miles to go til sweet Beulah Land

Beulah means 'married'....referenced in Isaiah 62:4...when Israel is called the bride of God...no longer forsaken...Psalm 22...God's compassion despite Israels' ingratitude is found in Hosea 11:1 which is used in Matthew 2:15 as a message to Israel regarding their obstinance to Jesus as the true prophet, messiah, Moses.

track

a distant bell

I don't know what happens when people die
Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It's like a song I can hear playing right in my ear
That I can't sing...
I can't help listening

These are phrases that describe God and me and somewhere out there in the other spaces or dimensions. And from experience I know that I am not alone in these feelings. Though for some they are more intense and frequent than for others. We have these colloquialisms.

'Tip of my tongue'...sometimes I feel like I just about know the answers, or better still can feel the answers, but they are just a little out there, just out of reach. If I think hard enough I can pull it up and speak it. But more often something has to happen to jolt my mind and then there it is, as clear as a bell. A distant bell.

'Deja Vu'...sometimes I think I have been here before, perhaps in a dream, or a moment, or in anticipation of a time to come. Something is familiar, but faint. It's real but maybe imagined. Is is and it is not all at the same time. It is in these moments that I realize I am more than a physical presence. Because I am. And I can hear it again, in the distance, a bell. And sometimes I know for whom the bell tolls. I know it is bound to come. One day the bell will ring and I will look over my shoulder and the world as I know it will fade away as I rise above. I think it is that way. When I was a little boy I dreamed I died and floated above the bed. Others were speaking, saying, 'How can this be' and I realise in my spirit I have died of a stroke. I even say in my dream, 'I am too young to die of a stroke'. I wonder if this dream state is somehow like a cousin to deja vu. Perhaps it has happened to me before or it will happen sometime in the future.

I don't know what happens when people die.

God's resolve amidst the human dilemma

Physicists call it string theory...that is that everything was ordered and then something occurred and all became progressively disordered or chaos. So the world was created from order to chaos.

“Israel bears witness, as did its antecedents, to an enduring force of chaos in its life. This chaos may go by many different names – Tiamat, Leviathan, Rahab, Yam, Mot – which we may summarize under the names of Death or Nihil. In a variety of texts, this rhetoric in Israel points to a recognition that something is at work in the world seeking to make impossible the life of blessing willed by YHWH.” - page 143

“This is a powerful, irresistible, transformative resolve, to be undertaken with a high level of emotional intensity. It is a burst of generativity that is going to change everything and create a newness. This is a God who will not forsake: 'I will not forsake them' (42:16); 'You shall no more be termed Forsaken' (62: 4). In this resolve to new creation, YHWH promises to overcome all forsakenness and abandonment known in Israel and in the world. When creation is abandoned by YHWH, it readily reverts to chaos. Here it is in YHWH's resolve, and in YHWH's very character, not to abandon, but to embrace. The very future of the world, so Israel attests, depends on this resolve of YHWH. It is a resolve that is powerful. More than that, it is a resolve that wells up precisely in tohu wabohu and permits the reality of the world to begin again, in blessedness.” - page 161

everybody must get stoned...

“If any man takes a wife and goes in to her and then hates her and accuses her of misconduct and brings a bad name upon her, saying, ‘I took this woman, and when I came near her, I did not find in her evidence of virginity,’ then the father of the young woman and her mother shall take and bring out the evidence of her virginity to the elders of the city in the gate. And the father of the young woman shall say to the elders, ‘I gave my daughter to this man to marry, and he hates her; and behold, he has accused her of misconduct, saying, “I did not find in your daughter evidence of virginity.” And yet this is the evidence of my daughter's virginity.’ And they shall spread the cloak before the elders of the city. Then the elders of that city shall take the man and whip him, and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought a bad name upon a virgin of Israel. And she shall be his wife. He may not divorce her all his days. But if the thing is true, that evidence of virginity was not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done an outrageous thing in Israel by whoring in her father's house. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.
    
(Deuteronomy 22:13-21 ESV)