Hosken-News Blog: August 2017

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Keep On Asking, Seeking, and Knocking!

ask, seek and knock The Lord Jesus Christ, in His "Sermon on the Mount," said - "Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who keeps on asking, receives. Everyone who keeps on seeking, finds. And to everyone who keeps on knocking, the door will be opened" (Matthew 7:7-8). The more common English translation of "Ask.. seek... and knock" doesn't fully convey the continuing tense of these verbs, but the original Greek and the Russian versions indicate continual and repeated action.

Today a good friend posted this story on the Internet of how a young monk visited a very old monk to ask how and even why the older man had kept going through all his many years and as many trials.

In reply the older monk told this enigmatic story.

A dog saw a rabbit and began to chase it, and the rabbit ran. At the end of the street another dog joined in the chase and then a couple of strays joined the two. Before long nine or ten dogs were barking, yelping and running as fast as they could. By the time the streets turned into countryside most of the dogs in the town, of all sizes and colours, dozens in fact were in hot pursuit. Yet, after a couple of fields, three hedges and a stream and as the forest grew nearer, only the first dog was still running.

And that was the answer the old monk gave.

Silence followed until the young monk said he didn't understand, so the elder repeated the story word for word for a second and then for a third time. At this point, faced with perplexity on the face of youth he revealed the key to the riddle saying, "Only the first dog actually saw the rabbit." A few moments later both men smiled as light visibly dawned inside the younger man.

Have you "seen the rabbit?" Do you fervently hope and pray and expect to catch it some day? Or are you only "running with the pack?"

How easy it is to say - "I'll pray about it" ...but nothing happens. That's not what Christ told us to do. He said - "Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for." You've doubtless watched a little child beg and beg and beg his mom or dad for something over and over again, right? Christ wants us to be persistent like that little child.

It doesn't stop there: "Keep on seeking, and you will find." Children aged zero through five are the most curious... then they go to school where they're taught to conform. The former brightest among them often become bored, lethargic, uninterested. I've noticed how often in our prayers the phrases "deliver us from lethargy" and "waken us from heavy sleep of indolence" appear.

It's so easy as we grow older to fall into the same old ruts, to go about each day on autopilot, almost half-asleep. Where's that childlike curiousity, seeking to understand the world around us and the meaning of life, asking "Why?" and not putting up with the "Just because!" or "It simply happened!" answers? "Seek and keep on seeking!" If you keep seeking, you might just rediscover that lost curiousity of your youth! Keep on looking for answers to the problems facing you. As Churchill said, "Never give up! Never, never, never give up!"

And lastly, "Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you." I recently read about a young man who grew up poor, but by age 22 he deposited his first check for $100,000 in the bank. He had started a business repairing electric signs on other businesses by driving around at night looking for burned-out signs. He asked one company owner if he could repair his sign, and the man said that two other well-known repairmen had tried and given up.

But this young upstart gave it a try, checked all the switches, ballasts, and bulbs... nothing wrong. Then he happened to test a piece of wire that looked perfectly good - no kinks or broken insulation - and Presto! There was the bad circuit. The young fellow won a $250,000 contract to upgrade all the signeage for this multi-state business, then he went on to win another $250,000 contract from the same business.

Have you knocked at a few doors asking for a better job, and then given up, settling for that same-old, same-old boring job? As you might know, I'm in my 75th year of life, and I do volunteer work helping inner-city people set goals, write a cover letter, list of references, and a resume, then train them how to apply online for jobs. In the last few weeks I added an 8-hour/day temp job called "Get-A-Job" -- you can see it here on the middle of the page.

It's one sheet of paper printed on both sides. It has 20 blanks on each side showing date of contact, employer and phone, job application (y/n), resume (y/n), follow-up date, and result. I tell them, "Now you have an 8-hour/day temp job called 'Get-A-Job' - your job now is to apply online for 1 job every hour, 8 hours per day, and I can virtually guarantee that if you apply for 40 jobs in 5 days using this sheet of paper, you'll get a real, paying job in no time!"

I know it's scary, knocking on doors and being told "No!" time after time. I've had to do it many times before: I've had various sales jobs and learned that for about every 10 "No's" there will be a "Yes!" And I've been jobless too, with a family to feed: I applied for job after job, then finally got a job to support my family. The system works if you work the system!

