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To live is to suffer. But to survive, well, that's to find the meaning in the suffering.

Monday - April 7, 2003

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way.

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The Sacred Romance, Curtis & Eldredge wrote:

One day soon we will round a bend in the road and our dreams will come true. We really will live happily ever after. The long years in exile will be swept away in the joyful tears of our arrival home. Every day when we rise, we can tell ourselves, My journey today will bring me closer to home; it may be just around the bend. All we long for we shall have; all we long to be, we will be. All that has hurt us so deeply - the dragons and nits, the Arrows and our false lovers, and Satan himself - they will all be swept away.

And then real life begins.

	Monday - March 31, 2003
Whatever we pray for has already been given. What we should ask for is the ability to see it.

DMX Convo...

Sunday - March 30, 2003

You'll get it all in due time.
You'll do fine. Just have faith cuz you mine.
And when you shine it's goin be a sight to behold.
So don't fight to be old, or lose sight when it's cold.
See that light down the road, it's goin guide you there.
Two sets of footsteps, I was right beside you there.

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The Sacred Romance, Curtis & Eldredge wrote:

We strike off down the road feeling much more alive than we have in a while. We are clueless as to how we will cross the abyss, but we feel a gladness to be on our way.

As the road grows long we grow weary; impatience and discouragement tempt us to forsake the way for some easier path. These shortcuts never work, and the guilt we feel for having chosen them only compounds our feelings of despair.

With an awakened heart, we turn and face the road ahead, knowing that no one can take the trip for us, nor can anyone plan our way.

Tuesday - March 18, 2003

The Sacred Romance, Curtis & Eldredge wrote:

As I spoke with a friend about her painful life, how reckless and unpredictable God seems, she turned and with pleading eyes asked the question we are all asking somewhere deep within: "How can I trust a lover who is so wild?" Indeed, how do we not only trust him, but love him in return? There's only one possible answer; You could love him if you knew his heart was good.

In the movie The Last of the Mohicans, brave Nathaniel has captured the heart of the beautiful Cora. With tremendous courage and cunning, he rescues her from an ambush set by the black-hearted Magua, leader of a warring tribe. Nathaniel leads Cora, her sister, and a few other survivors to a hidden cave behind a waterfall. Just when it appears they will escape and live happy ever after, Magua and his savages discover their hideout. Once captured, the women may be spared but the men will surely be executed. With no powder for their rifles, Nathaniel's only chance is to leap from the falls; by saving himself, he will live to rescue Cora another day. One of the other men calls him a coward, accusing hiim of foul and selfish motives. How is Cora feeling? What looks like abandonment may not be. Her only hope in the face of such wildness lies in the goodness of Nathaniel's heart. At this point, it's all she has to go on. It's all we often have to go on too.

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For I know the plans I have for you, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
-Jeremiah 29:11

Tuesday - March 4, 2003

An entry from E.A.R.L. - The Autobiography of DMX :

Outside the studio, a woman in rags crouches beside an empty office building. Sitting on a piece of brown cardboard, with her head bent down between her knees, the woman didn't see the fleet of cars come to a stop in front of her or the wad of twenty-dollar bills that DMX placed in her blue-and-white coffee cup.

"You hungry?"

Startled, the woman looks up and sees a star standing over her.

"If you're hungry, then use this to get yourself something to eat."

The cash came out of his front jeans pocket, money he left the house with added to his winnings from the few minutes he spent playing pool. This wouldn't be the first time I had seen X give money on a whim to a hungry person that he happened to pass, and the reaction from the less fortunate one was always the same.

"Thank you," the woman mumbles, hesitantly fingering the bills. "Thank you so much."

"Don't thank me, thank Him," X whispers to her. "I didn't do it, I was just given it to give to you."

The woman's eyes fill with water and, as if on cue, a tear starts to fall down her cheek.

"And when your time comes, and it will come, remember not to be afraid to fulfill your purpose..."

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God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.
- Hebrews 6:10

DMX Convo...

Thursday - February 27, 2003

You got a minute for your son, Father?
I need to talk, I'm so tired of trying to run, Father
Let's take a walk, I'm so sorry for what I've done, Father
It ain't my fault, the devil's been on my back lately, He's like a hawk
You never give us more than we can handle but it's gettin hard
And I'm a strong individual but I need you God

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The Sacred Romance, Curtis & Eldredge wrote:

The core of Satan's plan for each of us is not found in tempting us with obvious sins like shoplifting or illicit sex. These things he uses more as maintenance strategies. His grand tactic in separating us from our heart is to sneak in as the Storyteller through our fears and the wounds we have received from life's Arrows. Counting on our vanity and blindness, he seduces us to try to control life by living in the smaller stories we all construct to one degree or another. He accuses God to us and us to God. He accuses us through the words of parents and friends and God himself. He calls good evil and evil good and always helps question whether God has anything good in mind in his plans for us. He steals our innocence as children and replaces it with a blind naivete or cynicism as adults.

