10-9-11
“Beauty
For Ashes”, by Bruce C Hafen (cont)
In this talk He quotes one
of my new-found favorite scriptures from Isaiah 61:
1 The aSpirit of the Lord bGod is upon me; because the Lord
hath canointed me to dpreach egood tidings unto the fmeek; he hath sent me to gbind up the brokenhearted,
to hproclaim iliberty to the jcaptives, and the opening
of the kprison to them that are bound;
2 To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of avengeance of our God; to bcomfort all that cmourn;
3 To appoint
unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them abeauty for ashes, the oil
of bjoy for mourning, the
garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called ctrees of drighteousness, the eplanting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.
A friend of mine showed me
this scripture a month or so ago. The
vision of becoming a “tree of righteousness” has had such rich deep meaning and
motivations for me. I realized that as I
become one with Christ and do the Father’s will, then the mission of Christ
becomes my mission too. I feel compelled
to share my personal victory with others because of this scripture.
…
for some may simply drop out of the race, weighed
down beyond the breaking point with self-doubt and spiritual fatigue.
This breaks my heart. It makes me think of Kirk Duncan’s work with
Dot People. I am convinced that much of
our self-doubt and spiritual fatigue is because we are under the dark dot
voices influence and know it not. In the
last two weeks I have not been doing my Dot Affirmations and I feel this weight
very literally. I have been having much
doubt about myself. But what I think is
even heavier is the doubt I have that others love me or want to hear my
message. The dark dot voices are getting
me and I am going to fight back. I will
be restarting my Dot Affirmations today.
He spoke these comforting words in the context
of asking his followers to develop a love pure enough to extinguish hatred,
lust, and anger. His yoke is easy—but he asks for all our hearts.
This reminds me of that
Colleen Harrison has been saying in “He did deliver me from bondage” about
extinguishing our very desire to become angry.
It is a very slow process for me, but I do see changes happening in my
life, even though my husband may not verbally recognize them. I see them and try to focus on those victory
moments.
By
analogy, criminals are not necessarily rehabilitated by serving a fixed number
of years to pay their debt to society. A prison term may satisfy our sense of
retribution, but real rehabilitation requires a positive process of character change.
When I was at Jury Duty
last month, it brought up many questions as to what should be done to help our
current system. I believe the justice
system is corrupt because the law is left too much to interpretation in an
immoral society. It is easy to make the
law relative without accountability. My
thoughts on my Jury questionnaire were that the law is too lenient. Men or women break the law because they think
they can get away from having to pay the consequences- because our justice
system is corrupt. As I was reading this
paragraph, I just had the thought that if I were ever in any position to do
anything about this, I would see if we could find away to fix a punishment to
each law. If man’s laws are most
effective when they are founded on Natural law, and that it is true that in
God’s law we obtain the blessing of a specific law by obedience to that
law—then could man’s law not have the same clear punishment attached to the
crime? I think this would help the
would-be criminal realize that they cannot squeeze out from under the
consequence, if the justice system were like a good parent who follows through
to do what they say they are going to do.
In a world of my own making, the punishment and consequences might look
something like this:
If you are found guilty of
stealing, your hand will be chopped off.
If you are found guilty of
murder, you will be put to death.
If you are found guilty of
rape, you will be neutered.
In my world, there would
be no delay between sentence and execution, and there would be no
plea-bargains. I have no idea if this is
constitutionally sound. I know that
according to the constitution we have the right to a trial by jury, and that we
are innocent until proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. It would be interesting to put this idea to
the test to see if it has any merit.
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