“Jot” this down
Last night I kept dreaming about the word jot. In my dream I knew it meant something extremely tiny but I kept dreaming jot and scuttle…as in scuttling a boat or deliberately sinking a ship. In my dream I knew that jot was like an atom…and I also knew that the word I was searching for was not to scuttle or to sink, and I wanted to get up and figure it out, but I did not get up to figure it out until this morning.
I looked up where “jot” is in the bible and it is the following,
“For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”
Now I have said before that I love to look up one daily bible verse, so that I can see what it is God is saying to me, about our world, and I think God speaks to each of us.
I was listening to Joel Olsteen, and he said that reading a bible verse to see how God speaks to us, does not always “work” and he talked about how this man looked up a bible verse, and it said that Judas went out and hanged himself. Then the guy panicked and picked a different verse, and it said that “they went and did likewise”. It made for a good joke, but actually I have not picked a bible verse yet that does not “work” for me, because it is not literal, but often global or metaphorically that I believe verses “speak”.
I know that God is good, and that every story in the bible is ultimately about mankind, and how good is working in our lives.
Growing up, Monsignor Edward T. Gilbert, the pastor of our parish, used to talk about the tapestry of our lives as a giant quilt, and we are one of the patches or the “jot”. We cannot always understand the bigger picture until we get a broader, or more elevated, perspective.
So, I know that even though I may not always understand the bible verse, or the reason for a dream, I DO know that God’s purpose is always good.
So with regards to the jot, I was glad to know, that scuttle was actually tittle, which means the stroke of a pen. I believe it is my “calling” so to speak to write my understanding of things, so when I write, I believe we are to recognize that God does not let people slip “under the law” without consequences. Writing is how I speak my thoughts or understandings of what God is saying to me.
Having laws, does not mean that people cannot be forgiven, but it means that their must be restitution, and legal consequences must match what has been done, that is wrong. The legal consequences for what mankind did, was death for Jesus. There was definitely a cost, and it was great, and Jesus assumed those consequences.
(On a side note, Isn’t it interesting that Jesus assumed? Taking the blame and the consequences for all of humanity allowed him to be lifted, spiritually… He did not have to die twice, did he? Mankind actually was not able to kill Jesus, as he rose from the dead and he “assumed”. )
So I was thinking about “jot”, and how I was writing about atoms as nuclear, in an earlier piece, and comparing them to the nuclear family, and I realized that perhaps I am meant to recognize and understand, that the nuclear family (mother, father and children) shall not pass away, nor shall the letter of the law (ten commandments) pass away till all be fulfilled. Maybe the “jot” metaphorically, is the atom.
So, with this in mind, nothing that any justice department, or judge, or disney says (people who have been compromised, or have been bought or paid off, because they are flipping), can change the good, that God has planned, for the nuclear family, and the world.
So in the middle of all this reverie, I thought of what it is that WE can do, to stay receptive to God, and his laws and his creation of man, woman and family.
I thought of the woman at the well…and how Jesus said that there is living water, of which we shall never thirst.
The word “well” gave me an idea, for what it is, we can do, because Jesus loved to use parables, to explain things to his listeners. With the well, first of all, I think that we need to “dig deep” into our understanding of good…and how good operates.
And I decided to make “well” an acronym for weight, energy, law and light.
Each of us, individually, can do a lot to see the “spiritual concepts” and find a way humanly, to demonstrate an understanding of good, first with “weight”.
Heavy weights, in financial terms, means to be someone who has a lot of money and power. But we also know that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle, than to enter the kingdom of heaven.
So we can start HUMANLY with the idea of weight as a load that can be lightened, with is a GOOD thing, by finding ways to help others, and divest ourselves of that which we are unnecessarily holding on to.
For me, this translated into donating clothes that I have been keeping, until I lose weight. I had wanted to lose weight BEFORE I gave away clothes, but I realized that maybe I had to give away clothes, before I would lose “weight” metaphorically, and literally…ie wait causes weight.
(LOL)
So for the first part of my plan, to take action humanly, I have been taking clothes and giving them to the pregnancy support thrift shop in tomball, as well as the foundational church support thrift shop in Austin.I believe this will translate into effective weight loss for myself.
The second letter in my acronym is E for energy. I thought about how our world is being told that we are going to have an energy shortage. Gas prices are up, and food supplies are supposedly going up as well…and these things as well as nuclear, supply us energy literally.
So to do my part humanly, I decided that each of us can demonstrate “energy” by doing more with our time, cleaning, organizing, assisting others, teaching children christian values, and skills, and refusing to “conserve energy” by watching TV, our phones or sitting inside and sleeping.
The energy and industry we demonstrate as individuals, is magnified in the energy and industry communities, as we demonstrate as a country our own energy, so I got up earlier, did my workout, cooked soup for someone who was sick, cleaned their house and played with their children, cooked dinner, did my weight training workout, and went to church. I feel compelled to enthusiastically demonstrate NO LACK OF ENERGY.
Law, the third letter of my acronym of the word “well” might seem difficult because there are so many things in the area of “law” that seem more political than anything. But I realized that “law” for me, means truth. There are no loopholes in the truth and the truth does indeed set us free.
I decided to look for the truth in every situation I encountered and to radically rely on truth, especially the truth that mankind is created by God, that mankind has an inexhaustible supply of energy and good, and that Law is just.
I treat each person, including children and preborn children, as all having the right to be given time, kindness, forgiveness, and generosity and most of all LOVE. The more I can do for the least of these, the more I am doing to improve God’s kingdom. Not by taking advantage of the law, but abiding within the truth and integrity of the law.
Light is the last part of the acronym. Light is understanding, and each of us can have understanding of our purpose, our essential importance in the tapestry quilt of our lives, and our “understanding” is developed by prayer, and reading bible verses, recognizing that they are timeless, relevant and discernible.
The well may be deep but living waters that we are promised are worth the dig. And in my analogy of the nuclear family to an atom, all nuclear families have one mother, and one father, and only the number of children vary.
So in the periodic table of elements, all families are hydrogen based …isn’t that interesting, because WATER is Two hydrogens, and one oxygen. I know with that well I was talking about we have to dig deep…but maybe more simply put, God is telling us that WE are the living water, the source of energy, and the truth, as spiritual creations of God.