Innocence.

Many have asked me what the picture on my blog is for - the eye.

It has to do with a project 86 song that is raw, heavy, screaming and true.
The lyrics are below. It basically talks about what we are longing to see again... what we have lost.
Innocence. i have forgiveness, and i am no longer in fear of punishment -it has already been given to Jesus. But there is a former "old josh" (what Paul cause the "old man" - the FLESH)... the realm of sin, the Dominion of slavery and rebellion that i once lived in.. and find myself drifting in those former neighborhoods sometimes.

it is an aching. a desire. a freedom i long for.
i was talking with my boss on the way home from work today about heaven... if there will be fishing there. etc. but really God has been speaking to my heart about my heart lately... how it needs to be totally his... given over to him for honor, and worship... but also for protection. Jesus knows how to handle my heart, he will guard it... (read: the Holy Spirit also here). But i seem to think i can handle my heart... my will... my desire.. somehow i forget that we have these "training wheels" till we die.

and this is the longing and freedom i await for...
it has been said "theologically" in church history that DEATH came into the world in 3 form after the fall.

1. the SOUL died immediately (separation from God)
2. the SPIRIT died progressively (loosing our will, our desires, our wills became set against truth)
3. the BODY died eventually (death was a mercy judgement in view on an eternity of #1 and #2)

And it has been said that we are transformed in Christ

1. the SOUL is saved immediately (Salvation -, saved, alive again)
2. the SPIRIT is saved progressively (Sanctification - becoming holy )
3. the BODY will be saved eventually (Glorification - a Resurrection body)

It is #3 that i long for...
it is the daily grind of sin, of being an enemy of sin, of battling and warring in my soul, my spirit, my body... that i hate...
and so this "eye" on my blog is the reminder that the sacrifice is finished at Calvary, though I am not. The name stamped on my soul is Jesus - though my body is not yet like his.

and i find myself, longing, yearning, pleading to be set free.

SIN. it is ugly. EVIL. it is rebellion. DEATH. it is still the enemy, but conquered.

EVEN SO, COME LORD JESUS!

(if you have a chance to listen to this song on the Internet... or a friend... please do!)

===========================
"PS" - bold italics mine

Her heart bleeds...
It is a basis for your heartfelt hunger so gaze
At the page at the faces of nameless...
You're alone again
And this distortion is an apt replacement for
An unquenchable desire for more
More pages strewn across this sickening floor
I can't look at this
I can't look at you
I can't look at me
Who cares

If they saw what those eyes have seen.....
Oh how her heart it would bleed
If she only knew those abusive roots
And how the children would weep
If they only saw what those eyes have seen
It always keeps us longer than we wanted to stay
It always takes us further than we wanted to go
But you don't seem to mind at the time

Begging to be set free...
From what we were meant to be.

Innocence
It's inside you and your soul is longing,
Yearning
Pleading to be set free
Within your eyes,
Within my eyes,
Within our eyes
There could never be a more complete perversion of what we were meant to be
And with all that is in me I hate this
As we're sinking inside this ever-feeding illness
We are all quite silent
Sitting still.

"PS" - from Drawing Black Lines (P86's sophomore album)
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I hope you understand me a little more now... if only a little more.


(what is true? what is real? NOT what you feel, but you know eternally?)

Buchanan (btw - 2 months with "old claire" today)

Today I read a very good article by Pat Buchanan (yes, that Pat Buchanan - the conservative, the third party candidate, the MSNBC commentator) on Real Clear Politics (a great service for us political geeks).

I was walking with Claire today and met a neighbor, we talked for 10 minutes, found out that she is a widow (an opportunity to help a person in need "in your neighborhood" - there the people you meet , when your walking down the....you get the picture).

