One summer day about half a lifetime ago while playing Little League baseball I was having trouble hitting and catching the ball. My Dad told me later when I was practicing that I would never be any good at hitting or catching if I kept taking my eye off the ball and he taught me to watch the ball all the way to the bat or glove. I took that lesson to heart and, when I learned to always focus intently on the ball all the way to the bat or into the glove, my hitting and catching improved tremendously. Even though Dad was talking about sports, that same principle can be applied to our lives.

God is Love. God was and is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. Christ is still interceding for us. The Love of Christ is the ball of life that we should never take our eye off of. God's Love is like a softball - easy to hit and catch if we keep our eye on it. The trouble is that there is an enemy pitcher out there who is playing hardball and he is always throwing us curveballs, spitballs, knuckleballs which we are constantly dazzled by and always swinging at and missing. These curveballs, spitballs, and knuckleballs are love of self, love of things, and love of money. The majority of people spend their whole lives in frustration keeping their eye on and trying to hit the curveballs, spitballs, and knuckleballs. And they tell everybody else by word and example that these are the balls that they should be swinging at too. I guess they just like being frustrated and want everybody else to be frustrated along with them. The trouble is when they're not swinging at the curveballs, spitballs, and knuckleballs they are swinging at each other out of their frustration. They apparently love the disunity and dissension which God hates. “Blessed are the peacemakers”, God says.

The heart is the eye of the soul. Jesus said where your heart is there will be your treasure be also and if your eye is clear your whole body will be full of light (Matthew 6:21-22). Our motives are determined by what we value and keep our eye or heart set on. Our motives are like the lens of the eye. Jesus says the clear, pure, and great motives for living are Love for God and Love for others and, if any other kind of love motivates us, then any and all pretense at being in God's will is only a ruse to fool ourselves and others (Mat 22:37-39). All other lesser motivations are cloudy and make the heart dark and diseased and our lives and that of others miserable. “Let your love be without dissimulation”, God says(Romans 12:9). There are two kinds of love. One comes down from above and is crystal clear, full of goodness, and is easy to be entreated and the other is earthly and dark, sensual, and hard on the heart. Which love motivates your life?

Jesus said that we should not judge by the appearances, but that we should judge righteous judgment. If we get into judging personalities and egos we are judging by the appearances. By their fruits you shall know them, Jesus says. No one can read another's heart. The Love of Christ covers and overlooks a multitude of sins. The love of self, money, and things covers and overlooks no sin but exposes them for all to see and remembers the sins of others as a reason to hold grudges and sever communications.

Jesus says, “Let not your heart be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in Me” (John 14:1). There are many troubled hearts in the world. How easy it is to dwell on the troubles of our troubled heart if we have not found our way to Jesus. Prayer is the key in the hand of faith that unlocks the treasury of God's Word and Heaven's storehouse. It is a battle in this world to find our way to Jesus and even a battle to maintain that higher ground when and where we have found Him and how easy it is for us to lose a right perspective and let the cares of this world bring us back down to the valley of dissension, destruction, and death. It has been rightly said of this temporal world that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, but is it not also true in the Spiritual? Only God knows how many throughout earth's history have been alienated, not only from God, but from their brothers and sisters, by taking matters into their own hands and out of His. If we're praying for our brothers and sisters, it is very hard to remain mad at them for very long. If we're not praying for them, the winds of strife will never blow over or away. If you love dissension and alienation, then don't pray for your brother or sister and don't forgive them.

The love and wisdom of Christ is without partiality and I do not want to be on any other side but God's. We are called by God to a much higher calling than that of resentment and suspicion or to that of our own egos and I would hope that no one carries this stife any further to aggravate the assault on anyone. God wants us to strive for the mastery of knowing Him, not to strive amongst ourselves to prove our own righteousnesses, which are, in truth, filthy rags. I've done way more than my share of things to alienate my brothers and sisters in the past - so much so that I never want to dishonor God and be a prisoner of guilt and shame again as long as I live. But besides being called to loyalty, does not God call us to peace and mercy?

None of us is perfect and all have fallen short of the the glory of God and that is why trust must be earned for trust is a learned response. If we've believed the enemy's lies about God, we will have trouble trusting Him and we will have trouble even trusting those who should have earned our trust. Everybody has their own personality traits including some that may be peculiar, and almost all those peculiar traits involve ego. The wonderful thing about Jesus is that He emptied Himself completely for our sakes. He says, “Greater love has no man that this, that a man should give his life for a friend”and then He demonstrated the greatest love of all by going out and giving His life for His enemies. He calls us to “examine yourself to see if you are in the faith”(or just in the flesh). Looking at Jesus and considering all of our inherited and cultivated tendencies to evil and seeing how far off the mark we are, how dare any of us cast judgment on another person? If any comparisons are done, should they not be only with ourselves and Jesus?

I so admire the Amish and the way they refuse social security and look out for their own. You'll never find an old Amish mother or father stuck in a nursing home. They put their trust in God and each other and not in an outrageously priced health care system where greed is the underlying motivation for taking care of people. If we could see our modern health care system through God's eyes, we would probably call it a disease care system because there is no incentive for them to find cures for cancer and many other aliments because doing so would put many mult-million-dollar-disease-promoting industries out of business. The Amish are a plain people who are proud in many of the right ways where it doesn't cause division amongst themselves. I admire and respect my parents for the love and sacrifices they made for all their children and I especially respect my Mom, who, as a loving daughter, refused to let her mother stay in a nursing home with strangers caring for her one minute longer than necessary.