March 08, 2008

Revelation 14.13-16

And I heard a voice from heaven saying, "Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth"

"Blessed indeed," says the Spirit, "that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them."

Then I looked, and lo, a white cloud, and seated on the cloud one like a son of Adam with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand. And another angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to him who sat upon the cloud, "Put in your sickle and reap, for the harvest of the Earth is fully ripe." So he who sat upon the cloud swung his sickle on the Earth, and the Earth was reaped.

1 comment:

forrest said...

People start schools, and talk about all the virtues we would like them to install in our young...

And then the direct result of such clever plans is to produce one or two model students, who've learned to fool us so well that they may even fool themselves for a number of years.

The saints and heros our ideal systems produce are the ones who break all their gearteeth and are lucky if they don't get expelled! ... Students like Terry Messman, who was sent by a journalism prof to cover a war protest, and unexpectedly decided he should join in! (He has been editing Street Spirit, an excellent monthly paper published by AFSC in San Francisco, a great many years now.)

When (as the Nonprophet explains this world) God makes a manure pile to grow saints in... We don't know how He's grading them.

But how do we learn, ourselves? How long, between the time we first meet some idea, and the day it suddenly ripens into something utterly unexpected? Isn't it like this?-- We could have seen things entirely differently, done things entirely differently, except that we had no way to see that until we'd ripened to grow room for it?

So when will the Earth be ripe? And ripe for what?--Ripe to become full of the knowledge of God, I think. And I shouldn't be so impatient for it, but we do suffer so!