Cylcles Of Life

Lately I have been able to spend a lot more time out in the woods or walking out on our road and I have started to notice some things that for reasons that are lost on me that I had never noticed before. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t see these things, it was just that I hadn’t really understood what it was that I was seeing, it wasn’t until I opened up my mind to see that I really started to get a grasp of what it was right before my eyes.

What I have seen, played out before my eyes for years, is that life renews itself after death. Go take a walk in the deep woods and take a serious hard look at a fallen tree or a stump and look at the life coming from it. You will find everything from moss and lichens to mushrooms and, in many cases, you will find new trees growing out of the stumps of the old. Life coming from what we would consider to be dead.

What does that say about us? We who have the breath of God living within us? Do we simply die and rot away in the ground and all that is a part of us disappears? Or is their more to it then we think?

Just about every religion that I have heard of share two things in common; one is that there is a big change coming in the not so far distant future, a subject for a separate post, and the second is that there is something beyond this life. If you’re a Christian you likely refer to it as heaven, if you’re a Jew it’s likely to have something to do with the messianic kingdom or if you’re a Hindu it’s likely to be some sort of re-incarnation, no matter what you wish to call it, it all boils down to that there is something after this life and nature shows it to us day after day.

There is a school of thought that I subscribe to, that suggests our lives repeat themselves until we have learned the lessons that we need to learn. I don’t mean that as soon as I die the clock rewinds for me and I go back to 19-- and start over, no, I believe that we are reborn as different people but we retain some of the knowledge, through our spirit, that we have taken from this life and as we interact with the same people, the same souls if you will, that we have interacted with in this life, we relearn and grow as in our previous lives and times. I don’t have any proof of this mind you; I can’t pull out some sort of theological study or scientific publication to prove this. I can only offer a couple of ideas as to why I think this way.

First is the above mentioned cycle of life that you can see in nature, the cycles of the moon, the seasons, life and death in nature. The second is not so concrete; dreams. I have had dreams that have been so real, so vivid and detailed that when I woke up I was disorientated as to what was actually real. I have seen through the eyes of people that I don’t remember and yet in the dreams I knew who I was and who all those around me were. One dream in particular I was in a battle during the American revolution and I was running with a group of other men and we were crossing a bridge, just as we got to the other side there was an explosion from a cannon ball and I was knocked down to the ground. The last thing I remember was faces looking down on me as everything fades to black. Then there was one dream that I had that I was getting ready for work as a nurse, I am assuming based on the clothes, and as I looked into the mirror the face looking back at me was my face but with long red hair and freckles but the real surprise for me came when I went to a battlefield and realized that this was the place that I had seen in my dream. I had never been there before so I had no way of knowing what it looked like and yet it was like I had just walked back into my dream. Are these proofs that I had been there before in a past life? No, but it’s very compelling.

My last reason has to do with people. Have you ever had the experience of meeting with someone for the very first time but feeling like you have known them your entire life? Or you’re certain that you know them from somewhere but as you compare notes you realize that it’s not likely? Or you meet certain people and you just immediately click? Why is that? I would humbly submit to you that it’s because of the spirit of God living in us points you to those that you have been with in past lives or times and so your spirit knows them even when your mind has forgotten.

Some will argue that this is not theologically sound, that’s OK, but let me ask you a question; if it’s the breath of life that comes from God that gives us life in the first place, where does that breath of life go? If God is eternal and He is spirit than I would submit to you that this breath of life or spirit of God goes back to Him and He does what He wants with it. Yes our bodies die but if nature is any example to us than I can see where our lives are renewed and we begin again.

Just my own humble opinion. Shalom

Fairy Tales And The Bible

Do you believe that the Bible is nothing but a bunch of fairy tales?  I ask this, not because I think that, but because a surprising number of people do. I will grant you that many modern scholars don’t take a lot of the bible seriously or literally and many see no historical value, though from an archeological point of view much of what is written has been proven to be accurate as they uncover artifacts, but still many biblical scholars as well as Christians and Jews alike don’t take much of what was written seriously, instead suggesting it is more of an allegory or poetry to tell a story of the people of Israel. One author that I had read some years ago even suggested that Moses made the whole thing up for the purpose of uniting the tribes in a common ancestor. Let’s take a look.

In the first 11 chapters of Genesis you have a few stories, creation, giants and the flood that, in all fairness, might seem to be a bit over the top in believability. If the bible was the only source for that information I could understand the skeptics   yet in just about all cultures, in ancient times, they have variations of the same stories. Whether or not they actually happened in the manner described by the Native peoples here in America or whether or not it happened as the epic of Gilgamesh suggests is not really the point, the fact that these stories exist at all is enough to convince me that something happened and it affected the collective consciences of the ancient peoples to the point where they all wrote their own versions of the events.

The prophet, Ezekiel, saw what he described as “a wheel inside a wheel” while having a vision from G-D. Some have suggested that what he is describing a UFO, while others, going back to the fairy tale theme would suggest that he was hallucinating. I would argue that his vision was quite real and he was doing the best he could to describe things that he didn’t begin to understand. Imagine someone coming to our time from 200 years ago and that person seeing an airplane. That person would have no real good description for what they saw so they would describe it as best they could based on what they know. It wouldn’t be that the plane wasn’t real; they would just be hard pressed to describe it.

After that the rest of the bible, and I am only referring to the Tanakh or OT, is the Story of Abraham and his decedents, the laws that G-D gave them and eventually how they screwed up. It’s also about redemption as G-D promises to redeem His people despite their collective failure and a promise of better days to come.

What truly makes this so believable to me is because the warts on the main characters are all included. Think about it; if you were going to write a bunch of fairy tales about your ancestors wouldn’t you want to write it in such a way as to make them look good? I would. I would want every one of my ancestors to be the smartest, brightest, best looking people on the planet without a single flaw, yet this is not what the writers of the bible did, they left the flaws. You have Abraham, being afraid and lying about his wife being his sister. You have Jacob who had two wives and two concubines and family in fighting. His sons, not to be out done, did everything from selling Joseph into slavery, to sleeping with prostitutes. It’s not a pretty picture. Once you get to the book of Judges, you have everyone doing their own thing and the various stories of the rulers who led them either into evil or back to G-D, but no matter how you look at it was ugly. Even the great heroes of the bible, Samson, Moses, David and Solomon, just to name a few, all screwed up badly and none of those facts are hidden as you read the stories. So for me I accept the stories, with all the warts and ugliness as being true. If that’s a fairy tale then it’s one I will gladly believe.