April 14; Just Passing Through To The Other Side
MANAGEMENT BY THE BOOK:
365 Daily Bible Verse &
One-Minute Management Lessons For The Busy Faithful

Chapter Four: Relationships; 14 April

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles,

to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.

1 Peter 2:11

Alien

Two men unknown to each other join in a friendly conversation. As they talked one would draw an ellipse.

The other might draw another intersecting ellipse that would look somewhat like a fish.

This is how the early-persecuted Christians were able to identify one another.

It’s how Followers of Christ do it today too. But the secret is out.

“Beware of the fish people, they are the true enemy” said atheist-composer-musician Frank Zappa, in a speech to a pro-choice abortion rally in Los Angeles circa 1990. He was serious.

If this earthly logic makes no sense, then you might be (an) alien to this world. The “inability to be more than ambiguously at home is the strange truth about our souls,” says professor Peter Lawler. Maybe our home is elsewhere.

Dr. Lawler writes in his book Aliens In America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls. We are merely “pilgrims or aliens in this world” on our way to our real homes. Professor Lawler teaches at Berry College (Lord only knows how he got a job in academia) and served on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics in 2004. President Obama shut the Council down in 2009.

The relationship between the earth-bound and the pilgrims passing through Vanity Fair doesn’t have to be a Zappa war; the Christian is called to be a witness to the Truth. We are just passing through for a short time. And we are to avoid temptations on the journey.

Zappa was actually moderate on drugs other than nicotine, but his band Mothers of Invention preached sex, drugs and worldly rock and roll. He felt children did not need protection or discipline to duck the devil. He said, “My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.”

We do not have to hide from the Zappas of the world. They know exactly who we are. I have a Fish on my car.

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. 1 Peter 2:11.

Frank Zappa died at 52 from prostate cancer. It seems that the funny-man musical-atheist did give some thought to his afterlife, “There is no hell. There is only France.”

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