December 13, 1995
CONVERSATION WITH GOD
(Transcribed from John McConnell tape recorder November 22, 1996)
I'm here at my home in Queens, New York. This morning I thought I would record some of the difficulties in my struggle to understand and to act. Usually, but not consistently, I spend a period -- sometimes a couple of hours -- in prayer in the morning when I wake up. Sometimes I do this during the day. I don't pray out loud. The thoughts and prayers are in my mind. But perhaps it would be helpful if I express what is on my heart, or try to articulate it, verbally.
Of course it appears that I am just talking. But as I talk I remember the Bible teaches that God hears our prayer. Thoughts that come to me that are reflected in my prayer or meditation may be God speaking to me. So I will just call this "A Conversation With God."
One thing I keep puzzling about is the amazing coincidences in life. I was listening to Rev. Kenneth Copeland on Channel 47 earlier and he was telling about a man who was driving his car down the road and he had a problem with the way his engine was acting. He pulled off to the side of the road and as he got out of the car he stepped on some kind of a bag. He picked it up, opened it, and it was filled with audio tapes. Among them were many tapes from Kenneth Copeland. This intrigued him so when he got home he took his tape recorder and listened to some of them. It seemed that they had the message he needed. Then he went to church the following Sunday and met a stranger whom he told about finding the tapes. To his amazement the man said, "Oh, I know what those tapes are. I'm the person who lost them. He mentioned the road where they were found and said he was driving on that road before he discovered the tapes had fallen out of his truck."
Now for this man to accidently find the tapes and then in the fashion described meet the man who had lost the tapes is the kind of coincidence that defies reason and science cannot explain.
This morning I was listening to different TV programs. My purpose was to get a sense of what was getting to the media made minds of the general public. Even those of us who are critical of TV are in subtle ways influenced by their images and emotions that trigger evil thoughts and attitudes. They focus so much on hate, fear, vice and violence with little or no attention for the basic causes of these problems, or the solutions.
For example, in one program I watched they told of how a family in their car got lost in the city and went down the wrong street and had a gang they were passing pour twenty bullets into their car -- killing their four year old daughter and injuring the driver. Unfortunately, there was no compensating story in that newscast that reported healing or love at work in life.
It is no wonder most people have no meaning or purpose in their life. As a result, most people live for the moment and their shallow, lustful and greedy choices condemn them and civilization to oblivion -- unless there is a dramatic change of direction.
At the same time you ask the question, "How could God allow such a thing." The thing that I keep struggling with is the enigma of life. The paradox of life. If you become too negative and start seeing all the horrible things going on in the world today, you just can't imagine there is a God or there is any meaning in the universe.
On the other hand, if you look in the other direction you see such amazing wonderful examples of love and answers to prayer. This enigma is something I keep struggling with. Going back to my early years, one thing I got from my fathers ministry in one sermon after another was the importance of the question, "What is life all about? Why are we here? Where are we going?'
There must be some meaning in this amazing Cosmos and in life on our planet. In the very nature of the individual you see at work wonderful things. And on the other hand. the balance seems to be tipped in the direction of destruction and evil. This "insane" world is the way many intellectuals refer to it.
As I say that I again come back to the question of what I am doing. I'm 80 years of age. When I got to my 80th birthday I was more aware than ever before that life would not go on forever. The question of what happens when we die and why are we here and all the rest. You look around, you listen, you read and you find a thousand different hypotheses regarding what life is all about. Many of them contradict one another. In the extremes you find the person who is a complete atheist and believes that everything is just an accident -- which does not make any sense at all to me. One thing we know from science and logic is that order and resulting beauty, love and life, cannot come out of chaos. There is chaos in the Cosmos -- and yet there is beauty and order -- and life!
We face the fact that we have consciousness. We are aware that we exist. We're aware that we have a past and a future. There must be in this Cosmos greater consciousness than we have. And certainly what ever is responsible for this Cosmos, this Universe, must not be inferior to our consciousness. So there must be a conscious God, a God of great wisdom. And we know that the greatest wisdom we have found in life is the wisdom of love. So there is the argument that God is a God of love. Still we have all these difficulties.
We are at the period of history, or evolution, where it looks like the destruction of civilization is very possible, or perhaps even likely. And on the other hand we have the technology and we have the knowledge, we have the understanding, at least in many circles, that could turn things around and make of our whole planet a garden of Eden in the foreseeable future. We could eliminate poverty and pollution and provide a sustainable future that would enable us to realize the human potential for meaning, purpose and achievement.
Now in all of this I feel that I want to effectively communicate the vision I believe God has given me. One possibility that intrigues me now is the development of Internet. This Information Super Highway offers a great opportunity. And I've prayed about it and sought help. My hope is to make the best possible use of Internet to communicate the Earth Trustee ideas described in The Earth Magna Charta. It is on World Wide Web, but it needs better design and development -- and global attention for its agenda.
