Senator Boxer vs. Doctor Evil

In light of one of my embarrassing state representatives (Barbara Boxer) I can't imagine the President humiliating a general for calling him "sir." Come to think of it, while in the Marines, if I had called an officer by their rank (such as Captain) I would have been corrected because it's customary for an enlisted man (or even a junior ranking officer) to call the officer one is addressing as "sir" or "ma'am." "Sir" and "ma'am" are words of courtesy and respect where as "Senator" is simply a word connotative of one's position. You should enjoy this YouTube video regardless of whether or not you agree with me (there is more to read after the video).

If I may take the liberty of expounding upon this point as to how a true public servant should act we can look to our Christ. Consider Philippians 2:5-11 for a moment:

⁵Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
⁶Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
⁷but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
⁸And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
⁹Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

So we have a God who humbled Himself by coming to enjoy our life in the flesh with us (by experiencing temptation, illness, injury, and ultimately death) so that He would have the pleasure of our fellowship through forgiveness which could ultimately be bought only by the shedding of His blood. How does He prove to us His desire for such fellowship? It is written in John 15:13-15:

¹³Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. ¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command. ¹⁵I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

God, who is of a much higher estate than "Senator" Barbara Boxer, allows us to call on Him as our friend and never rubs His power in our face by demanding obeisance. God humbled Himself before us in accordance with His His nature to prove that, "...everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

How we treat others is a reflection of our relationship with God.

The picture is a painting by Elena Ray called "Healing Waters."

Deuteronomy 30:6
The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.

Luke 10:27
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'

Psalm 51:1
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.

The verse from Luke has had the most impact on me recently of all these verses from the Bible. I have to admit that this is mostly because I have not loved my neighbor as I love myself. I do not prove my love for myself by providing for my own needs; I prove it by trusting in God who has provided all things for me and providing for the needs of others in return. In truth, I am not loving God if I do not love my neighbor in such a way and I have been taught this again because of the love of Christ who necessarily came to serve me and not to be served by me.

I stated in my title that, "how we treat others is a reflection of our relationship with God." The practical application of this statement that gave me the wisdom to peer more deeply into Christ's sacrificial love was this: In the home I rent in, the owner (and amazing friend of mine) has many pets such as chickens that I love very much. My afternoon ritual after work has been to enter into their cage and pet them as they all run to congregate around me.

I have repeatedly stated my love for them to many people. But what does love entail when it comes to animals? Scripture gives insight in Proverbs 12:10 when it says to us that, "A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel." So how have I provided for the needs of these animals that I often refer to as "ours"? Well, I've occasionally fed them and cleaned out their coop and gathered their eggs, but this has not been a very regular occurrence. When this was brought to my attention the response of my heart was to convince me that I should ignore the chickens when I got home and not visit them so that I would have an excuse not to care for them. The question God posed to me was whether this was a loving response towards creatures that cannot care for themselves. Of course, it was not.

Sin, being what it is, is about as useful as a darkened lighthouse and just as dangerous to those who depend on it to provide comfort. There is no safety in sin. It darkens the heart and leads every area of one's life astray. My response to the principle of loving those chickens was the same response I have been taking in much of my life recently. Instead of being a servant, I have become a taker. I have eaten the food provided for me without giving thanks, washed my laundry and took showers without a thought given to the water and soap costs, and enjoyed the fruit of the labor of my friend, all the while chalking my rent payment up as an equal exchange.

The exchange of money here is not, in itself, a righteous act even if the payment faithfully comes on time. It is the motive behind the exchange that matters. I had withdrawn myself from my friendship under the assumption that I would no longer be responsible for what came with maintaining it. In other words, my relationship with my friend, as with the chickens, had become one motivated not by love and compassion, but by duty and obligation.

While considering this outcome of my heart I began to realize that though I felt like my relationship with God was a good one, my actions were proving to show a completely different reality. Were my life to genuinely reflect the love God has shown to me through Christ I would have given of myself joyfully to care even for lowly creatures such as chickens, not to mention a friend who has repeatedly and happily sacrificed her own well-being at times to provide for my needs.

I'm happy to admit that, because God is a great God who blots out my transgressions and sins, I have again reformed and re prioritized my life to honor Him through my love towards others. Still, my heart is deceitful and though it as well as my thoughts have been illuminated by the light of the Holy Spirit the feeling of love is somewhat absent. This has been good for me however as I believe that God is desiring to show me that love is something that comes even in the absence of feelings. It is something absolutely knowable because it is able to shine even in those times when I don't want to give it. In other words, love is an action of letting go of my desires to bless others even when I don't want to.

