Ideas are clean

Ideas are clean.

They soar in the serene supernal.

I can take them out and look at them, they fit in books, they lead me down that narrow way.

And in the morning they are there.

Ideas are straight--

But the world is round, and a messy mortal is my friend.

Come walk with me in the mud.............

by Hugh Prather in Notes to Myself 1970

Dear Heavenly Father,

It is said that that we’ve come this far by faith, it is also said that faith the size of a mustard seed will remove mountains. Is it possible that we’ve come this far presuming on You, solely by Your grace and not by faith at all? Why do we continue to repeat the errors of the past? Hear our prayers….they are always the same. Are there strongholds in us that keep us repeating the errors of the past? You want us to remove these mountains of unbelief in ourselves. Holy Spirit has constrained us because we can’t be trusted too far yet. Each of us has or belongs to a network that could be put to work but because of the potential for abuse You save others from us. We need to graduate from the crisis management mode of presuming on You to the faith that will remove the mountains of presumption. These mountains are the obstacles to the transforming of our minds, the new creation in the earth. It is not our intentions that are wrong but our methods. We’re holding our own deliverance back by our unbelief. Our unbelief is represented by our small mindedness and reflected by our cultural and traditional presuppositions of church culture and norms; American culture and norms. We think that just because we are Yours we can expect “magic”. We are called to have dominion as lived in vessels; Temples of the Holy Spirit in whom the mind & character of Jesus Christ is being formed.

The grand reason why the miraculous gifts were so soon
withdrawn was not only that faith and holiness were well-nigh
lost, but that dry, formal, orthodox men began then to
ridicule whatever gifts they had not themselves and to cry
them all [down] as evil madness or imposture.
... John Wesley (1703-1791)

An ode to the Hipster

Our search for the rebels of the generation led us to the hipster. The hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformist by lying low . . . You can’t interview a hipster because his main goal is to keep out of society which, he thinks, is trying to make everyone over in its own image. He takes marijuana because it supplies him with experiences that can’t be shared with “squares.” He may affect a broad-brimmed hat or a zoot suit, but usually he prefers to skulk unmarked. The hipster may be a jazz musician; he is rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich Village, but some hipsters have found a safe refuge in the upper income brackets as television comics or movie actors. (The late James Dean, for one, was a hipster hero.) . . . It is tempting to describe the hipster in psychiatric terms as infantile, but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times. He does not try to enforce his will on others, Napoleon-fashion, but contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested. . . . As the only extreme non­conformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if underground appeal for conformists, through newspaper accounts of his delinquencies, his structureless jazz, and his emotive grunt words.

—“Born 1930: The Unlost Generation”

by Caroline Bird

Harper’s Bazaar, Feb. 1957

"The Apostolic Song" *

O, I want to be an Apostolic Leader...

That is what I truly want to be...

And if I were an Apostolic Leader...

Everyone will be in love with me...

* sung to the tune of the old commercial jingle for Oscar Meyer Weiner

Courtesy of Tim Early & FAP International