Word of God – Down & Dirty

The talk went well in Batesville. They did me so right. Dominos is always a winner with me.

For a review of my lesson click here.

I went further opn the three bad soils in the parable of the sower. The three bad soils are three different ways of being self-obsessed. I confess to taking some liberties, but I think that point makes a lot of sense and would be sanctioned by Jesus.

“Pathy” soil is the kind of soil that is walked on. Depressed, hopeless, helpless feeling people – people firmly commited to the idea that nothing is good and nothing ever will be. These people are typically overly self-focussed. They are too attached to their feelings of hopelessness that they find any hope in anything.

“Rocky” soil is hardened and robbed of all joy. Angry, bitter, jaded, bent on revenge, these people are obsessed with putting a feeling onto someone else in order to relieve them of the feeling they do not choose to release. In short, they are committed to feeling unforgiveness until someone else feels worse that they do.

“Thorny” soil is self-impressed and self-congratulating. It looks in the mirror and really just wants to keep looking, being so enamored with what it sees. Thorny people thrive on their talents and abilities. They are self-obsessed narcissists who have a real hard pondering the fact that anyone else has a feeling or that those feelings other people have are worth anything. THey tend to behave as if other people are as impressed by them as they are themselves.

Good soil is not impressed with itself. It just goes ahead and lives healthy. Kind, generous, forgivining, these people are not oppressed by depression, even when deprressing things happen. They are not bent on revenge, even when they get burned. They are not seduced by the rose, so they never get cut by the thorns.

Viktor Frankl said that “without self-transcendance there is no self-actualization.” Let me rephrase that – “You’ll never find yourself until you get over yourself.”

Finding yourself is a neat little side effect of finding God.