“Lifetime relationships are a bit more difficult to let go of. When a parent, child, or spouse is involved, the wounds are very deep. When the end of a lifetime relationship comes, you may feel that you would be better off dead. The pain seems to grow, the memories linger, a part of your life is dying. You relive every painful moment in an attempt to understand. Your job is not to understand. Your job is to accept. Lifetime relationships teach you lifetime lessons; those things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. They are the most difficult lessons to learn, the most painful to accept; yet these are the things you need in order to grow. When you are facing a separation of the end of a lifetime relationship, the key is to find the lesson; love the person anyway; move on and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships. A new life begins when a part of life ends.”- Jasheem Wilson
Tag: foundation
The First Sentence
What is this post without its beginning? I have heard over the years how important you are and your contribution to the writing process but I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t always put you first. Don’t always put much thought into you. So you test my patience with the very need to begin. Times where my mind is far too cluttered with a hanging word waiting to be pushed to the middle of this screen. You see though I trust that I can give birth here, I have since remembered there is movement in stillness. I have since learned to cherish you as something more than a good morning greeting thrown into the air and smashing into walls. I promise to not turn my back or kiss you gently on the morning after. No longer can, “Hello”, or “What’s up my people?” prove sufficient, for you are the commencement. The beginning. The start of this post and worth more than just some nightly fling. For what is the cake without its icing? The cooking pot without its lid? What is a post without its opening sentence? Must I risk my words boiling over the edge of posts and spilling sloppily into WordPress readers? All this mess that a conclusion of a sentence won’t clean-up for me.
Truth Is…
…foundational
no structure can exist without it,
and no tree can stand if its truth has not taken root.
Truth is not held captive to the dogma of religion….
held bondage within the framework of theology….
it is not trapped inside the walls of College classrooms,
oppressed by the lips of Baptist ministers,
and does not sing the hymn of Islamic melodies……
it is neither canonized nor done away with….
neither stolen away nor traded amidst the bowels of slave ships…..
truth is not lynched,
nor shackled against the cages of fear….
it refuses to shake hands with deception,
and will never embrace the arms of uncertainty
because truth is always certain.
It is sure to be like nothing you can ever imagine
but be everything you’ve ever hoped for….
it is accepted by the faithful….
and resisted by those who are afraid.
Castles in the Air
Choices
The Story
When enrolling in college was one of the most important and exciting times in my life, I couldn’t make it to her office fast enough. I cannot recall her name, only the exciting rush of anxiety that ignited in my heart and up to the creases of my face. She wasn’t anyone of particular specialty or significance, but what she represented was indeed important. She was my academic adviser and seeing her meant that I was on the road to something great. If I had not “made it” it was the step in the right direction. Little did I know the kind of revelations choosing this particular institution would cough up for me. Little did I know how much my life would change from this seemingly unimportant choice, which would have nothing to do with school, academia, or some fancy certificate to prove to the world how much I actually lacked in knowledge.
But on that day, I was deeply troubled to find a need to rush home immediately, shortly after my excited arrival to her door, (though I had not registered my classes), which ran me the risk of not being able to attend the classes I was so excited to be a part of. As I sat in front of her I quickly chose the additional courses required of me which I had not deeply thought about, I was just anxious to leave due my intense emergency. Thus, for that reason (which I am not apt to mention here because it’s just none of your business 🙂 ), I discontinued my journey for the solemn one back home.
When I returned to the source of my redemption (so I thought back then), I found to my great disappointment the closing of one of my classes. Pieces of my day had so perfectly fit into its own schedule like the perfect puzzle, each class ending in time for the next one to begin, all in order like the perfect lyric over a tight beat—all was well. Except, now a word was out of place, a sentence incomplete; fragments of a schedule now off beat. “Why?” I asked myself, “…did I have to take a class so off schedule?” Unlike the rest, this African American studies course was the only class I had that day in the middle of the day (and it wasn’t even one of my primary classes, it was the one I rushed and chose the day before). I would now have to take public transportation (as I did not drive then), to this now dreadful place for one single class; this I did not have the bus fare for, and so you can imagine my discontent. However, seeing it was the only available course left I settled, and took the class anyway.
It didn’t turn out so bad though, and the first day of class would change my life forever. It would be the day I would actually meet my husband, and I would hear the voice of truth for the first time in 19 years. Instead of it being a dreadful one, this day would instead be something like the night before a revolution.