I got to thinking - "gee, wally, i would not have met half of the people i know now in Lapel (Indiana) if not for claire, i would not be as relaxed when i go to bed, i probably wouldn't have lost these 20 lbs so easily [ see - claire is my 2-3 mile a day walking buddy], and life would not be as fun, and i wouldn't have poop smell in the garbage outside, or bite marks on my hands (through gloves mind you)."

then i smiled as i though of how many people love their dogs, and would give money to the local kennel (ASPCA) yet are not as passionate about abortion/pregnancy. Enough with the arguments that Christians only care about babies getting born - and not the care after birth. That is not legit and I can't stand that charicature!~

i just don't get it. birth is birth, life is life. Ever read the declaration of Independence? What do you think the phrase "and our posterity" means? our horses? money? our land? NO... our children! Get that? our posterity - those yet to be born.... generations in the womb currently, or 5 years from now --also are guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yes...more than a blob of cells? I will side with 4th graders on this one - even they can tell life when they see it!
And... yes the Bible says so also! Seriously, think about it. it is those 2 months from being born, or 2 months from death that a socieity's love can really be discovered - beyond the words, policies and posters! And the partial birth stuff... that is just.... just... barbaric (like Germany AD 120 type barbaric)


Enjoy this article posted by Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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The Catholic Case against Barack Obama (by Patrick Buchanan)

In the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama rolled up more than 90 percent of the African-American vote. Among Catholics, he lost by 40 points. The cool liberal Harvard Law grad was not a good fit for the socially conservative ethnics of Altoona, Aliquippa and Johnstown.
But if Barack had a problem with Catholics then, he has a far higher hurdle to surmount in the fall, with those millions of Catholics who still take their faith and moral code seriously.

For not only is Barack the most pro-abortion member of the Senate, with his straight A+ report card from the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood. He supports the late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion, where the baby's skull is stabbed with scissors in the birth canal and the brains are sucked out to end its life swiftly and ease passage of the corpse into the pan.
Partial-birth abortion, said the late Sen. Pat Moynihan, "comes as close to infanticide as anything I have seen in our judiciary."

Yet, when Congress was voting to ban this terrible form of death for a mature fetus, Michelle Obama was signing fundraising letters pledging that, if elected, Barack would be "tireless" in keeping legal this "legitimate medical procedure."
And Barack did not let the militants down. When the Supreme Court upheld the congressional ban on this barbaric procedure, Barack denounced the court for denying "equal rights for women."

As David Freddoso reports in his new best-seller, "The Case Against Barack Obama," the Illinois senator goes further than any U.S. senator has dared go in defending what John Paul II called the "culture of death."
Thrice in the Illinois legislature, Obama helped block a bill that was designed solely to protect the life of infants already born, and outside the womb, who had miraculously survived the attempt to kill them during an abortion. Thrice, Obama voted to let doctors and nurses allow these tiny human beings die of neglect and be tossed out with the medical waste.

How can a man who purports to be a Christian justify this?
If, as its advocates contend, abortion has to remain legal to protect the life and health, mental and physical, of the mother, how is a mother's life or health in the least threatened by a baby no longer inside her -- but lying on a table or in a pan fighting for life and breath?
How is it essential for the life or health of a woman that her baby, who somehow survived the horrible ordeal of abortion, be left to die or put to death? Yet, that is what Obama voted for, thrice, in the Illinois Senate.
When a bill almost identical to the one Barack fought in Illinois, the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, came to the floor of the U.S. Senate in 2001, the vote was 98 to 0 in favor. Barbara Boxer, the most pro-abortion member of the Senate before Barack came, spoke out on its behalf:
"Of course, we believe everyone should deserve the protection of this bill. ... Who could be more vulnerable than a newborn baby? So, of course, we agree with that. ... We join with an 'aye' vote on this. I hope it will, in fact, be unanimous."

Obama says he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act because he feared it might imperil Roe v. Wade. But if Roe v. Wade did allow infanticide or murder, which is what letting a tiny baby die of neglect or killing it outright amounts to, why would he not want that court decision reviewed and amended to outlaw infanticide?
Is the right to an abortion so sacrosanct to Obama that killing by neglect or snuffing out of the life of tiny babies outside the womb must be protected if necessary to preserve that right?

Obama is an abortion absolutist. "I could find no instance in his entire career," writes Freddoso, "in which he voted for any regulation or restriction on the practice of abortion."
In 2007, Barack pledged that, in his first act as president, he will sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every federal, state or local regulation or restriction on abortion. The National Organization for Women says it would abolish all restrictions on government funding of abortion.
What we once called God's Country would become the nation on earth most zealously committed to an unrestricted right of abortion from conception to birth.