He replaces the love affair with a religious system of do's and don'ts that parch our hearts and replaces our worship and communion services with entertainment. Our experience of life deteriorates from the passion of a grand love affair, in the midst of a life-and-death battle, to an endless series of chores and errands, a busyness that separates us from God, each other, and even from our own thirstiness.

DMX Convo...

Thursday - February 27, 2003

Just because you went away, my doors are not locked
Wanna come back home? All you gotta do is knock
You see I left home a boy, but returned as a man
Full grown, and I'm still not able to stand
I gave you a hand - Well, but I was lookin the wrong way
Figured out the plan, then I started to pray
And that prayer, took me from here - over there
back to over here, now it got me like where?
Do I belong, do I fit in?
Things on my mind, where do I begin?
It's easier to sin, but it hurts my heart
I'm really tryin to win, so where do we start?
Thou shalt not steal - But what if he stole from me?
Thou shalt not kill - But what if he's tryin to kill me?
No matter how hard it rains, withstand the pain

I'm ready to meet him - our father, who art in heaven
I'm not ashamed to ask for guidance at twenty-seven
No longer afraid to knock on your door
Not scared anymore to lose my life in the war
After what I just saw, I'm ridin with the Lord
Cause I really can't afford to lose my head by the sword
And now that I've seen, what I need to see
Please take me, where I need to be

DMX Convo...

Wednesday - February 26, 2003

Many a nights I cried, and called your name out loud
But didn't call you when I was doin good, I was too proud
And STILL you gave me love, I wasn't used to that
Most of the people that gave me love, they ended up takin it back
That's somethin new to me, so I'm askin you for time to adjust
Let me make it there, I will be one you can trust
What I stand for, I put my life on, I DO!
I guess what I'm askin is - show me how to stand for you

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The Sacred Romance, Curtis & Eldredge wrote:

All of us had poignant ecstasies of heart over a love affair that subsequently turned to immobilizing pain and shock as we realized that our lover could actually know us and yet leave us for another. But have you ever dated someone and you just knew, from the first time you met her, that she was the one you wanted to spend your life with? As you laughed and talked and marveled together, you felt your love deepen to a heart bond that you knew you never wanted to free yourself from. And have you ever been shocked to find one day that the one you loved so deeply and who thought that loved you just as passionately, had been dating other guys and, moreover, was spending more and more of her time with your worst enemy?

Have you ever had to literally turn a lover over to a mortal enemy to allow her to find out for herself what his intentions toward her really were? Have you ever had to lie in bed knowing she was believing his lies and was having sex with him every night? Have you ever sat helplessly by in a parking lot, while your enemy and his friends took turns raping your lover even as you sat nearby, unable to win her heart enough so she would trust you to rescue her? Have you ever called this on you had loved for so long, even the day after her rape, and asked her if she was ready to come back to you only to have her say her heart was still captured by your enemy? Have you ever watched your lover's beauty slowly diminish and fade in a haze of alcohol, drugs, occult practices, and infant sacrifice until she is no longer recognizable in body and soul? Have you ever loved one so much that you even send your only son to talk with her about your love for her, knowing that he will be killed by her? (And in spite of knowing all of this, he was willing to do it because he loved her, too, and believed you were meant for each other.)

All this and more God has endured because of his refusal to stop loving us. Indeed, the very depth and faithfulness of his love for us, along with desire for our freely given love in return, are what give Satan the ammunition to wound God so deeply as he carries out his unceasing campaign to make us into God's enemy.

The journey of our individual hearts, as well as the heart of an entire nation or culture, really distills into this warfare for our heart's devotion. It is the central plot of the Sacred Romance, Act III, life here on earth. Indeed, all of the subplots of our lives come out of it. Satan has camouflaged this simplicity with a thousand other religions, psychologies, philosophies, knowledges, and mysticisms over the centuries, but the embers of the love affair, sustained by God's faithfulness, have refused to die and grow completely cold.

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And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
- 1 Corinthians 13:13

DMX Convo...

Tuesday - February 25, 2003

I don't deserve what you've given me
but you never took it from me
because I am grateful, and I use it
and I do not worship money

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What good is it to gain the whole world but lose or forfeit your own soul in the process.
- Luke 9:25

We didn't bring anything with us when we came into the world, and we certainly cannot carry anything with us when we die.
- 1 Timothy 6:7

DMX Convo...

