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Lord’s Prayer

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.

To Live in God’s Presence

Dear God, I know you are with me now. I know you are with me any time I call on you, or even think about you. Let me remember, every minute of every day, that you are with me, watching me, ready to help, protecting my soul even when the things of this world give me pain.

Let my every minute be lived in your presence. Let my every action be an offering of love to you. Let my every word be a prayer.

Mason Barge 3/2/14

To Awaken in Christ’s Body

I  awaken in Christ’s body as Christ awakens my body, and my poor hand is Christ. He enters my foot, and is infinitely me. I move my hand, and wonderfully my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him (for God is indivisibly Whole, seamless in His Godhood). I move my foot, and at once He appears like a flash of lightning.

Do my words seem blasphemous? Then I must open my heart to You and let myself receive the One who is opening to me so deeply. For if I genuinely love You, I wake up inside Your body where all my body, all over, every most hidden part of it, is realized in joy as You, and You make me utterly and real. Everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to me dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in You transformed and recognized as whole, as lovely, and radiant in Your light.

Awaken, Beloved Son of God, in every last part of my body.

~ adapted from a prayer by
Symeon the New Theologian, ca. 990 A.D.

Mason Barge 10/11/2015

Meditation

“In your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.

~ 1 Peter 3:15

Benediction

Now to Him who has given me grace in accordance with His gospel, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for many ages past, but now revealed and made known by the command of the eternal God, so that all mankind might find the obedience that comes from faith; to the only God, the God of wisdom and truth, be glory forever through His only son, Jesus Christ.

Think of the day ahead in terms of God with you, and visualize health, strength, guidance, purity, calm confidence, and victory as the gifts of His presence.

Proverbs 14:29 (NKJV)

Genesis 23:1-9 (ESV)

The Story of Abraham [39] - The Death of Sarah

arah lived 127 years; these were the years of the life of Sarah. And Sarah died at Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan, and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.

And Abraham rose up from before his dead and said to the Hittites, “I am a sojourner and foreigner among you; give me property among you for a burying place, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.” The Hittites answered Abraham, “Hear us, my lord; you are a prince of God among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our tombs. None of us will withhold from you his tomb to hinder you from burying your dead.”

Abraham rose and bowed to the Hittites, the people of the land. And he said to them, “If you are willing that I should bury my dead out of my sight, hear me and entreat for me Ephron the son of Zohar, that he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he owns; it is at the end of his field. For the full price let him give it to me in your presence as property for a burying place.”

Notes on the Scripture

Genesis 23 skips forward some years to the time of Sarah’s death. Abraham has, apparently, moved to Hebron in the interim. One does not have to try hard to see why he would want to leave Beersheba, a desert city dependent on wells for survival. This move puts him yet again among a strange people: for now we meet the Hittites, perhaps the first great expansive empire in Western history.

When archaeologists claim not to trust Biblical accounts, one must always remember the Hittites. The world of archeology claimed they simply did not exist (or, if they did, they were some minor tribe) until, in the late 19th century, they began to uncover records of a great empire called the “People of Hattusas” from Anatolia (Turkey). Genesis was right. And when modern archaeologists express doubt about, for example, the existence of Sodom, one is fully justified in believing they simply don’t know what they are talking about.

The Hittites are remarkable for another reason: they were not Mesopotamian in origin, but western. Their language was Indo-European — in the same family as English, German, and Latin. Their prominence sprang largely from their use of the chariot, which spread down from Eastern Europe, and they almost certainly had roots there.

Abraham thus lived among all the great middle eastern empires of his day — Mesopotamian (early Babylon), Egyptian, and now Hittite. This represents a meeting not only of empires, but also of continents: African Egypt, Asian Babylonia, and the European Hittites. It is this singular confluence of three continents, together with their peculiar religions and cultures, that has made the Middle East so contentious throughout history; and here we see it, already, more than a thousand years before Christ’s birth.

Abraham wants to bury Sarah out of his sight. Rather than dig her a grave — which unlike today, would be difficult to keep secure — he will go to great lengths to bury her in a cave. Protecting a body from discovery or molestation, and putting it in a place where the living would have minimum contact with it in the future, are advanced ideas for the time. Although Abraham really has no civilization to call his own — his entire existence revolves around his direct relationship with God — his sense of civilized customs was progressive, as befits the patriarch of two great peoples: the Hebrews and the Arabs.

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“New Sneakers”

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