Before any devout Catholic, Evangelical Christian or Orthodox Jew votes for Obama, he or she might spend 15 minutes in Chapter 10 of Freddoso's "Case Against Barack." For if, as Catholics believe, abortion is the killing of an unborn child, and participation in an abortion entails automatic excommunication, how can a good Catholic support a candidate who will appoint justices to make Roe v. Wade eternal and eliminate all restrictions on a practice Catholics legislators have fought for three decades to curtail?
And which Catholic priests and prelates will it be who give invocations at Obama rallies, even as Mother Church fights to save the lives of unborn children whom Obama believes have no right to life and no rights at all?
==========================

I would tell a person to vote on just one issue. that's because I don't beleive it is that simple. BUT I will tell people that it is okay to disqualify a person because of their policies, statementes, record, etc... (like their views on a particular issue)... i find only good reason behind this approach!
Many of you know that I am a pro-life-federalist- libertarian on just about every issue... a bet that I wasn't going to vote for obama in 08 would have been good money spent anyway. But with the "I have a dream... and it is me... speech in Germany and now this commitment that his FIRST act would be to abolish the will of the people in many of THESE united states and impose his "radical" views on life (not on abortion... no, his votes help us to understand how he feels about getting "punished... with a baby" -- or so he's said).

Okay let me have it if you want.
That is my stance.
I am tossed up leaning more towards Bob Barr than McCain.... we'll see if I go from voting for a libertarian candidate, or to vote McCain to negate another's vote for Obama.

anywhoo.

8.8.08 = 15

Many people are all a-buzz concerning the official opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympiad tonight. And it is a big deal. But to me it represents the "Minnesota niceness" of the world. I firmly believe that the all powerful bottom line in this world is more about resources, material, wealth, economic freedom. There is where differences are truly ignored and a common pursuit is shared - the pursuit of happiness.
Two countries maybe on each others nerves but usually they trade items together and the concerns to the economy often outweigh their prejudices. In some ways the Olympics are a shadow of the average person in each country that doesn't really care much about the over-arching geo-political forces, or travesties, of another country.
If I am swimming the 100 meter free-style and the swimmer next to me is from Sudan (country who has currently killed over a million and displaced over 4 million refugees - tribal, Christian, ethnic cleansing) - that person wants to beat their opponent - instead of refusing to swim against a person representing the horror of Darfur. Or if America sold your country weapons in the 80's and now those same weapons are causing death and tribal squabbling in your country... will you pull out of the race? Cause Micheal Phelps is representing America?
So, I am a fan of the Olympics, don't get me wrong -- but to see them as the answer to reconciliation is just not correct. They are a cleaner form of competition, of willful ignorance, of speeches and feelings against the world (possibly China, regularly a top 10 person on Amnesties list of worst human rights violators). I prefer the less clean, less pomp version of world markets and free & fair trade.

there is great 8.8.08 that I celebrate today.

Today is the 15th anniversary of my baptism in the name of the "Father, Son & Holy Spirit". I became a Christian 15 years ago - TRUE reconciliation. However I played my first year more like an Olympics with Jesus. I did my thing, he did his, we didn't talk much - and so I had the real thing, I was covered by his blood for my sins = no guilt, but I wasn't really engaged with the Bible, with our church, with prayer and service to mankind.
I had real reconciliation, peace, with God. But I acted like we were neighboring countries in need of just ignoring each other.
So, Today also marks 14 years since I got fed up with playing Christianity (don't they say your first year is always the hardest, worst?). I decided in 1994 that I was going to just read Mark chapter 6 (for example) - study it, ask questions, seek advice, commentaries -- find the meaning... and DO IT. And it has been a better way. 1 year trying to have it on my terms was like being married and having a date each week - but never really talking to each other. the last 14 years of daily readings, talking, thinking, praising, serving.. of "loving God and Others" ... beats the pants off the "false Olympic facade" that I had erected around the simplicity of childlike faith and mature conviction with Jesus Christ.

