I watched Gravity last night (George Clooney, Sandra Bullock),which inspired the title of this post. “Houston in the blind” is how astronauts address Houston on the radio when no transmissions from Johnson Space Center are being received, and it is uncertain whether Houston is receiving the astronauts’ transmissions.
Well, here goes my first transmission after having quit reading and posting to Facebook for the rest of this year. I have long been in the habit of posting here, and then putting links and excerpts on Facebook for my contacts there to see, but today, this is it. And we’ll see who stops by to read this.
Think on how it is that people are born into this God-created world, And are in a constant state of possibility regarding Whether they might care to love and honor God or not.
He is careful to warn me that the only proper motivation for good works is the gratitude for the great grace bestowed upon us by Jesus. To do them for any other cause, he cautions―such as duty or obligation or utility or obedience―is to miss the mark and to operate in a worldly and unspiritual manner―and then he grows darkly serious when he goes on to warn of how doing good works under any hint of an understanding that they are required by God is nearing the heresy of “works salvation”.
It’s not that the time I’ve spent on this Earth so far Has been wholly without its bright spots, mind you, But I must say that had it all been left to me, I would much rather have done the work Of making bigger differences in this world Than the world seems to want made.
The big lie says that those who have been harmed by this world deserve special latitude when harming others―that those having been cheated deserve to cheat, and those having been lied to deserve to lie, and those having been betrayed deserve to betray others.
What the well-established menace to society requires this to thrive is this: His own will to violate the good order of the society must exceed the combined will of the rest to maintain that order. Thus does the one man’s continual transgression serve to condemn the apathetic hordes, who might otherwise have put him out already with but a flick of the public wrist.
About once a year or so, I’ll have a chat with somebody about religion, to which his or her response is an enthusiastic outburst about how, surely, his or her pastor and I would get along just great.