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The one thing that I feel is essential here is that I have a way when I make a connection to get people to do something that will lead them on.... to some deep understanding of what is important. Again, while we may have all kind of differences, the one thing on which most people can agree is that we would have a future if we would eliminate poverty, pollution and violence and open up opportunity for individuals to realize their potentials. We need a free and open society that will have money, credit and property rights restructured so there is fairness and opportunity and incentives to be altruistic and to work for the common good. People can benefit more in the long run from a balance of altruism and personal advantage.
The key to that, I believe, is expressed in the Earth Magna Charta. With help we can design the Earth Magna Charta Web Site so that people who get a hold of it can go on to learn more and more and do more and more. The way Internet works you can click on to a particular word or theme and go to more pages about the subject. It's like a chain reference.
For instance, if you are interested in what can be done about credit you can link up with other sites that have ideas and examples of solutions. I discovered on World Wide Web people who connected me with projects that were demonstrating the value of the Henry George philosophy on property rights and taxes. In different parts of the world new ideas are being tried, sometime with real success. And now through Internet they can help one another.
I keep coming back to ,"What am I doing? How am I going to see all of this come together?" And isn't it rather presumptuous for a person with no more ability, or education, or intellect than I have to undertake such an ambitious program.
I do believe that its worth the effort to put what I have on Internet. Then we need a few examples of how an Earth Trustee individual, business or municipality would function -- and what the benefits would be. The beauty of Internet is that people that get the vision and then demonstrate the solutions can relate this on Internet. With better organization of information available every solution can be accessed worldwide. Eventually, every success will bring benefit globally to every similar venture.
At some point the old media will wake up to the new Earth Trustee possibilities. When newspapers, magazines, TV and radio provide as many altruistic incentives for profit as they do with greed, violence and vice incentives for profit, the world will be well on its way to a happy future. Then reports of problems will be upstaged by headlines for solutions. Right now there are a vast array of solutions that are being ignored by the regular media.
To come back to the Kenneth Copeland program and the failure of religion in today's world. Kenneth Copeland quotes scripture the way my father (an evangelist) used to quote them. I see the value of the scriptures. On the other hand on different religious programs they take the same scriptures and get different conflicting meanings from them. Many accent the negative. Some of the radio preachers proclaim views that would increase the prospect of Armageddon -- of everything going up in smoke. "Don't waste your time helping the environment. God will soon destroy it." According to them Hell and Doom is all that's ahead of us in this life here on Earth.
If people go to the words of Jesus and the promises he made, the life that he lived and the hope that he inspired will bring the love that he demonstrated. If we could get his focus on the power of love I believe that we would see the rejuvenation of individuals, of families, of businesses, of cities, of nations, of cultures--of people and their planet -- all over the world.
Again, the thing we have in common is our planet and our common humanity. We all bleed red blood, we have genes that are all related. We have repeatedly seen that love can make a difference in any life, in spite of the tragic enigma of sin and violence and cruelty that we see all around us.
The vision we need now is that we can come together with one goal and with a sense of identity with the whole human family. We can take action in our present global society through Internet, through social and religious institutions, through person to person connections. Every person should have close relations with two or three people, and a real relation with eight or ten. And then some relation with a church or religious group of perhaps two or three hundred. This can be complemented by linkage with groups and individuals on Internet and some sense of what is happening all over the world. A common commitment to Earth Trustee action will strengthen relationships.
And as this occurs I believe we will find amazing good coincidences that come to people who are striving to love and to demonstrate altruism, honesty and virtue in their conduct. This can then spread a vision, and an agenda that will rejuvenate our planet. By the year 2000 we will then see light at the end of the tunnel.
Dear Heavenly Father, with all these things and many, many more things on my mind I find it difficult to make the clear choices that are needed to get things done. But you have said that "if you abide in me and my words abide in you that you can ask what you will and it will be done." Oh Lord, I ask for your wisdom, for your guidance, from moment to moment: Who I should speak to, what I should write, what I should say, where I should go. Oh God, my circumstances have too much chaos. Only by your guidance can I find the way. Jesus said,"I am the way, the truth and the life." Help me Oh Lord, to see the way I should go. And increase my faith. You said that if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed you can say to this mountain be removed, and there are mountains of obstacles all about us. But, through the wisdom and power of Christ's word we ask that these mountains be removed. One mountain that I face is the lack of funds, the lack of someone to get money and manage it, to pay bills. These mundane things must be responsibly managed. I need someone. I can't do everything myself. Bring the help. Provide the way. And Oh Lord, help me to abide in you. May I live the life of the song we used to sing:
All my days, and all my hours
All my will, and all my powers
All the passion of my soul
Not a fragment, but the whole
Shall be thine, Dear Lord.
Shall be thine, Dear Lord.