The Door

The darkness is complete.  Silent.  Suffocating.  In the stillness you can detect no sound.  Not a whisper of air is moving.  It feels like a tomb and would be except you can hear your own heartbeat thumping in time.  It will be a tomb soon enough if you can't figure a way out but who could when you can't see your hand in front of your face!

You feel around but there is only emptiness.  There are no walls, no furniture, nothing.  It feels like you could go on forever running full out and never trip over anything yet continually afraid that you might.  It's the worst kind of prison.

The darkness is complete.  And in your desperation when all hope is lost you cry out.  You can't even tell if you said anything, just gave relief to your pent up anger, frustration, and fear.  An animal cry that doesn't even echo so vast is the emptiness.  When the last breath escapes and you gasp to recover your air the silence returns.  But an instant of hope occurs as you think maybe, just maybe, someone could hear you.

In that instant hope arose, that moment before all is lost and you tumble into forever black, a crack appears and light stabs the dark!  At first it's blinding, this tiny ray of light.  But you blink away the aching of your eyes as you desperately cling to the hope welling inside you.  There stands a doorway.  Light illuminating the edges.  It's open just a crack.

You want to cry out but something inside you holds back.  Strange thoughts betray the hope inside and you begin to doubt that anything good lay beyond that door.  You realize that you have become used to the darkness and it's anonymity.  The hope begins to fade and the door begins to close.  At once your on your feet sprinting for all your worth to catch it before it closes.  But you seem to never get closer nor does it seem to be outpacing you.  And the door closes.  Hope dies.

Tears flow freely at this point.  You weep as would a child who wakes from a nightmare and finds an empty bedroom.  But the thought occurs to you that there must have been someone who opened the door!  You scream, "Please!  Whoever you are don't leave me here!  Please come back!"  And you wait.  That tiny flicker of hope returns.  So does the door.

Knowing from previous experience that it's no good trying to go to the door you begin to plead with whoever is there.  The words tumble from your heart as you express your regret and confess your shortcomings.  And plead if they would only allow you to exit this hell that you would be content to be nothing more than a slave in the employ of this doorkeeper.  Pride dies, and so does a life.

The door swings wide.  Light, glorious and pure vacates the darkness.  You stand exposed and naked before it.  It is all around you and through you.  There is nowhere it does not shine.  And you find that you have been on your knees, begging.

The figure in the doorway embraces you like a son and lifts you to your feet.  You feel strength return to your limbs and the agony of loneliness flees you.  He says in a voice so pure and so filled with love that your heart breaks from the sound, "Come.  Enter into the joy of your master."

A life is born.

The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  John 10:3

'Behold, I stand at the door and knock'   Revelation 3:20

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."  Matthew 7:7

Radiation

For a brief period in our nation's history nuclear war was a very real possibility.  All of us have a pretty good understanding of how devastating that could have been to the world in general, to the human race, and to our selves specifically.  Hollywood has used the idea of nuclear fall-out for countless plots to describe the "end-of-the-world" results of unmitigated nuclear war.  

And science can attest to how destructive radiation is to human tissues.   They have even found that used in small doses it can kill cancer, however, the cure is almost as bad as the disease.  We worry about over exposure to ultraviolet radiation, ground radiation, and x-rays because we know it can lead to cancers and all kinds of medical problems.  Most of our solutions, like sun block, are covers to protect us but they are not 100% effective.  But everyone would agree that the best prevention is avoidance.  But what if you can't avoid it?

The thing about radiation is that it's so hard to detect until the damage has already been done.  It is invisible, odorless, colorless.  It's completely outside of our humanly senses yet we know it exists because we can observe the effects of it's presence.  Namely, the sickness it causes from exposure.

Imagine for a moment that a friend or family member lives in an area that has been irradiated.  What would you do if you found out?  If I really cared about them I would immediately bring it to their attention.  I would try to convince them to move as soon as possible and discuss with them the effects of prolonged exposure to radiation.  But being radiation's nature, completely invisible, they could simply conclude that I was wrong and had no idea what I was talking about.  There wouldn't be much I could do until the damage was done to convince them of the truth.

What if I told you that the place we all live, right now, is irradiated?  There is no place on earth that is safe.  How did this happen?  Just as we, the human race, were getting started a cataclysmic nuclear bomb went off.  To this day we are feeling the after-effects of the blast, centuries later.  It was so powerful that it altered the physical world, it causes all kinds of illnesses today, and we are so irradiated that we pass it along to our children upon birth.  Some would refute this claim simply on the basis that there is no physical evidence of this cataclysmic "event" but we know it exists because we can observe the effects even though the radiation is outside of our senses.

You should know that efforts are underway and have been for centuries to mitigate the damage of this "event".  At the beginning the infected were cast out and left to deal with the after-effects as best they could.  Our efforts to cover up our condition were laughably ineffectual but over time we developed sophisticated ways, or laws, of protecting ourselves.  But, as mentioned earlier, the only 100% effective way is avoidance.  However, since there is no safe place on earth we're kind of in a pickle.

But a plan had been formulated from the beginning to deal with the situation in a way that no one could have guessed.  Since avoidance of the radiation was impossible, and all our efforts were ultimately futile, we needed a way of improving our ability to regenerate from the damage.  This effort was centuries in the making but finally a breakthrough was made at enormous cost to the author of the "serum".

There was one born who had a complete immunity to the radiation and a serum was replicated from his blood that provides 100% ability to regenerate the damage of the radiation!  This is good news, right!  But the author sacrificed his life in order to provide us this cure. There are highly trained individuals among us who are standing by to administer this cure but use caution.  As this is a highly valuable commodity there are "snake-oil salesmen" trying to peddle their false concoctions.  You will know the real doctors because, when pressed for details, they are more than happy to provide you answers and the recipe.  Remember, they required the cure as well so they're uniquely qualified to offer insight.

So even though the earth is saturated in radiation, a cure is available.  However, many, because of the nature of radiation, will not accept the truth until the damage is already done. Some will even refute it to their dying day.  Don't wait!  

How can you get this amazingly effective cure?  Just ask.  But who?

By now you may have hit on what I've been alluding to but in case your still in the dark, allow me to illuminate you.  When humanity was just getting started a huge bomb went off called "sin".  It was so destructive that it forever altered our physical world from perfection to dysfunction.  Hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes, etc.  are all examples of this. Not only that but we were cast out of Eden and left to cover our shame and learn to live in this fallen world.  We went a long time scratching out a living but all the while God was working a plan for a "cure".  Over the centuries we learned how destructive sin is and we developed a complex set of rules to try not to sin.  But it was so complex that no one could keep it and so our sin had to be covered by the blood of sacrifice.  We suffered under this system until the time was right when Christ came and through His blood on the cross we were provided the "cure".  This "serum" was replicated by faith in Christ and lives inside us regenerating our souls by His Spirit.  As soon as we believe in Him we are "inoculated" but we require weekly "booster shots" or even better we can take a steady "dose" throughout the week.  We read the Bible, our daily "dose", and this keeps the "radiation" from destroying us.

Some will refuse this explanation because they can't quantify it or it simply exists beyond their humanly senses.  But we know there are realities that exist beyond what our senses can detect.  With a trained eye we can spot the effects of sin "radiation" exposure and apply the only appropriate "cure", Jesus Christ.  

Do not be deceived, the "radiation" is real and deadly.  There is no safe place on earth.  We can't avoid it or cover it.  Only through Christ can we regenerate from it, and God willing, build an immunity to it through our daily "dose" of the Bible.  But don't take my word for it.  Do the research yourself.  I recommend you start with Genesis and keep reading.