Bear

He was John Norris with a single W (congratulations to cousin Morris with a double W new mayor of Red Deer AB) (last name! Flewelling). One fine day Grandpa decided to get married so he got up in his Sunday go to meetin’ duds and said “I do!” Later strolling down Lacomb’s board walk he said to Annie, “well my dear I have exactly fifty cents left so which will it be, a meal at the restaurant or a movie?”
“Oh Jack dear, I can’t decide which one we should choose!” she replied.
“I know, we’ll flip the coin, heads we go to the restaurant” he said.
“OK”
Up, up, up went the shinny fifty cent piece flashing in the sun.
Down, down, down went Grampa and Grangran. They spent the rest of their honeymoon in a futile attempt to retrieve the coin from under the walk.
Lacomb is (or was) situated in bush country, the great boreal forest, lots of animals. They lived not far from Gull lake which like all Alberta lakes at the second last turn of the century had considerably more water in it (and less algae) than now. It was too wet for Grampa so off he went to homestead in eastern Alberta. (Ironically he settled in the Palliser triangle that blew over into Saskatchewan in the dirty thirties) For a few dollars you had a homestead and if you lived on it for a certain amount of the year and plowed so much of it, it was yours to keep. Grampa lived there long enough for Dad it be one year old before he got a house built and called for them to come from Lacomb.
Shortly after they got there its off to Hardisty for Jack to fetch supplies, that being the last town on the railroad.
“Mom can’t we go outside, it’s hot.”
“No”
Three days later “Mom can’t we go outside, it’s hot.”
“No”
A Week later “Dad’s here!” Three little kids spill out of the house and run pell mell out to meet the wagon. (ok, two kids, the baby was still a bit young for running)
“Oh Jack I am soo glad that you finally got back, it has been so hot and the kids have been cooped up inside ever since you left!”
“But Annie dear why ever would you keep them inside, it is summer and . . .”
“The Bear!”
Consort is on the north end of the great plains which extend all the way down to Oklahoma or somewhere down there. When Grangran moved to the homestead she could see one tree from upstairs in the house. You must understand that from those windows at that time you could see for thirty miles north and east, now the shelter belt blocks off the view to the north. Last lonely outpost of the foothills of the Rockies, down hill from there to the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
“Bear?”
“Yes, down east there”
So Grampa gets on the horse and goes to investigate.
“It was a lost black angus calf !”

Beneath the Poppies

Why did they plant poppies in Flanders Fields? My WIF and I have this ongoing discussion with Puff at the focal point. The Magic Dragin. Henri said it himself, (Pappion) I never killed anyone but it was easy to frame me being who I was and where I was. If PP&M had not been the vanguard singing through all that blue haze Puff might never have been suspect. We also have a go around wonderland every once in a while with Alice. Would LC ever have been able to write such a story if he had not been dedicated to opium himself? 1819 John Keats, 1821 Thomas De Quincey, 1830 22,000 Lbs imported into Britian, 1837 E B Browning, 1874 first Heroin. Even Sherlock Holms himself when he did not have a case to work on drifted off into never never on opium’s magic carpet and the good doctor used to get after him about it.

“Scientists found that the human brain's neurons had specific receptor sites for opiate drugs: opium, heroin, codeine and morphine. But then there was the obvious question. Why would nature put in our brains a receptor for a plant? After all, human beings didn't evolve over millions of years eating opium or shooting heroin. The scientists reasoned there must be some other function for these receptors sites. They soon figured out that the active ingredient in all these opiates - morphine - had a chemical structure similar to endorphins, a class of chemicals present in the brain. Endorphins are feel-good chemicals naturally-manufactured in the brain when the body experiences pain or stress. They are called the natural opiates of the body.”

All this because Karl said “religion is the opiate of the people”. I often wonder how many people are under the poppies. I think Karl was right for the most part. Certainly he never experienced a personal relationship with God and it seems that religion was just a pain killer for him. However it is too bad that he had to go on to something stronger. For how many Christians is God just there to dull the pain or for euphoria?

1753 Linnaeus, the father of botany, first classifies the poppy, Papaver somniferum-- 'sleep-inducing', in his book Genera Plantarum. We can “not sleep though poppies grow” because God is real, it is not opium it is the real thing, God is there ! ! ! Sure Jesus died but He rose again and that is where we are.