Has the Lord Jesus Christ given you a vision to accomplish something seemingly impossible? If so, have you kept on seeking for ways to accomplish it? Have you kept on knocking on doors... openings... opportunities that will let you move ahead with that God-given vision? Or have you tried just a thing or two, then given up? Has your "get up and go" gotten up and went? Keep on knocking! Perhaps, just maybe, that next door will open with a "Yes!"

"Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who keeps on asking, receives. Everyone who keeps on seeking, finds. And to everyone who keeps on knocking, the door will be opened."

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Sunday, August 13, 2017

The Mythical, Imaginary "They"

Like so many other mythical creatures such as unicorns, jackelopes, fairies and gnomes, the mythical, imaginary "They" persistently keeps popping up in popular political mythology: "They" should provide free medical care for the poor; "They" ought to give pensions to the elderly; "They" should provide free college education for everyone; "They" ought to build and staff hospices for the dying... the list could go on and on. I've heard these myths over and over during our 17 years in Russia and now I'm hearing almost identical myths in America.

As I've written in my "Daily News & Views," seven percent of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, twenty percent of American high school graduates don't know how to make toast, and one-third of British high school graduates don't know how to boil an egg. This is the new "virtual reality."

People today have been raised in an environment so removed from basic physical reality that they think the mythical "Others" or "They" can and should magically provide all their needs, wants and wishes. Certainly, we don't need to know every detail of how an economy functions, but we ought to have a grasp on basic facts such as all cows give white milk and water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) with or without eggs.

As the article Religion and Politics at the Dinner Table: Challenging the Old Maxim explains, "family members bear natural affection toward each other" - or at least they should - and thus they bear responsibility to care for the young, the infirm and the elderly in the family circle.

As the Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy - "But if anyone doesn’t provide for his own, and especially his own household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever. ...If any man or woman who believes has widows, let them relieve them, and don’t let the church be burdened; that it might relieve those who are widows indeed" (1 Tim. 5:8 & 16). The context is about how the church should care for widows in their midst, but the primary responsibility lies with the immediate family.

The Church Fathers Chrysostom, Theodore, and Theodoret wrote that "Special care is to be given to the supervision of the work of widows in the church. It is important to distinguish those widows who deserve appropriate support from those who do not and to monitor the widows who are being supported, lest their time turn to idleness and mischief. The true widow is chaste and patient, and if she is without children, she deserves the church’s support" (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture).

Note how St. Paul and these Church Fathers emphasize the need for the local church to monitor the behavior of widows. St. Paul wrote that younger widows should get married and bear children: "So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander" (verse 14).

Instead, what we have is "They," the modern secular welfare state, even giving young women financial incentives to not get married, to bear children out of wedlock. The article Why Are So Many Millennials Having Children Out of Wedlock? states - "57 percent of parents ages 26 to 31 were having kids outside of marriage."

Why has this happened? It's not simply due to income inequality, as the article implies. That's a result, not the cause of the problem. Rather, it's because Christians have not taken a firm stand in the public square on social matters; instead, we've allowed the state to pay unwed mothers to have babies. Children born out of wedlock have a very difficult life ahead of them. Morality in sexual conduct isn't a "private matter," it has a direct effect on society at large, on the economy, and on our taxes.

Not only are babies increasingly being born out of wedlock, fewer and fewer babies are being born. The post-war "baby boomers" born from 1945 to 1960 - seventy million Americans - are now reaching retirement age, and there are not enough young adults paying into the Social Security fund to support them. These 70,000,000 retirees also are no longer investing money in private retirement plans but instead taking their money out, while those same fewer young adults are putting less money into private retirement plans. This means less money for investment in the economy... thus a shrinking economy.

When the socialist notion takes root in our thinking that the mythical, imaginary "They," the state, will take care of us from the cradle to the grave, this begins to weaken the above Christian teaching about the immediate family's responsibility to take care of each other. Adult children begin to think that if they live far away from their parents or if they simply don't want to, they don't need to look after their elderly parents. We've witnessed first-hand in Russia how a divorced adult son beat up and forced his widowed and disabled mother out of her apartment so that he could live there with his girlfriend. Similar things are happening here too.

The answer to these problems isn't to simply continue singing our hymns and listening to warm-fuzzy pablum-sermons in church while we stick our heads in the sand and ignore society as it crumbles around us. The answer is to preach and practice the Scriptural texts on social responsibilities and sexual conduct, as well as to boldly express these teachings in the public square. We not only have the right to freely express our religious beliefs, as the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states, but also a civic duty to do so.

(Linked to www.Hosken-News.info of 13 Aug. 2017.)