as the world sees it and make a mark on a fading earth. If you believe, then you know that no one will remember your bank account in eternity or that you changed Nigeria or made sliced bread better. These last two are worthy causes and done with the right heart are forms of worship, much like anything done in God. Yet, when made the focus of any life are limited instances where man is being man and will rise no further. The soul is the thing. The soul you nurture in God and encourage in others is where God rates the thing. We give our all to Him and in doing so we do much more than our secular hearts could ever do and for others too. We are that ‘living’ sacrifice made for ‘greater works’ because the time has come and the harvest is full but the hands are few. When I think of this I have no time for bile or anger. I barely remember what he said and what she said. My own amateur attempts at sin fall down and plead help because something greater has taken the place of that great need. It is a sacrifice worth making because the first one who did it now sits at the right hand of God. Where the earth, though it may not seem so, is planted and being planted under His feet. He will come to collect. ‘Soon’, we are told. He is first preparing a place for you and I to sit as former lambs in those heavenly places.