Writing prompt: Urgency

Plan the devil out of your life.
Redeem the time because the days are evil.
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
Don't allow a crack in the hedge of your believing.
Rise to the urgency of our times.
All things decent and in order.
All nine, all the time.

The "all nine" manifestations of the spirit:

Speaking in tongues.
Interpretation of tongues.
Prophecy.
Word of knowledge.
Word of wisdom.
Discerning of spirits.
Believing.
Workings of miracles.
Gifts of healings.

Most churches teach these are the nine "gifts" of the spirit. The Way teaches these are the nine "manifestations" of the one gift of holy spirit, lower case "h" and lower case "s." Upper case "H" and upper case "S" are used only when the words "Holy Sprit" refer to God our Father, who is the giver of the gift of holy spirit, lower case "h" and lower case "s."

Every person who believes that God raised Jesus from the dead, thus making Jesus lord or master, becomes born again. That is born from above, filled with holy spirit, enabled to operate all nine manifestations.

According to The Way.

"Reach up into Daddy's cookie jar," Wierwille used to say.

God was "Daddy" and God's "cookie jar" was the gift of holy spirit with the manifestations. To me the cookie jar represented everything God was and provided and had made accessible to His children, the believers, those who are born again.

All the answers are found either in God's Word, The Bible, or in "Daddy's cookie jar" via the manifestations.

It's the all-in-all end-of-all.

There is really no further reason, no space, for any unanswerable questions.

We were to be diligent, always.
We were to speak in tongues all our waking hours, as much as we could.
The spiritual battle was 24/7.
And when we made mistakes, we examined where we "missed it," where God had spoken to us and we didn't obey.

*~*

As I type those words I feel a tightness around my chest, a tenseness in my body's muscles.

I say to myself,

Relax.
You no longer live in those confines.
Breathe.
Recall your times with the woods.
And the trees and insects and leaves,
and groundhogs and clover and wildflowers,
and cows and snakes and birds and deer,
and rocks and hills and rivers and dells,
and turkeys and coyotes and rabbits and skinks,
and squirrels and wild ponies,
especially Fabio.

My chest relaxes, no longer feeling bound.

It expands, letting in the open spaces.

Open spaces filled with peace and life and trust.

The unanswerable questions hang in space, lingering.

Unanswerable for now.

And there is no urgency to contrive an answer.

***

Brings to mind a poem I wrote in 2007: Bareback