Return to Eden, fire and spirit purification
Return to Eden, fire and spirit purification
An old friend replied to the “Imagine an America where Christian lawyers, priests, business leaders, politicians and ordinary citizens experience the fire and spirit Baptism of Jesus and Mary Magdalene” post:
Palm Sunday. Bash and the Good Witch. Hope all is well with you both. I have benefited greatly from your writing.
I cynically thought “Christian lawyers “ was an oxymoron.
I am not a lawyer, but I can read…
My reply:
Thanks, John
You are right about oxymoron, so many times I felt like a moron after blowing something the angels arranged for me to engage.
Of lawyers, Jesus said in the Gospels,
Luke 11:46 New King James Version (NKJV)
And He said, “Woe to you also, lawyers! For you load men with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers.”
I will always remember eating lunch at Betty’s Country Store with Lawyer Charlie Brown one day in 2001, the same year you picked up a hitchhiker with a daypack, wearing an Atlanta Braves cap. After hearing some of my stranger than fiction tales, Charlie asked me if I attended church, and I said I didn’t know when I ever was not in church.
Charlie became a public defender some years after that, and I thought he was doing God’s work when he went on to the great beyond. A couple of years ago, our friend Davis told me that Charlie had told him what I had said in Betty’s in 2001, and it had always stuck with him.
My many conversations and dealings with you, old friend, caused me to think you are doing God’s work, even though church people might view you, and me, as heathens, because we don’t attend a man-made church.
I remember several conversations with the Methodist minister of the church on the road from Helen to Sautee-Nacoochee. He was convinced the Devil would get our friend Davis, who did not attend church. I kept telling the minister that Davis was dealing with God in his own way, and it never seemed to go in, so one day I asked the minister where did he think the Devil would hide that one would ever think to look? The minister said he did not know where that might be. I said in a church.
A little while later, I dreamed the minister was at risk to a heart attack, if he kept his ministry. He had been a real estate developer, and a big heart attack had caused him to leave that line of work to be a minister. I figured he would not listen to me, so I wrote his wife a letter about my dream. Then, the minister came in a dream and asked me if something he was going to do would be okay? A couple of days later, I heard he had retired from his church and had gone to work for the Methodist national church as a representative to various Methodist churches.
By then, most times I visited a church service, I felt the palpable presence of Evil in the church. That continued. It’s been a long time since I attended a church service, but when I get into conversations with Christians about what Jesus was really about, they don;t seem to be able to wrap their minds around what he really was about, which was trying to get people to live differently from the way they were living before they met or heard about him.
I told a 32 degree Mason this morning that I belong to a lodge, too, the Melchizedek Lodge, and that entailed my being stood before many mirrors looking at me for a very long time, even now. The 32 degree Mason didn’t seem to hear me.
The Witch and I did some videos on my i-Phone this morning, perhaps to upload later at her new YouTube channel: Redneck Witch and her Redneck Soul Mate. I talked about gardening at her home and in the Garden of Eden, where God placed two Cherubim holding swords to fire to protect the Tree of Life and its ways. I said the Witch and I are trying to get back into Eden together and we are feeling those two Cherubims’ fire swords, which burn impurities out of us.
I said John the Baptist said of Jesus, that Jesus’ baptism would be in Spirit and fire, and I had experienced plenty of that for a very long time, and people who think they are saved by Jesus because he died for their sins, do not understand salvation through Jesus.
I said non-straight people get the same chance to get to God as everyone else, and it’s one step at a time, say by day, trying to move closer to God.
The HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale novel I wrote around the time we met is about the kick ass trial lawyer (I never was) Riley Strange’s wild adventures in paradise mating, aka the baptism in fire and spirit, with Mary Lou Snow, then after her heart-wrenching departure from this life, with Willa Sue Jenkins. The sequel, RETURN OF THE STRANGE, which I wrote last year, takes up where HEAVY WAIT left off, and ends with Riley, Mary Lou and Willa Sue about to hitchhike the Galaxy together.
Both tales now are free ebooks at archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/heavy-wait-a-strange-tale_202212
https://archive.org/details/retun-of-the-strange-v-20_202306
