Posted on 08/04/2002 9:02:53 PM PDT by TBP
We shall not cease exploring
And the end of our exploration
Shall be to return to the place where we started
And know it for the first time.
-- T.S. Eliot
The story of the Prodigal Son is the story of each of us. It is your story and mine. The prodigal son is heir to a great estate, along with his brother. He asks for his share, gets it, and goes wandering off from his father’s rich estate. Eventually, the prodigal son runs out of money and returns home. His father throws a banquet for him, much to the consternation of the other brother, who has been at his father’s estate, tending to the land, the whole time. The father declares his love for both brothers.
It has been said that you can’t step in the same river twice. This is because the river continually flows, and by the time you step in again, even at the same spot, the water is different. The water you stepped in before has flowed downstream. So it is with returning home.
We all play a game, in effect. It is a little like a game of baseball. You begin at a place called home, then you go on a journey with the ultimate objective of returning home. But when we do, the water has flowed downstream. God’s love for us is new each moment. We cannot repeat the experience, only enjoy the banquet newly laid out for us, for “It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”
In this way, each of us is the Prodigal Son. We believe we have left the Kingdom, only to return home to abundance and love. But in reality, it is not possible to separate ourselves from God. God is Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnipresent. Like the diffraction of white light when it passes through a prism, we are a rainbow of faces of God. That is why the banquet table is spread, in honor of our recognition of the Truth of who we really are, expressions of the Life of God, each unique and individual, yet each connected and part of the whole Universe, which is the body of God.
When we try to wander away from God’s house, we get lost and we bring ourselves trouble – strife, disease, and other forms of misery. It is only by returning to attunement, to recognition of the fact that we live always in the house of the Father, that I claim our rightful abundance and the feast is laid before us. It is then that I most fully live in God’s grace. It is then that I most fully please God, for by recognizing my Oneness with God, claiming my power, and declaring my good that I can fulfill the purpose for which God chose to express as me. And that is what I am here to do.
In a certain sense nothing can be spoken of so briefly as the Good when it is well described. For the Good without condition and without qualification, without preface and without compromise is, absolutely the only thing that a man may and should will, and is only one thing. Oh blessed brevity, oh, blessed simplicity, that seizes swiftly what cleverness, tired out in the service of vanity, may grasp but slowly!
A Repubic is what America try to maintain before many of our follow citizens gave into the Socialpath Democrarcy.
As you notice the Comet Cusor dictioary I have, even short changes Repubic. compared to the defenition of Democracy. I will try another dictionary for a better disscription of Republic;(this surprised me I have not looked up the word Repubic in a long time.)
Repub. abbr. 1. Republic. 2. Republican.
de·moc·ra·cies. 1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives
Top 10 on Republic
(FreeRepulic is one of them)
What is a Republic Government?
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Personally I think the words are off on defenition.
We are suppose to have a Republic kind of government, not a Democracy!
When spelled like this it is a discrption of a kind of government.
Do not be confused by the two party names that seem simular to the types of governments.
This is still a Republic!
There is the Republican party that try to sell us on the fact it is still abiding the Constitution. Things we like to hear, but in many case if you look closely sadly it is only a wolf in sheep clothng. It takes dilligent hard work to hold on to this Republic.
My opinion on the Democrates Party the majority has sold us out for a mess a potage!
What we have left is being good Stewards and keeping the Faith!
Alas, there is in every man a power, a dangerous and at the same time a great power. This power is cleverness. Cleverness strives continually against the commitment. It fights for its life and its honor, for if the decision wins, then cleverness is as if put to death- degraded, to become a despised servant whose talk is attentively listened to, but whose advice one does not stoop to follow.
Now in the inner world man uses cleverness in a ruinous way, in order to keep himself from coming to a decision. In countless ways cleverness can be so misused; but in order once again not to multiply that which is not important, we will again simply designate this misuse by a definite expression: to seek to evade. To forsake one's post, to desert in battle is always disgraceful, but cleverness has invented an ingenious device that apparently prevents flight: it is evasion. By the help of evasion, namely, one does not come into danger, and neither does he lose his honor by running away in danger- on the contrary one does not come into danger- that is one advantage. And one wins great honor as being especially clever- that is a second advantage. Only eternity, the Good, and so also the Holy Scriptures, are of another opinion about this matter of evasions and about the much-honored clever ones. For they are referred to when it speaks of, "those that draw back into peridition" { Hebrews 10:39 }. How strange that a man can, therefore, avoid a danger and when he believes himself secure and saved { which one indeed should believe after he escaped danger }, just at that point he has sunk into perdition.
But they weren't included. -- Steven Wright
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies. -- Groucho
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