Around and around we go

Round and around and around and around we go
Oh now, tell me now, tell me now, tell me now you know.
lyrics by Rhianna

There is only one secure foundation: a genuine, deep relationship with Jesus Christ, which will carry you through any and all turmoil. No matter what storms are raging all around, you’ll stand firm if you stand on His love.
Charles Stanley

(floor in Christ Cathedral, Dublin, Ireland / Julie Cook / 2015)

Spinning in circles
Round and around and around….

Dizzying
Unsettling
Disorienting
Confusing
Sickening

Out of control….
As our lives and this world are now spinning out of control…

Make it stop!!!

Just as the child on the playground innocently climbs upon a spinning roundabout merry-go-round…
At first she joyfully, merrily and enthusiastically commands to be pushed and pushed, faster and faster…
Only soon to discover she can no longer hold on, for she is now feeling deathly sick
and is so terribly disoriented that she feels completely out of control as she is about to lose her hold and will come flying off…
She finds herself crying, pleading, begging for the spinning to stop…

All the while as a voice we no longer recognize as our own, rises up from somewhere deep within and cries out to an Unseen and Unknown presence for immediate help…
We hear ourselves pleading, crying out, begging “I want to get off”
Please, make it stop, I want to get off…..

There is but One who remains unseen, who sees, hears and answers during our time of distress…

I am feeble and utterly crushed;
I groan in anguish of heart.
All my longings lie open before you, Lord;
my sighing is not hidden from you.

For I am about to fall,
and my pain is ever with me.

Come quickly to help me,
my Lord and my Savior.

Psalm 38:8-9,17,22

Cast your cares on the Lord
and he will sustain you;
he will never let
the righteous be shaken.
Psalm 55:22

concentric centers

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.”
Thomas Merton

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei

(images of an amazing sunflower / Julie Cook / 2015)

concentric
kənˈsentrik
adjective: of or denoting circles, arcs, or other shapes that share the same center, the larger often completely surrounding the smaller. Late Middle English: from Old French concentrique or medieval Latin concentric us, from con- ‘together’ + centrum ‘center.’

The sun sits in the middle of a solar system which sits in the middle of a galaxy. . .
While everything and everyone spins mindlessly around the center—that being the sun.
God. . .who sits at the center of the universe
God. . .who was before there was anything
God. . .by whose hand all things came in to being
God. . .who will be when all has come and gone
God. . .in whose breath we find life
God. . .who all living beings revolve around
God. . .who sits at the center of our very being
God. . .who sits at the center of it all. . .
Or
do you believe that this is all here merely by happenstance?
do you believe it all just fell in to place?
do you believe that you sit at the center of it all,
wielding your own power of what will or won’t be?
You who builds skyscrapers, roadways, planes and rockets?
You who charts the heavens, the seas, the entire planet?
You who makes medicine, who attempts to heal, to teach, to save?
You who makes guns, bombs, wars and takes lives.
You who kills, steals, rapes, murders, lies, cheats. . .
You who abuses drugs, alcohol, sex, money, people, animals

Who created the flower?
Did it just happen one day?
Did it evolve from something else?
How did it come to be perfectly and concentrically formed, fitting amazingly together petal by petal and seed by seed?
How does it “know” to follow the sun for its life giving rays?
Can you, did you, make this flower?
You can make a copy, “print” a 3D image, paint or draw a copy, take a picture but can you make, create, produce a flower?
The question remains. . .
Who sits at the center?
At the center of it all. . .
Is it man?
or
Is it God?