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There is a story told about Jesus interviewing people at the gate to Heaven. He comes across a man who might be Joseph, who is elderly, failing eyesight and hearing and understanding. Jesus asks him if there is anything Joseph left behind. Joseph replied there was a beautiful boy who had wisdom beyond his years, and yet was childlike. He had nails in his hands and feet. Jesus looked significantly at Joseph, and Joseph looked back, and then asked "Pinocchio?"
It is said that all writing is rewriting. And so the story of Pinocchio has tensions mirroring the Christ story. Pinocchio goes to hell, and is reborn as a good boy. Literary analysts connect this progression with Homer's Odyssey. Pinocchio wants to be a real boy. Christ was God made a real person. And so the joke laughingly suggests the true story of Christ is the fantasy of Pinocchio, but highlights the truth that all writing is rewriting.
There is no escaping God. God has forgiven all of us. Not that God approves of sin, but that God has made a way by which we can be with Him even though we are sinful. We are often, for a time, captured by our memory. We have made choices which don't include God. And every bad choice we make makes it harder to make a good one. The Devil points to our past and tells us that there is no way God can accept us. But we know the Devil's future. And we don't have to share it. Even though we have a past.
The point was driven home to me powerfully recently when I learned an elderly woman was suffering dementia. She has spent her whole adult life opposing God. Cursed as a child by betrayal from her father, two of her three sisters suicided. Her mother was strongly religious without having awareness of God as saviour. She had married a man who gave her children, but she rejected her husband when a child died and she never remarried. She raised her children to hate God, and told her dying child that there was no hope with God. And she would sleep with the ashes of her child. And she would drink and sweat alcohol. And no one who knew her casually knew to help. And so she has aged. And one day she will die. But what of her pain and her choices? Her dementia robs her of choice, as it will eventually rob her of life. And yet there is mercy too. And maybe, some nurse will show her love which she would never accept from others, kindness.
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I now know I was wrong. The woman has still not succumbed. Her dementia has advanced. No one person can give her redemption. But God can. He is there for us, regardless of our circumstance. We can turn to God and wrongly hope for a better quality of life. It is good to hope for better. It is better to embrace God.
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addendum, the detail in this missive is personal. I'm not betraying any trust, but many might feel I'm being fast and loose. I don't write about my family because family is separate from my mission, for many bad reasons. I have written a little of my mother and father, but nothing of my living siblings and very little about my sister Pamela, who died on Feb 14th 1978, when I was 11 years old. Feb 14th 1978 was when I first dreamt of meeting God. I am in poor health and could reasonably expect to die in the next few years. The explosive nature of some of what I have written in the past is likely to allow sibling rivals to mischaracterise what I have written on mission. I have done no wrong, no outrage of public decency. I'm very conscious that my step mother is failing in her duty to protect my father's legacy. I cannot protect my self and him at the same time. She is his advocate. He is a great man whose life work in education greatly enriched humanity. I was estranged from him at birth, when he named me 'o'DDBall and at the end of his life, with my last words to him being a sarcastic "Stay in touch, don't be a stranger." I won't explain why. It has nothing to do with my mission.
David Daniel Ball
26th July 2021
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