Doing it Right!

Every day we pass judgment on the things other people produce.  When folks paint artwork or make music or any one of a thousand other things, we judge their competency.  It’s the same out here in Redneck country and some of the things we judge are those that can be seen from the road.  It might be the quality of fences, the health of the herd, or the shape of your hay bales.

For the past week I have been driving by what I like to call the “weeping bales.”  They are the saddest bales I’ve ever seen and the consensus is that they should have been hidden in the barn before anyone had a chance to see them.  Today I stopped to take a photograph of them and discovered why they haven’t been stored away.  They are not tied and would fall apart if lifted!

Thanks to the efforts of Gary K.,

even using one of the most troublesome balers in the county, we were able to turn out some pretty fair bales, thereby keeping our reputation in tact.

Gary says he can do better so the two of us tore into the John Deere Baler yesterday and replaced a hydraulic pump, removing several million parts to do so.  I must admit, I had doubts that we would ever get it back together but Gary pulled through again.  He seems to have some innate mechanical aptitude that allows him to do these things.  He’s the same guy that tore into the mower gearbox last week.  This is the gearbox, and we removed every part and replaced all the gears!

I used the mower yesterday and it purred like a kitten through 20 acres.  Tomorrow we will try the baler for the first time since replacing the hydraulic pump.

My New Perspective

I have been a pragmatic for most of my 60 + years and always relied on human qualities to guide my approach to life.  Like many folks, I just could not reconcile biblical events with the tools of logical deduction that I believed, God had given me.  I only learned recently that, by anyone’s standards, I would be called a Humanist.

There are “self-help” books and authors too numerous to mention that purport to tell us how to think to make our lives fuller and richer and I have read many of them.  Set goals, nurture positive thinking, and visualization are a few of the techniques they offer as footsteps to achieving fulfillment. 

 

I always thought I had one of two choices.  I could accept blindly what “a book” (the Bible) was telling me about God, or I could use my God given sensibilities to deduce the truth by examining the world around me.  Surely God would not want me to abandon my free will and accept some illogical and unsubstantiated belief system that had been handed down by man through the centuries.  That seemed to me to be a very dangerous path to take and I had seen its results many times over the years in places like Guiana (Jim Jones), Waco, TX (David Koresh), and Heaven’s Gate (Marshall Applewhite) in San Diego, CA

.

While I was never able to accept many biblical accounts of the Flood, Virgin Birth, raisings from the dead and many, many others, neither did I discount them completely.  Anyone who has read some of my other writings knows that I usually allow for some credence to all legends and sagas, no matter what their source.  There is some truth behind many of them whether they come from the mysteries of Persian Zoroastrianism, The Bible, or some Greek mythological Odyssey.

My observations of the awesome creations around us and the balance that exists in nature have always affirmed my belief in God and a divine creator, but my study of religious history and its divisiveness has always prevented me from aligning myself with any particular church or group.  Nevertheless, one of the few statements from the Bible that I firmly held on to was (Matthew 7:14) “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life.”  A narrow path to me meant that it was individual and only wide enough for one person and each of us has his own, and the path is hard because it has to be traveled alone; on faith.

My sudden “Awakening” and rebirth on the morning of March 10, 2013 did not change my basic belief system, but it did add the Bible to a preeminent place on my list of “self-help books.”  Suddenly, a spiritual facet was added to my Humanism and my faith was expanded many fold.  I could see that Jesus was also trying to show me the “footsteps to achieving fulfillment.”  He had found the path, not only to eternal life but to a present life of fulfillment and I only needed to follow his example and “walk in his footsteps.”

During my Bible studies, I learned that Jesus often referred to himself and human kind as “sons of God,” but beyond that, a very subtle detail arose that was repeated many times in the testimonies of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  That detail is the fact that, on several occasions, Jesus referred to himself as “The son of Man,” (Luke 9:56) just like the rest of us!

If Jesus had been born a supernatural being, then his accomplishments would not have much relevance to ordinary folks, but he assured us that we are just like him and have the same abilities and even more!  (John 14:12) “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father.”  Here was a man, just like us, who was performing miracles almost daily, and he was telling us that we could achieve the same!  As further proof that Jesus was a son of man, contemplate his final words as he hung on the cross at Calvary, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  Those words would not have come from a supernatural being!

As a consequence of all this, I no longer solely depend on the guidance of Dale Carnegie, Wayne W. Dyer, Tony Robbins, Paramahansa Yogananda, or any of the other “self-help authors but, instead, will continue to practice walking in the footsteps of Jesus, the original and “The true light and the way.”  Now, whenever I have a question, I ask myself; What would Jesus do in this situation?

The Reformation and the continuing battle for freedom

 The Reformation

I have recently been reading about Martin Luther and the period of the Reformation that divided the Catholic Church into the so many separate sects of Protestantism.  In those days, the Catholic Church was considered the “conservative” point of view, Luther and his followers were considered “Liberals,” and a third group of reformers, the Anabaptists, were the radical socialistic arm of the Reformation movement.

This whole period between about 1400 and 1500 is a fascinating time in world history when the Black Death (Plague) wiped out an estimated 30% to 60% of the population of Europe by the 1400’s, leaving the landowner Gentry in short supply of labor and giving the Serfs a better bargaining position.  The invention of the printing press and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible in common language (1450), further relieved the Serfs from dependence on the Catholic Clergy and they began to feel their muscle!  It was at that precise moment that the “man of the hour,” Martin Luther produced his Ninety-Five Theses (1517) and ignited a revolution of free thinking that changed the world.

Making comparisons with the world we find ourselves in today, I find it difficult to reconcile my mistrust of Liberals with the fact that Martin Luther’s movement to free the populace from the tyranny of the Pope was a “Liberal” movement.  Liberalism had always had negative connotations for me but I had always thought that Martin Luther’s movement had a positive effect on world history and now I began wonder.  Certainly, living under the despotism of conservative Catholicism was not a good thing in the 16^th century as it reduced the populace to serfdom, a modified form of slavery that existed under medieval feudalism.  Having said all that, it seems that a Liberal movement was necessary to change things and therein lies my conundrum.  Can a liberal movement have a positive effect?

Under these conflicting viewpoints it would appear that Liberalism is nothing more than the engine of “Change” and that Conservatism is a resistance to change.  In the final analysis it seems that the only relevant factor is what kind of change is taking place!  Today, it seems like all the change is undermining the world’s most free and advanced form of government, the American Republic, but in Martin Luther’s time the change was undermining the despotism of the Church sponsored feudal system which allowed for the growth of the many Royal Houses of Europe and their myriad of Kings, Dukes, counts, and Princes to oversee the Serfs.

The Catholic Church fought back against the Reformation by intimidating Martin Luther and his followers and, later, with the Spanish Inquisition that condemned many Protestant groups for heresy.  The radical Anabaptists were hunted down and exterminated wherever they could be found, (mostly in the Netherlands) and the Protestant followers of John Calvin (Calvinists) in France were subject to a massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 from which they never recovered.

From the singular event of the Reformation, sprang the likes of Baptists, Mennonites, Calvinists, Quakers, Lutherans, Methodists and many others including the Puritan Pilgrims who almost immediately began the population of the New World and what would soon become our American Republic.  When seen in this light, it can be seen that millions of people sacrificed and suffered for the right to be free from the tyranny of the “Old World” and Serfdom just a few years before this country was settled, and many more sacrificed during the Revolution of 1776.  Look up the word “Serf” and see how closely it represents your lifestyle today and you will soon realize that the battle still rages!  Freedom is not free and just because the battlefield is not apparent does not mean there is not a war raging against our freedoms!