Let the Dead Bury Themselves

People have asked about my family. I believe my father is getting closer to accepting Jesus. My sister got angry about me mentioning her here, and I stopped.

It looks like God healed her of lung cancer, but now she’s in trouble with the law. Two weeks from today, unless she can get it put off again, she will be tried for battery on a law enforcement officer and felony fleeing and eluding. This relates to an incident in August of 2011, in which she was pulled over and decided to run. The police say she hit an officer with her car, and that he had to go to the hospital. I don’t know a whole lot about it. I haven’t seen the evidence. She doesn’t want me involved.

When it happened, I looked up the statutes by number, and she was looking at a 5-year minimum for the battery, plus a three-year minimum for the fleeing and eluding. The maximum, assuming consecutive sentences, would be 30 years. I doubt they would give her that much time. I think they save that kind of time for people who are in shootouts and so on. But I don’t really know.

They put her in a year-long deferral program, and she could have walked at the end, but she didn’t complete it, so now they’re going to try her. I don’t know if she’ll get a plea or reduced charges, but it’s my understanding that when you batter a cop, you can forget about those options, unless the cop agrees to it. The authorities take crimes against government employees much more seriously than crimes committed against ordinary people.

I don’t pray for her to be acquitted. I’m afraid that would destroy her. I do pray for God to soften her heart and give revelation and help her change.

Free will is a double-edged sword. It gives us freedom, but it also prevents us from controlling other people when they screw up. You can’t get salvation for your relatives. They have to agree to it, themselves. And you can’t make them go forward in the kingdom of God. We tend to judge people based on how their loved ones turn out, and there is some justification for that, but like I always say, God raised Satan. Look at the results. You can’t blame God for that.

I have come to realize that there is no limit to the depth of depravity or self-deception.

Today I was praying for God to be bold and to do very obvious things in my life, and then I wondered if that was realistic, because God always leaves room for disbelief. Then I realized that disbelief doesn’t depend on what is observed. It depends on the observer. People watched Jesus work miracles and then turned their backs on him. If he appeared right now on national TV and healed every sick person on earth, a big percentage of people would come up with an alternative explanation. Most of the Hebrews turned against him after the large-scale works he did in Egypt and in the desert. So no, I don’t think it’s wrong to ask God to do obvious works. These things will not force anyone to believe. They will not violate free will.

I’m not asking for signs. I’m asking for God to do these things in order to crush the enemy’s kingdom and extend his own, and to bless the people he wants to bless. If the things he does also function as signs, it’s incidental.

God has shown my sister his power. Either she’ll give in and listen, or she won’t. I’m not going to fret over it. I was put on this earth to have peace, love, and joy. I’m not going to get sucked into a spiritual black hole, destroying my own shalom in order to try to force shalom on someone. Maybe that sounds heartless, but I worship a God who loves, yet who casts people into hell, and I don’t have to try to be better than he is.

I have come across so many people I can bless; God puts me in contact with people who will listen and change. If I sit at the doorstep of a rebellious person and plead and pray and allow myself to be abused, I’ll be taking energy away from the people who will listen. Jesus told us not to do that. He told us to go after the lost sheep, but he didn’t tell us to go after the sheep that cannot be persuaded. He himself abandoned cities after they rejected him. The Bible says God’s love endures forever, but it doesn’t say that about his patience. Sooner or later, he wants to wrap things up, and that means he’s not going to let the rebellious delay things eternally.

Today I was thinking about the word “father,” and I realized that in God’s eyes, you aren’t a person’s child unless you resemble him. God created man, yet he called rebellious Jews “sons of Satan.” So who is my father? Who are my brothers and sisters? Do I just look at DNA? No. My real relatives are in the church. Jesus said that if we gave up relatives for him, he would give us new ones in this life and in the life to come. I hope the person I refer to as “my sister” comes around, but there are people God himself reckons to be my brothers and sisters, and I can’t shortchange them by getting overly caught up in the self-inflicted problems of a biological relation.