Happy Anniversary My Love!

Land of the Free by Andrew Peterson

Jen's friend passed a song along to her, it resonates with us and where we're at, here's a snippet:

"Well, I’m weary of the spoils of my ambition and I’m shackled by the comfort of my couch. I wish I had the courage to deny these of myself and start to store my treasure in the clouds ‘cause this is not my home...and I’m just a little jealous of the freedom that you have, unfettered by the wealth of a world that we pretend is gonna last. They say God blessed us with plenty, I say you’re blessed with poverty ‘cause you never stop to wonder whether earth is just a little better than the Land of the Free." -Land of the Free by Andrew Peterson

Refuse to become corrupt...

I was driving last week, and in my quest to come up with original and relevant facebook status updates I came up with:

"Tim Pearson Refuse to become corrupt...it's an active process, to be passive is to be corrupted."

Okay, it wasn't truly facebook that influenced me, but my overactive idealistic mind that wonders why we don't do the right things even when we know they are the right things to do. I call it sin nature, you may call it human nature, but the point is WE ALL DO IT. We are self destructive as a community when we aren't actively working against our individual selfishness, and it's our selfishness that craves the things that destroy us as a group, or destroys another group for our own comfort to benefit 'our' group.

Uh oh...let me try to scramble so I can unpack this. Last sunday's sermon, I'm sure it was excellent but, my memory only allows for one tidbit to stick...the one thing that stood out for me was an illustration of the community that fights tooth and nail to avoid having power lines go near thier neighborhood. They get lawyers, experts, sheer numbers of neighbors to protest how this will bring down property values, create health risks, provide a place for people to throw shoes onto the wires (whatever reason they can come up with). And finally the county caves, decides not to put them there...only to divert the lines through a poorer, less organized neighborhood.

There is the saying that kaka rolls downhill, but it's more than that. Our actions affect more than just those directly around us. And now your saying, "I thought this was about corruption". There are two types of corruption, corruption of comission, and corruption of omission. Comission is actively doing something you shouldn't, omission is not doing something when you should.

How often do we want to do something that is 'good', but then, as soon as it becomes just the slightest bit inconvenient, the idea falls to the wayside? We have a glimmer of wanting to help with the Big Brother Big Sister program, Habitat for Humanity, or sponsor a child through Compassion International, and then the thoughts of cost and commitment come in and we wind up ignoring the tugging on our heart.

We are corrupt in every part of our being. We're like a garden, when it is left unattended, the good things become overgrown and ugly, and the bad things flourish and choke out any new growth. Without constant weeding, pruning, nurturing, tilling, etc. our lives won't bear any fruit.

We can live for ourselves, but it will always be at the expense of another. Our only defense is to constantly be in a state of readiness against our propensity for corruption...or we can get drunk and watch a lot of T.V. eating Twinkies until we die, never thinking twice about the human race as a whole.

**These rambling thoughts have been brought to you by: Cuban Coffee, stimulating the mind for hundreds of years.**