The cap below is a kind of door that leads to the underground water system.
On this cap/door from Prague is an image of an open door with an arm holding a sword in a defensive posture.
In case that door doesn’t count I’ve included a door from somewhere in the Prague Castle.
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Posted as part of Thursday Doors.
The fields have ripened—harvest soon
as dawn respects the waning moon.
The light of gladness shines through noon.
His name reigns over all.
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Ronovan Hester offers the inspiration “respect” for this week’s Ovi Poetry Challenge. Also posted on Poet’s Corner.
Psalm 97:11 KJV – Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart.
When Ryan visited his friends one evening he talked to their aunt who sat in a wheelchair with her heart wrapped in a web of bitterness so tightly that love couldn’t escape. Feeling a rush of reckless compassion for them he risked asking her if she’d like a prayer of faith even though he knew she wouldn’t.
Compelled by politeness she agreed sternly informing him that she knew what paralysis was even if he didn’t and he merely responded by saying, I command healing in your body in the name of Jesus. After a pause he spoke directly to the hostility in her eyes, The Kingdom of God has come near to you. When nothing happened, he told her to remember and expect her healing, but if anything was amiss it was his faith and not her lack of it.
Three days later she rose from her chair and walked wanting out of habit not to smile yet overcome with such joy she couldn’t help it.
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Denise offers the prompt “web” for this week’s Six Sentence Story.
James 5:13-15 KJV – 13 Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms. 14 Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: 15 And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.
1 Peter 2:24 KJV – Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.
Dale offers the prompt “autumn color” for this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge. The leaves are still green where I am now, but here are photos from different trails I’ve walked in the past.
In trying to find out how far back the idea of the natural went the search engine offered a link to a paper by a naturalist philosopher, David Papineau, who described philosophers like himself as people who were committed to the belief that reality contained only what is natural, nothing supernatural.
Papineau wrote1,
They [naturalist philosophers] urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit”…
His argument could be easily rejected. All I’d have to do is reject any definition of natural that could exhaust reality. Indeed, I’m more inclined to feel that reality is exhausted by the supernatural rather than the other way around.
A Miraculous Raising From the Dead
Besides Papineau, I was also listening today to Curry Blake give a testimony during his Divine Healing Technician Training lectures. Before he was involved in his healing ministry his first daughter died when she was three and years later another daughter fell over twenty feet onto concrete. He could tell she was dead, but he carried her and then stood her up against the wall commanding her over and over again: In the name of Jesus you will live and not die.
And then she came back.
She said she was hungry. He gave her only a small piece of bread, because her mouth was crushed in the fall. When he took her to the hospital they said she had been dead for 45 minutes.
Blake made an interesting comment (about 52:50 in the video) explaining why he didn’t take his daughter to the hospital when he realized that she was dead:
Now I didn’t rush her to the hospital cause any time you take a dead body to the hospital they take them away from you and you don’t get to be with them anymore. Right? That’s why we don’t see many dead raisings in the States. Soon as somebody dies they take them away and they start cutting on them and taking pieces out and you’re not with them and you can’t get to them again until the funeral. Whereas in other countries they, a lot of times they, keep the body in the house and different things go on and you can get to the body. That’s why there are so many more dead raisings in other countries. You know, we’ve civilized ourselves out of the power of God most of the time.
In my mind I took Blake’s testimony back to Papineau. I had a few questions to ask the naturalist philosopher.
He didn’t answer, but then I only asked him in my mind. In my heart I was beginning to see how our philosophical commitments to what we think of as natural keeps us from seeing what is truly real.
Footnotes
1 Papineau, David, “Naturalism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/naturalism/>.
Below are some pictures of doors at the Český Krumlov castle in the Czech Republic.
They are not far from the door I posted last week.
At least, that’s what I remember.
I also remember this was early morning, perhaps 5 or 6 AM. Most of the other tourists were still asleep, but not all.
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Posted as part of Thursday Doors.
The stone was sealed. The guard was set.
With prophesied conditions met
His empty tomb’s our sign, so let
our praises rise with Him!
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Ronovan Hester offers the inspiration “empty” for this week’s Ovi Poetry Challenge. Also posted on Poet’s Corner.
Matthew 12:39-40 KJV – 39 But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: 40 For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
Sam knew he couldn’t get there from here, at least not on his own smarts, but he agreed to go.
The still small voice told him to move to Colorado, then Florida and then Maine. Although those moves made no sense, he moved anyway, since he knew he didn’t have the smarts to know what to do next. At every turn he took the time to listen and then do what the voice told him to do.
One day Sam was overwhelmed with joy to realize that he and the still small voice had been living, seemingly for years, in a wonderful dwelling paneled with righteousness and furnished with goodness and mercy.
The still small voice said, “I told you we’d get here when you agreed to go with Me.”
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Denise offers the prompt word “panel” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 