This prairie’s thick with butterflies. From bloom to bloom they make a trip as summer’s winds through flowers slip at home with life and cloudy skies.
These butterflies distract my eyes like yellow leaves that float and fall. They calmly work though very small. While on this journey patiently, though home seems far away from me, I’ll walk and pray, obey the call.
Ronovan Hester offers the rhyme word “trip” to be used in a B line of a décima having rhyme pattern ABBAACCDDC for this week’s challenge. And Eugenia offers “journey” for her prompt this week.
Considering how nebulous his mind was only a few years ago, Joel knew he was being led by someone beyond what he thought the word “beyond” meant.
Shamefully he admitted he didn’t deserve any of this insight, or help as he sometimes called it, having filled his life with vanity and trouble. Now all he was interested in were questions like How can you feel at home in this world?
When Joel disappeared most of them thought the hunters got him. The hunters got a lot of them. Sometimes they found body parts, but so far nothing turned up that could be linked to Joel giving them hope that whoever or whatever he thought was on his side led him beyond the hell they were living in and wishing they could have gone along even if it meant dying to get there.
Denise offers the prompt word “nebulous” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.
C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, Page 11.
In Miracles C.S. Lewis wants to convince his readers that miracles, especially the grand miracle of the Incarnation where God became Man in Jesus, are possible and fitting. He does this by challenging views of nature, both theistic and atheistic, that reject the supernatural as a source for miracles.
Naturalism claims that supernatural reality does not exist implying that there could be no miracles. Lewis takes from Naturalism that nature is orderly, impersonal cause and effect processes. He then shows that our reasoning ability would not be the result of such processes. Whenever we reason we thereby demonstrate reality that Naturalism cannot explain without something else outside it.
Hence, given Naturalism’s presuppositions about nature, nature cannot be the whole show. Alvin Plantinga carried this idea further in his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.
Combine Naturalism with some field of consciousness (to avoid the supernatural) and one gets Pantheism, an ancient but ever-popular form of spirituality. Lewis writes (pages 99-100), “The popular ‘religion’ excludes miracles because it excludes the ‘living God’ of Christianity and believes instead in a kind of God who obviously would not do miracles, or indeed anything else.”
Although that characterization of Pantheism makes sense, it seems limited. These nature religions also have an ominous underbelly of demonic activity that Ephesians 6 warns us about. Miracles are wonders to our eyes. God is not the only source of them.
Furthermore, I see Platonism as a rationalization of these popular religions that Lewis objects to. However, and this is where my problems start, Lewis views Christianity as having “incorporated both” Platonism and Judaism (page 101). After reading his appendix on special providences I lost the ‘living God’ in all that philosophy.
There is much in Miracles of value especially when Lewis uses the presuppositions of Naturalism to argue for the supernatural, however, I suspect that Lewis accepted without adequate questioning many of the presuppositions of Naturalism such as impersonal natural laws and my own worldview inclines me to trust the Jewish scriptures over Plato.
Next Sunday I will look at miracles as presented by Greg Bahnsen.
The audio below is a reading of a shorter essay by Lewis on the topic of miracles.
Six people wearing their required masks for passenger safety boarded the train heading downtown while Sam watched. He remembered the days when the station was full of people, of which he would have been one, going to work. Today he was waiting for the stopped train to move on so he could cross the tracks and proceed on his walk through the park.
Without realizing it Sam was near the center of a pentagram formed by two points in the station, two on the train and one across the tracks.
The media reports, carefully written days before the coordinated explosions occurred, said that a terrorist group had assumed responsibility but luckily an unusually high number of regular commuters had taken that specific day off. Sam would have described the event as his ticket home if he had known although if he had known he would not have taken his walk there that morning.
Denise offers the prompt word “train” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
He was a craft-less, cranky crook who stole the money from some kid. He ran and laughed at what he did then found a darkened, dreary nook, unwrapped the bills to have a look, and counted dollars, one by one. Just five? All singles? That’s no fun. He wanted more. There were no more. Complaining life was such a bore the rats approached. This tale is done.
Ronovan Hester offers the rhyme work “crook” to be used in an A line of a décima having rhyme pattern ABBAACCDDC for this week’s challenge.
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:
Given the Deuteronomy quote above there are both blessings and curses (life and death). Furthermore, experience suggests that many of us find it easier to curse than to bless. Too often we speak harshly of others and even ourselves. Too often we slip into immorality while seeking either pleasure or power.
Given curses, how do we undo them? How can we go from curses to blessings?
Near the beginning of the video below Derek Prince said, “If you have any need or problem whatsoever in your life there is one place and only one place to which you must go to find God’s provision or God’s solution and that one place is the cross of Jesus.”
Satan wouldn’t want to remove a curse. Those nature deities like Gaia couldn’t. Honoring them with attention might go beyond being a waste of time and lead one through idolatry to even more curses.
Weekly Bible Reading:Ezra (Audio), Nehemiah (Audio), Esther (Audio) Commentary: David Pawson, Ezra and Nehemiah, Part 26, Esther, Part 27, Unlocking the Bible
We tried, but knew we could not say, “Those others were the ones at fault.” We went along, insipid salt, and we ourselves would not obey. Ours was the wide, not narrow, way where newscasts pumped each cover lie. We offered babies up to die for curses Satan would approve. That mark we got did help us move about, buy junk. We scream and cry.
Ronovan Hester offers the rhyme word “move” to be used in the D line of a décima have rhyme pattern ABBAACCDDC for this week’s challenge. I’m thinking of Revelation.
James devised a tale where the deep state cabal released their bioweapons which triggered humanity’s genetic degradation which triggered starvation which triggered random violence from terrorist groups such as the Retaliators which triggered dead bodies piled upon dead bodies. That’s when something snapped inside of him making him explore other plots.
He came up with a new character, Tommy, a quite likeable bunny. He wrote that Tommy’s rabbit hole was near Farmer John’s vegetable patch. He brilliantly described Farmer John smiling at Tommy as they lunched together on carrots.
Being pleased with that new plot, James wrote his final words before the Retaliators arrived, “Their tears were wiped away and all the earth lived happily ever after.”
