Huff Expressions

“O Happy Day, that fixed my choice on Thee my Saviour and my God.”

Could muse on that for awhile with many themes. What of, for example:

• The idea of happy days, or happiness at all, for that matter?

• Who needs a Saviour? [Well, the other guy,or ‘the world’, but me?]

• What up with the KJV language?

• Fixed choice? Well, even some Calvinists allow for the appearance of choice or ordained choice…and they’d say it better. I hold out, though, that even with the concept of a First Cause there are real secondary causes, in a similar sense to the idea of real ’secondary’ persons.

• A day fixed the choice? OK…let’s give poetic license, please.

   

I’m happy to say simply that the old song was on my mind, and I am indeed glad for the day Jesus penetrated my heart and I had to deal with His claims, bend the knee, acknowledge Him as Lord, and surrender my life to Him. I am doing it again now as I write, and another song comes to mind:

“Knowing you, Jesus. Knowing you. There is no greater thing….”

This is true, indeed, but it seems we would all be helped by further inquiry into why it is true; and what exactly it means to know Jesus. Good questions for which answers do not easily come forth, but I will offer this bit.

• Why is it true? There is no greater thing than knowing Jesus because he is the beginning and end of all that is. Since you and I are persons within that “is”, knowing the person who is beginning and end is a prerequisite for life. Without this knowing, we will never have faces, never know as we are known, end up forever estranged from the life which only this knowing can bring to pass.

• What does it mean to know Jesus? To understand that He is God’s Son and that He really became man, walked on this earth in space/time, the Creator embracing the Creation, so that in His life and death and resurrection all is made new. And, praying/listening/walking/obeying/serving in our relationship with Jesus so that we are truly knowing Him, much the same way we eventually know a lifelong friend.

An attempt to do justice to a majestic theme, this is, and nothing more.

I wonder about blogging and I wonder about this blog. It is at present a coversation with myself, a miniscule particle of mist in a Niagra of web documents. But self-conversation is not all bad. It is much like journaling, and that is a good thing. Should I write a blog daily? Should it be political?

Yes and no, meaning literally, yes daily; no, not political. I’m in a [prolonged] phase where I am weary of politics. GKC pushed me to this, though I no doubt over-reacted. He reminded me that the family is the big deal; that in the home states rise or fall, are made or broken. That, as goes the saying, the hand that rocks the cradle — or doesn’t rock it — rules the world. On the implied suggestion that neglect has consequences as well, I am reminded of the research — can’t remember the book — that validly connected the likes of Hitler, Freud and Nietszche with bad home lives and terrible father relationships. And you may recall that Marx is another example, at least in his own life. Sadly, he greatly neglected his own family, and left the world a legacy that can not be called noble under any guise.

As to war, I ran across this quote in a posting on WMD’s that a friend sent me. Thought I’d plug it in here before I say good night.

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” –John Stuart Mill (Copied from The Patriot

Surely he speaks to the highest good here. May God help us.

Good night. ~RH

Well, from the non-computer-savvy mind of a man perched in a home office in Eastern Kentucky on a beautiful November evening comes this first-ever blog entry for all the world to see. Amazing what Gutenberg started all of those years ago. As George Will said, only ideas have BIG consequences, and Gutenberg’s idea and all that it spawned is enormous. What was the idea? Well, it was a collection of ideas that enabled a world of ideas to take wings via the mechanical press. Five hundred years later we have publishing at a mindless pace and blogging that is both mindless and mind-boggling, among other things. You can figure out which one this falls into. It is a ruminating, that is all.
As to Gutenberg, the man who wanted to enable the world to read God’s Word, what would he think about the limitless publishing the internet has allowed? Of course, as A. Huxley said, truth may be “drowned in a sea of irrelevance”. And so I close with this prayer: “Almighty God, you know my mind and my loves. Could you let the words I imagine and post be of good to someone, never be irrelevant, ever be true, and bring pleasure to you, the One who gives all. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”