God has brought me full circle in this reasoning. I was humbled before Him when He taught me that my feeling of love for Him was false because it was not backed by actions towards my neighbor (or friend in this instance). He is allowing me to understand His love in this moment by allowing the feelings of my heart to catch up with the actions of love that I am called to commit. This ability is not a natural act in the flesh but is only motivated out of thankfulness for the joy that has been set before me in Heaven through Christ who died for my sins. I hope that you also know of this life-giving love (or should I say "love-giving life?).

Service Entitlement.

To those who find my blog: Thank you for reading my first post on Blogger!

This blurb starts with a pureed meat sauce that a class at school made. Yes, it does sound vaguely revolting! "Pureed meat sauce," you're thinking. "Who would ever THINK of such a thing? Well, I assure you that one of the classes at the high school I work at DID think of it. What astounds me more is the thought process that then went through the mind of one of the young ladies in that class. She thought to herself that it would be funny to dump a bunch of said meat sauce into a planter bed and pretend like she had thrown up in it. Needless to say, the thought did not enter her mind to clean it up. Either that or her laziness and sense of entitlement got in the way. Probably a bit of both.

About a week later one of the students comes up to me and begs me to clean the meat sauce up. Apparently it had started to smell very bad and because I am one of the custodians it was my responsibility to fix her sense of smell in that small corner of her world. I told her that I would not clean it up until she told me who had dumped it there. Her response (as it is with the majority of high school students) was basically that she would not rat the person out. I told her that basically the mess was not going to get cleaned up. She caved, or broke like a dam, depending on your preference of descriptive phrases.

Armed with a name I promptly forgot about the mess and seeing that this was Friday afternoon there were going to be a couple days over the weekend for everything to "ripen" even more, as it were. Finally, Monday rolled around and I rolled by the detritus in my golf cart and caught a whiff. I decided to clean it up because I didn't want to wait to find the girl who had done it with the smell being as bad as it was. She would pay later.

One of the teachers came up to me and watched as I gingerly scooped the trash into a bag. He kindly offered to me the name of the girl who did it, at which point I turned to him and asked why he or none of the other teachers asked her to clean it up. He was silent.

When the school day ended the next day, the culprit was lounging around with a few friends and I went up to her and told her to pick up trash around the place for the mess that she had left for me to clean up. Her response was basically to tell me that it was my job and if I didn't want to do it then I shouldn't have chosen the profession I went into. Trying to put a polite and slightly humorous spin on her comment I said to her that, "I didn't choose it. It was chosen for me since before time began." I then stated that, "Sometimes a man needs to take a job to get by in life." She gave me an odd look of incomprehension and began to whine her way through trash pick up.

Returning to my thought on laziness and/or entitlement I believe that she felt entitled to the right to make a mess and not clean it up. This thought reminded me of a story that my mom told me about her dad when he was a janitor at the Air Force Academy supporting his family. My details are probably a bit wrong but I believe a cadet threw some trash on the ground and my grandpa saw the act and told him to pick it up. The cadet's response was, "If I didn't litter then you would be out of a job." Human nature doesn't change and, in a sense, I'm happy with the way I can now relate with my grandpa. I have found that wisdom has a way of growing with age if you cultivate it through action by means of meditation on the Truth.

I want to approach the girl and pose to her a question. I want to ask her if she has ever made a mess at home and had her mom tell her to clean up after herself. Of course, the question would be rhetorical seeing as no mother besides Mary mother of Jesus would ever lack that opportunity! Those are words passed from mother to daughter within every generation for the purpose of aggravating children. Do you suppose her response to her mother would be something like, "No! You clean it up mom! If you don't want to clean up after your children then why did you choose the profession of motherhood?"

I have prayed that God would give me a love for this girl regardless of her gross attitude. After all, my response to Christ when I sin is to say to Him, "You made this mess, now you clean it up!" How wrong my thinking is when I say that. I forget that I have perverted myself and chosen to walk down the streets of sin. Thankfully, God paces the highway of holiness.

When God made me, He looked upon me in my mother's womb and said, "This child is VERY good. He is the apple of my eye and the object of my affection." God has already cleansed me and the demands I place on Him effectively state that I have no responsibility for myself and no desire for His love. I try to prove that I am unworthy of love, but praise God that He loves apart from any worthiness of the recipient of His love. Worthiness comes through service and God shows that we can love others by being responsible for ourselves and serving them, for while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.