The Message
The purpose of this story is to show you the value in each decision we make. No matter how small or minute it may seem, each decision creates for us the next path like a molding of clay does a new form. Whether it is our desire to pursue a new career, attend a class or decide to take the bus North instead of South, every single decision you make puts you on the path to your tomorrow. It sounds cliche, but most cliches are such because of the depth of its truth. As each way has already been determined from the foundation of the world, we nonetheless make manifest that which has been done with the decisions we make. The irony in foresight is that we don’t have to be given the gift of hearing a doorbell ring before it does to possess this gift. But it exists naturally already in those who choose to acknowledge it. We may not be able to physically see the glass vase fall before it does, but we can choose to move it away from the edge of the counter, seeing that it may fall. We can decide what the next day will be like simply by carefully paying attention to each choice presented before us, letting truth lead, but choosing truth in the first place.
If we can choose our thoughts carefully, molding them into the right words and transforming these words into the exact representation of the action necessary for obedience; if faith can become works and works can produce righteousness, then maybe, just maybe we can develop a sense of foresight we didn’t know we had. Giving birth to a gift whose seed was already planted inside of us, but that we didn’t realize we had because we thought choosing to have cereal instead of oatmeal this morning was just about breakfast.
Did YOU Know? ….. National Sunday Law
The streets are empty of people, and the grocery stores void of movement. The people seemed to have vacated the Earth; perhaps they have residence on the moon. (I wonder if it really does taste like cheese.) The automobiles have stopped dragging their tires to the next corner for fear of being arrested, disassembled and then thrown into the nearest junk yard. (We do not accept gas as bail payment….sorry).
Why is Sunday’s so quite? Why do the people lock themselves inside their homes as if the taste of air itself will chock them? Why are the streets empty?
National Sunday Law
Many believe it is because it represents the seventh day of rest; a day to relax from all our labors, and to focus our thoughts on the thoughts of the almighty. But is this true? Is Sunday our day of rest? Is this why the people have vacated earth, the reason the stores have shut their mouths, and the vehicles have stopped running?
In A.D. 325 Roman Emperor Constantine held a worldwide Christian Convention with the Council of Nice. Great dissension arose among the pagans at that time about when to celebrate holidays and how to worship the Gods. Troubled by this, Constantine as the Pagan High Priest, held a convention in Nicaea in Bithynia, to which Bishops were invited from all over the world. It was a meeting that would culminate in the current Christian belief system by merging scripture with pagan beliefs in order to solidify the many viewpoints of the council and appease the Pagan priesthood. It would also result in the death of many openly Pagan groups so that the revelation that this new religion included Pagan beliefs would not be revealed. Constantine commanded that the pagan temples be destroyed and the people killed.
A Pagan is someone who worships Gods and Goddesses, or they may worship Satan altogether. As a Pagan, Constantine worshiped the sun-god Apollo, having the image engraved on his coin. Issued in A.D. 321 as part of the decreed, Constantine instituted our current legal institution of Sunday as the day of rest as a National Sunday Law; to which he called “The Lord’s Day”, or “Dies Solis”, that is, “The Day of the Sun” because he worshiped the sun-god. From this point on, people began to keep the Sabbath Day on the first day instead of the seventh day to which it was originally established according to biblical law. Constantine ordered that stores be closed and that activity of labors cease on Sunday. It was Constantine who first made a law for the observance of Sunday as the Sabbath who appointed that it should be regularly celebrated throughout the Roman Empire. Before this, as stated, everyone properly observed the Sabbath day as it was instituted by the almighty from the foundation of the world.
CONSTANTIN’S SUNDAY LAW, ISSUED A.D. 321, WAS AS FOLLOWS:– {GC88 679.1} “LET ALL THE JUDGES AND TOWN PEOPLE, AND THE OCCUPATION OF ALL TRADES REST ON THE VENERABLE DAY OF THE SUN; BUT LET THOSE WHO ARE SITUATED IN THE COUNTRY, FREELY AND AT FULL LIBERTY ATTEND TO THE BUSINESS OF AGRICULTURE; BECAUSE IT OFTEN HAPPENS THAT NO OTHER DAY IS SO FIT FOR SOWING CORN AND PLANTING VINES; LEST, THE CRITICAL MOMENT BEING LET SLIP, MEN SHOULD LOSE THE COMMODITIES GRANTED BY HEAVEN.” {GC88 679.2}
Let me make it clear I am not a Christian (nor am I a Jew). I do however believe in the principles of the bible. As such I must say, that to observe Sunday as the Sabbath day is not in accordance with the commandment we have been given. If you believe in the bible not at all, this post does not concern you. But if you consider yourself a bible believer, and you wish to keep the commandments as they have been issued to be kept, keeping Sunday as the Sabbath day is transgressing the command to keep the Sabbath day set apart because you are actually not keeping the Sabbath set apart, you are instead observing The National Sun-day Law, and worshiping the sun.