And so, i don't have time to walk through the last 15 years.. but I anticipate living at least another year, and seeing a large day in my life. When I am 32 next august, and I will have lived 16 years without Jesus and 16 years with him... I will have something more to say about each experience.
What I can praise God for today is the memory of a son, a brother, a friend that was not really nice, he was a good kid on the outside, didn't rebel for the sake of rebelling, but was a real jerk, hated much of life, saw injustice without hope, atrocity without rescue, sickness without the remedy.
Then he decided to spend a year looking into the answer that everyone else had told him they had found. Jesus. And he found the hope, rescue and remedy that he hated not knowing about. I am glad that that confused, inwardly depressed, outwardly sarcastic and painful 16 year old has been buried with Christ and a new person, a new Spirit, has come to reside in him for the last 15 years.
I am ever impressed that God would know my name, impressed more that he would even think of me, impressed more that he would have emotional feelings about me, impressed more that he cares for my future and personal happiness, impressed even more that he would die to bring peace between us - instead of some religious "Olympic" form of piety, prayer and sacrifice.

God is not as far away as we make him. However, he IS greater, more powerful, bigger, holier and more loving than we usually make him. I am grateful for my grandfather and grandmothers, my parents, friends and my pastor and especially a young preacher at camp name John Taplin who spoke to my heart 2 years in a row at Christian Harbor Youth Camp in Holcombe, WI.

Many go through life knowing that God is near, here, not far away. However their version of God, usually what they have heard and not studied - is a piece-meal of sermons, opinions, lectures, articles and "gut" feelings. And so they live with a CLOSE God who is their version of greatness, their version of powerful, their version of big, holy, love....
And they don't care for that god at all - a different god than the one of the Bible... and yet they have "Jesus" on this gods description. A mental idol (representation) that is not correct.
It is funny how that "god" seems to fit our mental puzzle for what he must be like... but then practically that "god's" puzzle piece doesn't line up with life. doesn't fit the way we thought.

And that is when we must make the decision: our terms, or Jesus' terms? I have found that the Bible challenges my mental "puzzle piece" more than I would like. BUT when I actually get it, try to live it out, it is funny how the puzzle piece that God describes himself as -- it actually fits with life!
And so, we can watch billions of dollars of investment, parade and pomp. however, you will not see the two children: one from North Korea, one child from South Korea -- that happen to find themselves among other children at a park jungle gym. And after several minutes they are laughing, dreaming up heroic scenes together, banishing the dragons, the evil sorcerers, and the demon's from their new little world. And somewhere there... in that little park. That $5,000 investment of some play area and grass.
The true look of reconciliation, forgiveness, of "life together" again is seen. Spend your billions on your "religiosity" of peace, reconciliation - all the while prostituting your Olympic team for politics and self-centered agendas. I will take the the simple faith of children, as they play. And water that seed with conviction, principle and passion. There is hope, rescue and remedy in that small little green park with two kids playing.

And if you think that your approach but be anything but child-like to accepting the gift of Jesus... you are like a 15 year old Josh Paroubek. and I hope you meet the 16 year old Josh Paroubek who grew "younger" in his need to approach his loving Father over a year - and "older" in his conviction, principle and passion.
It is a great paradox that I stepped through in childlike "faith" (pistis in Greek can also be translated as: trust, belief, giving your well being/future over to ______ ). That point in a 16 year old's life, that day, that hour, that moment when GOD was nearer than I expected him to be -- and more great, more powerful, bigger, holier and more loving than I had painted him out to be.

Oh for the Glory of the day
The day I took my Saviors painting away,
For the painting was painted by me through ignorance,
and replace by His self portriat offering a second chance.

I hope those who have found the hope, rescue and remedy of Christ can celebrate with me today.
I hope also that those who have not found Christ, but are interested, would seek to grow younger and older this year in relation to God in Christ.


May the name of Jesus be praised, raised and honored - now and forever more
(in this body of mine)

blurry.

after 10 hours of writing and filling out online applications...
i am glad i only have to do this once every so often...

whew!
time for the bed....

sleep run over my like a sweet river of death [some reading this will get it... some will just be disturbed]

(happy sunday ya'll)