Thursday - February 20, 2003

I thank you Lord for your guidance
Cause it's all that counts
I don't always do the right thing
And I ask you to forgive me
Cause I need you here with me
Without you in my life, it's empty

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Disappointment With God, Philip Yancey wrote:

Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love...In a concentration camp, the guards possess almost unlimited power. By applying force, they can make you renounce your God, curse your family, work without pay, eat human excrement, kill and then bury your closest friend or even your own mother. All this is within their power. Only one thing is not: they cannot force you to love them. This fact may help explain why God sometimes seems shy to use his power. He created us to love him, but his impressive displays of miracle - the kind we may secretly long for - do nothing to foster that love. As Douglas John Hall has put it, "God's problem is not that God is not able to do certain things. God's problem is that God loves. Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life."

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The Sacred Romance, Curtis & Eldredge wrote:

The wildness of giving us freedom is even more staggering when we remember that God has already paid dearly for giving freedom to the angels. But because of his grand heart he goes ahead and takes the risk, an enormous, colossal risk. The reason he didn't make puppets is because he wanted lovers. Remember, he's inviting us up into a romance. Freedom is part of the explanation for the problem of evil. God is the author of some storms directly; but he is the author of the possibility of all storms in giving us freedom. And we opened Pandora's box.

DMX Convo...

Tuesday - February 18, 2003

You told me what to do, and I do it
But every now and then,
Gets a little harder to go through it

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The Sacred Romance, Curtis & Eldredge wrote:

The voice often comes in the middle of the night or the early hours of morning, when our hearts are most unedited and vulnerable. At first, we mistake the source of this voice and assume it is just our imagination. We fluff up our pillow, roll over, and go back to sleep. Days, weeks, even months go by and the voice speaks to us again:

Aren't you thirsty? Listen to your heart. There is something missing.

Sometime later, the voice in our heart dares to speak to us again, more insistently this time.

Listen to me - there is something missing in all this. You long to be in a love affair, an adventure. You were made for something more. You know it.

In our modern, pragmatic world we often have no such mentor, so we do not understand it is God speaking to us in our heart. Having so long been out of touch with our deepest longing, we fail to recognize the voice and the One who is calling to us through it. Frustrated by our heart's continuing sabotage of a dutiful Christian life, some of us silence the voice by locking our heart away in the attic, feeding it only the bread and water of duty and obligation until it is almost dead, the voice now small and weak. But sometimes in the night, when our defenses are down, we still hear it call to us, oh so faintly - a distant whisper. Come morning, the new day's activities scream for our attention, the sound of the cry is gone, and we congratulate ourselves on finally overcoming the flesh.

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The Lord says:

These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
- Isaiah 29:13

Monday - February 17, 2003

An entry from E.A.R.L. - The Autobiography of DMX :

DMX - I know that I've done a lot of dirt in my life. You do dirt, you get dirt.

But the truth about a thug is that a real thug has a golden heart. A real thug will shoot somebody right in their face but then turn around and give a couple of dollars to a kid on the street who's hungry. He understands that if you're in the game, you're susceptible to the rules of the game, but that child is not part of that game. See, there's a difference between doing wrong and being wrong and if your heart is good, it will steer your bad in a certain way.

Fontaine - "But isn't it easier to be ugly? To just say fuck the world?"

DMX - Yeah, but even though you may get a lifetime of suffering, I believe that he's rewarded in the end. Like one time in the club this drunk spilled his drink on my sleeve. It was my first time wearing that silver-and-black Ruff Ryders jersey, so I was chillin. But it was some fruity drink so my shit got all colored and sticky and when I turned around, the dude was looking at me with the screw face, like he wanted to start something!

Come on, I thought. Don't do me like that. You could be dead in four seconds, you fucking bitch. You know who you spilled your drink on!

But do I tell myself he could lose his life right now in this club? Or say, Lord forgive him for he knows not what he does?

See, even though I was just disrespected, it was up to me to look after his life because he didn't know what he was doing. He was drunk, and I prayed for him, because I know that the next man may not be as gracious as me.

Fontaine - "Will the streets ever respect that kind of move?"

DMX - First of all, it's not easy to keep it real like that. Second, I don't care what motherfuckers think because I don't have to be real with anybody else but Him. All that fake shit doesn't matter to me because when I wake up, I crack that Bible and say what I have to say to get on with my day, and then before I go to bed, no matter how drunk I am, I crack that Bible again and pray. I pray for forgiveness every night, dog.