Making a Defferance

G.C.Morgan on the incarnation
“In proportion as men grew in their intellectual conception of God, it seemed increasingly unthinkable that He could be interested in their every-day life. Morality became something not of intimate relationship to Him, and therefore something that mattered far less.
The failure has ever been due to a lack of final knowledge concerning God.
The wide issues of the manifestation of God in Christ are the union of intellectual apprehension and moral improvement, and the relation of religion to life. In no system of religion in the world has there come to men the idea of God who unites religion with morals, save in this revelation of God in Jesus Christ (incarnation).”
This is that difference which makes the New Testament in Christ’s Blood totally unique and absolutely differ from the Mt Sinai covenant, and all of the other covenants of the time before the incarnation. That is the fact that all the covenants that God made with people had nothing to do with changing them, whereas The New Testament in Christ’s blood IS our salvation; it IS that which destroys that which was and makes a new start, the new birth “old things are passed away all things are new” ! “remember this, It was not by the eternal facts that sins were taken away, but by the manifestation of those facts. This text does not affirm, and there is no text that begins to affirm, that He before He was manifested, takes away sins.” G.C.M. on the incarnation. Jesus asked Philip “have you been with me for so long and not seen God?” We can not see God and go on and on and on ‘discussing’ what is right and what is wrong without some detriment to our vision. This is not to say that there is no right or wrong. There are absolutes. There is an AUN, Absolute Universal Norm for the uninitiated, which is “Be Holy” and is defined for us in the phrase spoken by God “as I am Holy”. That is pretty Holy. That does not leave much room for error, in fact it leaves absolutely no room for error or even anything that looooks like error “no shadow of turning” ! However We are not in the armed forces, more specifically navel inspection. When we spend too much time looking at our belly button we get a crick in our neck but far far worse than that we loose sight of, in this case, God and our fellow christian. This is the message of the gospel, we are free from the law, free from the condemnation of the law, free from the bondage, fear and guilt, of the law. We can look up. It is not that we do not need to know the difference between right and wrong but that we do not need to dwell on it, to focus on it, to act like that is what life consists of – obey the law line upon line ! We live on the other side of death. We live on the other side of punishment for sin. If the obedience that the NT calls for were obey the law –Jesus did it already, He lived a perfect life and He died for sin ! What is left for us is “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ”, faith ! Sanctification is not learning obedience it is learning to trust God. Trusting is the obedience called for in the NT !
People make one of two errors. They make the NT into an extension of the OT and therefore fall into the problem that GCM is referring to or they take their freedom in Christ for granted and assume that they can live life how they want to forgetting that we are now slaves of Christ able to and free to do good works – benefiting others not ourselves.
Beginning at home, our family – fellow Christians. Be nice, don’t argue about who’s right and who’s wrong. Love covers a multitude of sins, but love for whom? When we do good works we minister to our Lord Jesus Christ but to whom do we do good works? Jesus said “in as much as you did it to one of mine you did it to me”. If we minister ‘Love’ and ‘Good Works’ to non Christians it is in a much different capacity than that ministered to our fellow Christian. Fortunately we do not have to be concerned with making sure that our fellow Christian is right, that is for the Holy Spirit to take care of; what we need to do is love them and do good works, to them. Even the ‘church’ is not responsible for the morals of it’s members. “Encourage each other”, if they need it “Exhort some” but keep your eye on God. If we keep ourselves busy doing those things there will not be a problem with moral uprightness, it will be there. “If any man sins we have an advocate”. Apologize ask for forgiveness and keep going. Yep, if moral uprightness is not apparent in someone’s life we have reason to question their relationship to God – being a Christian will make a difference to the way a person lives BUT not by anything that anyone but God can do ! !

Growing Pains ?

How tall was David when he killed Goliath? As tall as he was ever going to get and taller than most of the rest of the men of Israel. How tall was Eve? There is unfortunately no reference or even inference in the Bible to tell us how tall she was as there is with David. Why would people think that Eve was smaller than we are? I don’t know, perhaps it is because we have listened for so long to the evolutionists. In Europe so we are told the people were shorter than we are – due to inadequate diet. Eve did Not have poor diet. In Japan the younger generation is taller – because they do not sit on their legs. The implication is that being taller was in the genes of the older generation who would have been taller if they had not had that custom of sitting on their legs. Did Eve sit on her legs? Did she have any other inhibitive custom that would have impeded her growth? In Viet Nam there is a government initiative to improve the diet of the people and try to gain some altitude. They seem to assume that the genetics are there to deal with the issue if the other factors are put in place. Was Eve genetically deficient? In Japan sumo wrestlers are much taller than average. Genes? No, special diet. We are hearing about glyconutrients and what they can do for the human body. Perhaps they would not contribute to growing taller but they would remove inhibitors. Did Eve have all the good stuff available to her? Was Eve’s environment grower friendly or trashed and polluted? What is a giant? Somehow the body did not get the message that it was time to stop growing. How long was Eve programmed to live? Did she stop growing at fifteen?
There are those who think that A&E did not realize that they were naked because they glowed. Remember Moses? I was surprised when I first heard the idea that what happened when A&E sinned to make them aware that they were not ‘dressed’ was that the light went out. They had been walking and talking with God in the garden and everything was good and their inner fire was stoked up and why wouldn’t they be physically taller than we are?